Kari Mjåtveit
15 September–22 October 2006
Kari Mjåtveit’s work – mainly photography and video – makes use of a compressed narrative strategy that causes the beholder to wonder as to what has taken place and why. By means of shifting everyday events like sitting at a table, walking in the park, standing in a group of people talking or instructing someone, she creates a personal extension of such seemingly simple activities and points at the fleeting moments that are beyond logical understanding and the normal range of language.
The exhibition I läsning / In Reading deals with issues such as readings and ways of reading and how these are influenced – and affect – the reader. Kari Mjåtveit constructs situations – reading events – in which she and others act. The meetings are documented and these exterior arrangements reveal something of the complexity of the relationship between the reader and the text. What does reading mean? When does one read “to live”, when does one read “to understand”?
One work included in the exhibition is Shared Room (2006) which takes as its starting point a meeting with the Norwegian poet Ellen Einan. Ellen Einan made her début as a writer in 1982 at the age of 51 without previously having had any contact with the literary world. She writes her poems in an unbroken movement in accordance with a ritual which comprises “dedication”, drawing and text. She sees herself as a medium or communicator for other consciousnesses and, in this way, paradoxically she is absent in her role as approving body. She stresses that she does not understand poetry at all. The seven-minute film consists of an act of reading in which Einan and Kari Mjåtveit read the author’s poems according to the principle “you read for me and I read for you” or “if you read first I shall read later”.
Kari Mjåtveit was born in Norway in 1957 and lives in Malmö.
