Yngvild Saeter at Kunsthall Trondheim, Trondheim, Norway: Group-exhibition

A BODY OF MEMORY (FROM NEURONS TO THE SEA)

 

This thematic group exhibition explores the role that memory plays in the construction of a person’s sense of self, and how identity, like remembrance, is something that is shaped by experience, history, knowledge of our bodies, and other factors and contingencies. Eschewing supernatural notions of a fixed and eternal soul, A Body of Memory (from neurons to the sea) takes inspiration from a psychological “turn” away from metaphysics and religion, and towards the idea that recalling who we were helps to shape and inform who we are, and what we shall become. Through the work of nine international artists, A Body of Memory (from neurons to the sea) traces the various ways and means through which recollection is not only tied to cognition, but how the plastic, malleable, and mutable nature of memory affects our ties to ourselves and other individuals, both human and non-human.

 

This change in the perception of the self – from something cosmic, intangible, and set, to something more social, embodied, and fluid – opens unique ways of thinking about our shared existence in specific, and memory formation in general. For example, how do the inherited stories and life experiences of our forefathers, foremothers, and other forebears inform not only how we think about ourselves, but how we feel as well? Furthermore, how do our learned senses – of taste, and touch, but also of pain and thirst, for example – read the world, and how do these processes and organs construct people’s worldviews and specific emotions at the same time?

 

Like a light shined through a prism, the exhibition at Kunsthall Trondheim casts various impressions on how life can be awakened from resting archives and other evidentiary means.

 

Yngvild Sæter’s sculpture The Auryn (altar XXIX) (2023) is a commissioned work made especially for this group exhibition. The work is a continuation of the artist’s investigations into her personal experience of hovering between life and death during brain surgery. Central to this experience was a specific visual figure, to which the artist refers as an ancient form that has been alleged to appear for human beings on the threshold between life and death. The sculpture presented at Kunsthall Trondheim refers to this ancient form, and to the artist it represents the safety that a memory can harbour; a shared bodily memory image that spans both humanity and time.

 

For further information about the exhibition, please visit Kunsthall Trondheim