Sketches for the meantime
Collaboration with Lutz-Rainer Müller
Installation at Fotogalleriet, Oslo
Most of the neon lights from the gallery celing were mounted on the back side of a gallery wall, pointing them towards the backyard through a glass door, thus staging the backyard as a film set.
Two objects in the installation were temporarily stolen from the park opposite the gallery. Neon lights from the gallery ceiling replaced the missing boards on the bench. The inside of the garbage bin contained a miniature reproduction of the film-set from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Text by Ida Kierulf:
Stian Ådlandsvik and the German artist Lutz- Rainer Müller have in a drastic way reorganized all the neon lamps in the gallery, utilizing them as props to suggest possible photographic sceneries. By removing the gallery´s own illumination the artists turn the space inside out. The darkened gallery room functions as a battery, a paradoxical generator for new images.
The lighting, detached from its institutional function, highlight photography´s dependence on light by constructing a kind of photograph in three dimensions. A ruined bench from the nearby park becomes a distillation of possible incidents, a garbage bin becomes a container for fantastic
possibilities, and the backyard of the gallery becomes a site for immanent drama.
The artists suggest new readings of the gallery´s function and of what a photography might potentially be. The gallery, devoid of light is an absurdity in itself, and might also point to the
melancholic nature of photography, an absence indicating a presence.
