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change my way of seeing PART I
These are just three of many valid ways of seeing which A K Dolven brings up in change my way of seeing, part I and change my way of seeing part II. Right from the point of entering the show, the artist physically involves her viewers into a socio-psycho-aethetic quest, as their gaze is attracted by a small, vague image, rhythmically moving on a large screen which shields the gallery entrance from the outside. By following his curious glance, trying to identify the moving image, the onlooker finds himself immersed in the screen surrounding it: a silent foil of indefinite whiteness, reminscent of a snowy field – an environment that Dolven is often drawn to. Perhaps because the bareness of the snow heightens one’s sense of vision and physical alertness. Or, perhaps, as Joseph Brodsky points out in his poetic study of the senses, Fondamenta degli Incurabili, because “beauty at cold temperatures is beauty”? The visitor dimly discerns, on this vast plane of grainy whiteness, a classic situation in high modernist films: a playful choreography of exchanging glances between the human eye and the camera eye. Whereas Dziga Vertov’s seminal film Man With the Movie Camera (1929) celebrated the camera as an omnipotent extension of the physical eye – thereby endowing both with a preconditioned objectivity - Dolven stresses the constructive fragility of the artist’s eye. In letting the viewer feel the physical strain of her experiment - trying to let her eye tolerate the brightness of the sun for three long minutes - the artist breaks down modernist views of the camera/eye as powerful and objective, thus opening the field to a variety of points of view. It is as if her Icarus-like glance had darted dangerously close to the blazing sun, but in this case, did not fail and burn its wings. Instead, the vulnerable, daring eye discovered the strength of a manifold, constructive vision in the process: the potential of diversity. During the shoot, Dolven turned the handheld camera to let the sunlight act on the viewfinder, thus shifting the viewpoint from an egocentric static angle to an open, many-facetted one. And by this move she invites the onlooker to leave his comfortably inactive position as a passive viewer and join in this vigorous exchange of views and glances. Here again, Dolven reflects upon a fundamental concept deeply rooted in art history: the idea of the artwork as looking back at its viewer, thereby acting as a counterpart, and creating the atmosphere of an intimate and silent thinking space. So who or what, then, is behind this screen, which proxies as a curtain through which the visitor enters the gallery-stage? It is the viewer himself in an empty white room, the gallery bare and simple. It seems as if the artist has created this indeterminate space for the viewer’s mind to wander around in and lose itself in these meanderings. Just as contemporary neuroscience charmingly defines the mind in it’s creative, constructively “lazy” mode: as the brain taking itself off for a stroll inside itself. Having entered the space, gradually the visitor is aware that sounds from outside filter through the emptiness, thereby structuring the time spent inside and giving him a firm sense of the here-and-now. The gallery setting is not, after all, as purist as the entrance scene might have lead one to expect. Two speakers, black and straightforward, play back scenes of everyday life from the immediate vicinity, thus letting the greater picture intermingle with the intimacy of the thinking space. The scenes are as colourful and varied as community life itself around the art space: there is a driver, angrily coaxing his car from the snow it got stuck in, a flock of noisy winter crows or children playing. Here, John Cage’s conviction that ambient sounds are our true silence, is transferred to A K Dolven’s art space.
installation Galleri MGM, 2011, photo Damian Heinich Special thanks to:
Somban performance at A K Dolven exhibtion opening 
opening Galleri MGM 20.1.2011 - photo Kristine Jærn Pilgaard
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