KO

KO

Seeing for Ourselves

Utstilling 26. september-4. oktober ons-søn kl.12-17
Velkommen til åpning fredag 25. september kl. 19-21

I stand where he once stood, but I don’t see what he saw

Kunsthall Oslo is very pleased to present Seeing for Ourselves, the first solo exhibition by the Norwegian artist, photographer and art director Sara Abraham, in collaboration with Yohannes Abraham. For this newly-commissioned body of work, Abraham has brought her own photographs into dialogue with her father’s archive of pictures from the 1960s and 1970s to create powerful and poetic new images.

All photographs, by their nature, capture a viewpoint and a moment in time; Abraham’s project concerns asymmetric perspectives and the passing of time. Abraham’s father’s photographs were taken over many years, moving between Ethiopia, where he grew up and Southern Norway where he settled in the 1960s. Sara Abraham was already a working photographer, and had made her own photographs of journeys to Ethiopia from Norway, when she discovered her father’s archive. In Seeing for Ourselves, the encounter between these two sets of images tells a new story, a story about a family relationship, but also about our ways of looking at the world.

The act of archiving contributes to the creation of public memory; the question of what is or is not represented is also a political one. What is collected, what is catalogued, what is granted institutional status, what remains private, what is degraded, and what is never collected at all – these decisions have consequences for society’s self-understanding. An absence, for example, does not necessarily mean that nothing happened; it may mean that something was not documented, not preserved, not considered important, or is no longer accessible. Similarly, Abraham’s new photographs are not the missing pieces of her father’s story, but images that emerge in relation to what is missing, and which change the way we read his pictures.

I discover an analogue, diasporic archive at the very moment when society’s infrastructure of memory is in the process of changing completely.»

The invention of photography created a new category of image; now the application of digital technology has transformed this category from an avatar of reality into something fluid, weightless and endless. To acknowledge this discontinuity – a shift which took place between her father’s generation and her own – Abraham has altered some of the images using various algorithmic tools, treating the images as data and allowing mathematical operations to determine the transformations. The final stage of the process, however, is to alter the physical fabric of the printed image in accordance with the virtual operations, emphasising the partial nature of the pictures memory and technology supply us with.
The exhibition is rooted in questions of migration, identity, and belonging – Yohannes’s journey to Norway and Sara’s journey to Ethiopia are not mirrors of one another, but stand in a complex relationship while also turning its attention toward the larger structures that shape the ways in which our lives are represented through images, archives, and technology. At a time when artificial intelligence – trained on existing datasets and archives – is becoming ever more powerful and being rapidly adopted in all areas of social production, these questions become relevant in new ways. If the technologies of the future are built upon the histories that have already been preserved, what happens to the experiences that were never recorded? Who will have a place in the collective memory of the future, and who risks being written out of it?


Seeing for Ourselves

Utstilling 26. september-4. oktober ons-søn kl.12-17
Velkommen til åpning fredag 25. september kl. 19-21

I stand where he once stood, but I don’t see what he saw

Kunsthall Oslo is very pleased to present Seeing for Ourselves, the first solo exhibition by the Norwegian artist, photographer and art director Sara Abraham, in collaboration with Yohannes Abraham. For this newly-commissioned body of work, Abraham has brought her own photographs into dialogue with her father’s archive of pictures from the 1960s and 1970s to create powerful and poetic new images.

All photographs, by their nature, capture a viewpoint and a moment in time; Abraham’s project concerns asymmetric perspectives and the passing of time. Abraham’s father’s photographs were taken over many years, moving between Ethiopia, where he grew up and Southern Norway where he settled in the 1960s. Sara Abraham was already a working photographer, and had made her own photographs of journeys to Ethiopia from Norway, when she discovered her father’s archive. In Seeing for Ourselves, the encounter between these two sets of images tells a new story, a story about a family relationship, but also about our ways of looking at the world.

The act of archiving contributes to the creation of public memory; the question of what is or is not represented is also a political one. What is collected, what is catalogued, what is granted institutional status, what remains private, what is degraded, and what is never collected at all – these decisions have consequences for society’s self-understanding. An absence, for example, does not necessarily mean that nothing happened; it may mean that something was not documented, not preserved, not considered important, or is no longer accessible. Similarly, Abraham’s new photographs are not the missing pieces of her father’s story, but images that emerge in relation to what is missing, and which change the way we read his pictures.

I discover an analogue, diasporic archive at the very moment when society’s infrastructure of memory is in the process of changing completely.»

The invention of photography created a new category of image; now the application of digital technology has transformed this category from an avatar of reality into something fluid, weightless and endless. To acknowledge this discontinuity – a shift which took place between her father’s generation and her own – Abraham has altered some of the images using various algorithmic tools, treating the images as data and allowing mathematical operations to determine the transformations. The final stage of the process, however, is to alter the physical fabric of the printed image in accordance with the virtual operations, emphasising the partial nature of the pictures memory and technology supply us with.
The exhibition is rooted in questions of migration, identity, and belonging – Yohannes’s journey to Norway and Sara’s journey to Ethiopia are not mirrors of one another, but stand in a complex relationship while also turning its attention toward the larger structures that shape the ways in which our lives are represented through images, archives, and technology. At a time when artificial intelligence – trained on existing datasets and archives – is becoming ever more powerful and being rapidly adopted in all areas of social production, these questions become relevant in new ways. If the technologies of the future are built upon the histories that have already been preserved, what happens to the experiences that were never recorded? Who will have a place in the collective memory of the future, and who risks being written out of it?