Uncertain States Scandinavia, Open Call, Issue 5

Cecilia Riis Kjeldsen

Daniel P. Agung

Hilde H. Honerud

Jorun Eikill Veflen

Kai Tormod Hansen

Kristine Wathne

Lars Vilhelmsen

Maria GosseĚ

Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard

We can talk some other time

Self exposure

It´s not easy to make history

Intimate

Botanical prints

Brain beauty

Scaffolding

Undressed

Leveld

Credit: Lars Vilhelmsen

Issue 5 / OPEN CALL

Issue 4

Lars Vilhelmsen A key aspect of Lars Vilhelmsen’s working method is the fact that he works ‘in the moment’, very quickly arranging objects to create a tableaux and then snaps the shutter. The finished pieces therefore become stories rather than sculptures; lingering too long over an arrangement would defeat the purpose altogether. Once the photograph is taken, the objects go back into circulation, being delivered back to where they were found, or sometimes given away, to continue their travels, leave their traces, perhaps make more stories. One can imagine the artist hiding objects here and there, so that they can have a journey, collecting and leaving traces and stories along the way, and it is this wonderfully imaginative perspective that comes across in the work. larsvilhelmsen.lv@gmail.com www.larsvilhelmsen.com www.ucsscandinavia.com

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Hilde H. Honerud “It´s not easy to make history” consists of a series of portraits of people who have stayed at Raumyr transit reception centre in Kongsberg. Honerud spent much of the spring and early summer 2016 along with asylum seekers and employees at the centre. She also interviewed them in cooperation with sociologist Jon Hovland. The title is a quote from one of these interviews.

It is a basic human problem to be systematically limited in the ability to present oneself as one sees oneself. This is a problem for asylum seekers in reception. They have lost their positions and the references that convey identity.

The work addresses how a person preserves his or her identity in a situation where most identity markers are removed, and the time you are in, is a waiting room before the future can begin. hildehonerud@gmail.com www.hildehonerud.com

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Jorun Eikill Veflen My work mostly consists of photographs and selfportraits that are personal and express my feelings.

Most of the subjects in my photos are turned with their back against the camera. Because of this the person can be anyone and it invites the viewer to interpret what the work is about.

Feelings and personal experiences or situations are often a starting point for my projects. I usually work intuitive and performative in front of the camera, trying to capture these feelings. I use myself as a model because it’s convenient and because it makes the photos more personal. The settings and locations are intimate, very often the space around me, like my bedroom. I try to find space in these locations to express my feelings.

my photographic diary. Because the subjects are turned away, the spectator is invited to take part in my feelings. Maybe it tells a completely different story to someone else because we all look at a work of art with different eyes and experiences. I like to work with ideas of what is real and what is fiction in photography. The photos are honest and real, but also staged.

They document feelings of longing, loss and vulnerability, but could also tell a fictional story.

My projects are about me and my feelings, yet universal because most people can relate to and recognize these feelings. jorun.veflen@gmail.com http://cargocollective.com/joruneveflen

I have always been interested in keeping memories. I photograph to keep some sort of a diary and I invite viewers to get a peek into www.ucsscandinavia.com

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Daniel P. Agung

Cecilia Riis Kjeldsen

My photography from the previous year is tied together by various aspects of life, but attempts to simplify or even negate the rush of time and relationships that seem to harass my own modern life. For such a concept, photography is an interesting medium as time is such a concrete part of photography itself, but as my understanding of photography develops I feel I am able to stretch these small moments and explore, often overlooked, questions. Part of my curiosity also lies in the ability of photography to capture and hold onto something that is finite, but at the same time continues to have some sort of life.

My exploration into the medium is a process of experimentation, trial, error and continuance. My exploration of life is greatly similar.

”We can talk some other time”, is a story about an emotional distance between a father and a son.

When creating photographs I often have a focus on form, the abstract and the intimate, as it seems to create an interesting mix of playfulness and calm when I spend time with my subjects.

Working on something internal or personal with external subjects, however, is not always easy and I am constantly trying to find a suitable, and at times practical, balance between the two. At times I feel like my living subjects (who I am also intimate with) become a still life after being photographed, but only after. After many aspects align and I recognise and capture my own thoughts and emotions by way of my subjects.

Just three weeks before my boyfriend and I met he lost his father to a sudden death after years of hardly speaking. At this point, I saw a man who were in a landscape of deep grief and new found love. I would see him fall apart emotionally and physically.

His father left boxes with hundreds of film rolls, plain tickets, notebooks model car – and airplanes. For each image scanned I got to know his father a bit more by each time.

Hundreds of images from work and travels, of rocks, mountains, caves, some other tourist and friends. Kenya, Nepal, Mongolia, Germany. His old back pack and shoes, covered in dirt. Lamps to carry into caves. Maps.

In between I would find my boyfriend as a child.

Looking so admirable at his father. Climbing a rock, holding a stick, running through the forest.

Birthdays and holidays.

In this series, I explore memories and loss through a collection of archival photographs that I later crop to emphasis the story through my own interpretation, trying to bring in all the pieces and personalize the unbearable feeling of losing someone before everything´s been said.

In no narrative order the series show bits and pieces of their life, bringing it all in as one big puzzle that never really seems to finish. http://www.ceciliariis.com post@ceciliariis.com

These moments, which are sometimes captured as a photograph, are often revealing, secret and exciting all at once. Something that I hope is mutually affecting, something that I hope to have captured for my own nostalgia. Capturing such moments is special to me, as I believe there can never be an exact copy of another moment when it comes to both life and photography. This idea applies most simply to living things, but also the inanimate as our environment is no less static than you and I. I like to think that I have the only copy of something so special, that it becomes as cared for and coveted as a life is. Captured in my negatives, captured (to an extent) in my raw files, I have what is often the final and only impression of what lay in front of my camera and myself. http://danielpagung.portfoliobox.net/ danielpagung@yahoo.com

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Kai Tormod Hansen My task is to gather, contemplate and construct. I don’t hunt for the right moment in my photography. As a painter, I start with the white canvas that shall be transferred into a picture.

On this photographic canvas objects are assembled. Finding things are easy.

Finding beautiful items is possible.

Finding elements that talk eloquent to each other on a canvas requires more.

But with a camera it is possible to give prominence and eternal life to beauty often overlooked.

My botanical prints are inspired from the traditional herbarium. I have carried nature indoors and laid it out for pure delight. My nature is not exotic, it is the everyday plants you find in your backyard, in the forest and in the mountains and which you walk by without a second

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glance or thought. Why not take a better look at them? Give them entrance.

When they were at school, my children were always surprised on their trips to woods: they didn’t understand why the other children didn’t know the difference between yarrow and cow parsley. It seems that knowledge of plants is not passed down via the curriculum these days. In my attic, I find my mother’s old herbarium where she, in her school days, collected and dried plants recording the name, place, and date and signing it earnestly with her best handwriting. Maybe today’s school teaches more about ecosystems and climate, and a globalist nature, but what do these abstract concepts mean to children if they don’t know the basics? Nature deserves, and we deserve too, that we know it – that we dedicate time and thought to it.

This photo project is a small study on how to appreciate common nature with fresh eyes. Take a look at lily of the valley: it is beautiful when it flowers in springtime, but it is also appealing in late fall, when the leaves turn brown and the white flowers become red poisonous berries. Have you seen the bindweed twisting and turning elegantly around your neighborhood? Have you taken a moment to appreciate the pleasing green of the black alder? Have you ever given pause to the flowers that will become blueberries?

Take some time to learn the personality of the plants: the aggressive thistle, the playful witch hazel. kai_t_hansen@hotmail.com

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Maria Gossé Undressed Through my work I explore contemporary Norwegian society, subcultures and the social body. I’m fascinated by how people navigate within society’s expectations.

This portrait series is an investigation of Norwegian burlesque artists in their homes.

Where does their personality end and stage character begin? Where is the border between daily life and their stage persona?

1. C arina Carlsen, aka Fifi von Tassel, is a feminist, receptionist and body positivism activist. She works tirelessly to promote body acceptance, and uses a lot of humour in her burlesque acts.

2. B ecky Kilcline Abbott, aka Novelty Starr, credits burlesque for giving her a better and more accepting relationship to her body, and sees it as a means of play and personal liberation. She is a former preschool teacher who studies theatrical makeup and works part-time at a sex fetish shop.

According to Carina, «being fat is worse than being mean». If your body doesn’t represent the ideal, you should be ashamed. And definitively not be naked or display your sexuality in public.

But the burlesque sphere is different. You can be sexy, vulgar, pretty, ugly, funny, or anything you want to. On your own terms. http://www.mariagosse.com/ maria.gosse@gmail.com

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Issue 4

Issue 4

Signe Fuglesteg Luksengard LEVELD None of my childhood-friends are running past me as I walk down the street to my old school.

It’s quiet. All I can hear and feel is the cold wind from the mountain. I pass by the house where me and my friends would all hang around the trampoline and I peek through the swimmingpoolwindow of my old school imagining how safe and good life was when growing up here. Knowing everybody, playing everywhere. I say hello to the old couple I meet on my walk. “When are you planning on moving back?” they ask. Not if, but when. And that’s what I ask myself. I have most of my friends, a possibility to live of what I love, soulmates when it comes to interests, adventures www.ucsscandinavia.com

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and all possibilities when living in the city.

Back home I have about six close friends (my grandparents included), some neighbours that probably don’t understand what I am up to (that I have to relate to) and a small village that might one day die due to political (lack of) interest - if nobody fights for it. Still, the thought of when I’ll be moving back home won’t go away.

I’ve heard stories about each house, farm, mountain and forest - stories about my father, grandfather, great grandfather and great great grandfather. Knowledge, myths and fairytales. It’s as if every hill is more than a hill, it’s a magical place filled with stories from the past: it’s almost religious. My village is close to the nature. Actually

it’s within nature - with fields around the houses, forests, rivers and mountains. It’s a place where the easiest way to visit my grandparents is by walking down the field, in good old working-boots - possibly passing by some sheep along the way. It’s a place many might question why someone would want to live. But for some it’s the only place to live.

In this tiny village there lives about 300 people.

It’s small. But compared to a lot of other small places this is a village young people actually move back to. I wonder if that’s what my friends will do.

What I will do. Some of my friends have already decided. “If my boyfriend won’t move back home, I’ll have to end it with him” they say.

Has the idea of moving back home to do with me being close to my family? Or is it because I feel a certain amount of responsibility that if I, who am young and who truly love this place won’t move back, then no one will and the place might die? Is it because I had a good upbringing here, that it’s close to nature, safe, and a place to both create and live a less stressful life? One of the few places I can feel at peace. Where I can really breath.

Or is it because I feel that this small village, no matter how different some of the people here are from me or how many traditions and happenings that sound silly, for me they feel unifying. That I am a part of something bigger than me. That this is my pack. That I can just be me. Or can I?

Maybe this project is for them to see me as who I am: not just my grandparent’s granddaughter and my parent’s daughter, but me. Maybe I just want to make them proud. These pictures are my parents, my grandparents, my neighbors and friends, my hills, my mountains and my childhood fairytales and stories. From that fact, everything follows: I want to stop time. I want them and it to live forever. http://www.signeluksengard.com signe.fuglesteg.luksengard@gmail.com

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Kristine Wathne BRAIN BEAUTY: Brain Beauty presents an typological serie of portraits of people in the streets where I have photographed our human expressions and its various phases. The face study presents an collection of raw, and almost uncomfortable upclose portraits shot during the cold winter months in my currently freezing hometown Trondheim, Norway. www.kristinewathne.com k-w-a@hotmail.no

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Uncertain States Scandinavia is a non-profit lens based artist collective who are passionate in creating, discussing and promoting photography. In this volatile global climate the work reflects some of our current concerns and challenges how perception is formed in our society on issues as diverse as politics, religions and personal identity.

For your on-line copy, visit www.ucsscandinavia.com Subscribe to the newspaper at info@ucsscandinavia.com | Follow us on Instagram: ucsscandinavia Uncertain States Scandinavia DA NO 916337027 Edited by Astrid Gjersøe Skåtterød, Tor S Ulstein and Charlie Fjätström. Designed By James Young. Printed by Sharman & Company Ltd, Peterborough.

We welcome submissions from lens-based artists for further publications.

For all enquiries please contact info@ucsscandinavia.com

Credit: Daniel P. Agung

We would like to thank the members of the jury who have reviewed all projects and carefully selected the artists for this Open Call 2017.

Damian Heinisch, Marie Sjøvold, Cecilie Nissen, Ann Eringstam, Tor Henrik Fjelldal, Dag Alveng, Helene Gulaker Hansen, Helge Skodvind, UCS / LONDON.