LANDSCAPES

“Landscape “ ,  an installation at the Young Artists House in Oslo, photographs on plexiglass, handmade paper with photographic elements and porcelain paper integrated in it.

I rented this gallery during an international ceramic symposium that has been held in Oslo, where I could not participate because of the conflict with the organizer. No other exhibition space would invite me. So I made an alternative exhibition that I have organized by my own. Several artists from Russia, Sweden and Norway were invited to exhibit in different rooms of the building. My own work has been exhibited at the top floor. We have received a lot of media attention and a lot of public response. This was definitely an outsider art project, which I have all the right to be proud of.

My installation was called “landscape” as a provocation. All dominating Norwegian art photography at that time was about “real” landscapes. Mine was about body topography. I worked on that subject for a while at the time and have made several installations and single pictures based on female nude, which differed from a beauty standard for female in front of the male photographer. My nudes were wrinkled and not perfect. I have constructed my own landscapes built on body forms and textures. Transparent photographs were hanging in the room and reflecting both light and architecture. I used materials that fitted into that type of building. I have tried to contrast and confront the textures and the materials of the architecture already present there. I accented the existing architectural details by mounting transparent photographs of these details against the original motives in the background. That has created an interesting composition that was changing depending on the point of view. Picture of the reality confronted to the reality itself.

This approach was a start for my own way of work and artistic investigation.

There were plates with pictures of the walls and there were blown-ups of body topography placed side by side, there were plates of handmade paper with some fragments of these photographs mixed into the surface, and there were porcelain paper plates resulting from firing paper pulp and porcelain-mix in the kiln, which I have used as a part of the new handmade paper plates. There were many different elements, all integrated into one room.

Each element could have been developed further into a hundred different exhibitions. But again, that is how I am, that is how I work. It was both complex and fascinating, just like me. I am a complex personality therefore my work is complex and not simple or laconic as it is expected in a Norwegian home or society. My work is created in Scandinavia, but it differs from what is considered to be “Scandinavian style”, it is a foreign element here. Just as I am.

I used some elements and some ideas resulting from this exhibition in my later work, always developing it further, learning from one step to another.

There is a connection between all my projects. There is a red thread, so obvious and clear to me, and so foreign and incomprehensible to all the others.

“Landscape of loneliness”, Berlin, Bannhoff West end, installation during an international project PAK, organized by Potsdamer academy.

This installation was made directly on the windows and on plexiglass plates hanging in the middle of the space, huge images of enlarged details of the naked female body. It is very much about age: 40-years crises, my own fattening and wrinkling body built into a kind of a topographic map. The lines are wrinkles, but at first glance, look like a drawing or a map. This building and windows could be seen in town from all directions. There were 12 images, each 3×9 meters, and one big image on plexiglass cut into the same window size and shape as the rest. That was hanging in the middle of the space, which was an entrance hall of an old railroad station turned into art space and workshops. This photographs started as 6×4,5 cm middle format camera negatives projected onto lithographic film, making a positive image. I did this project in a month, living in Berlin, working at the Potsdamer Academy of Art. I worked like crazy. The two German guys who organized the project were teachers at the academy. They terrorized me the entire time, because I was doing everything wrong. “Oh, -they screamed- but you cannot use a concentrated developer, it is not right… this film is not supposed to be used that way… you will never get a good result… you are going to bring a shame on our heads…” and so forth. Then came success and much attention from the media. Oh, they really hated me by the end! Later I saw a film of “Detective Derek (a German television series), where the main character was a prostitute named something like Halina Malikova. I was ready to sue, but then I started another project and forgot all about it.

Heksesabbat

http://www.galina.no/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Heksesabbat.pdf

http://www.galina.no/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Fotografisk-forbrødring.pdf

(2 pdf-s, open in new windows)

Sovjet heksedans

http://www.galina.no/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Sovjet_heksedans.pdf

(pdf, opens in a new window)

Bortsjh

http://www.galina.no/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Klassekampen23juni1990.pdf

(pdf, opens in a new window)