Sara Bjarland - Past Events

About

A cluster of half deflated balloons hangs on an almost invisible thread. White, grey and a single black balloon. The shrivelled up rubber resembles my own ageing skin, with increasingly deeper creases and wrinkles. The passage of time and the traces that it leaves behind; some people see beauty in it. Sara Bjarland isn't really interested in the romantic aesthetic of deterioration, but rather in its destructive and transformative power. Bjarland collects, assembles and photographs objects that fall apart, decay, lose their original shape and begin to resemble something else during that process. According to her, that's what makes it interesting. It opens the mind to imagination and personal associations.

The plastic venetian blind folded in two on the floor resembles a tropical plant or an elegant swan and the twisted umbrellas in the series of photos are reminiscent of long-legged spiders performing a choreography. Sara Bjarland is fascinated by materials and objects with a certain ambiguity, somewhere between the natural and the artificial. Like a beachcomber, she rummages through streets and thrift stores and drags seemingly useless and neglected objects to her studio. Her first impulse is to photograph the objects. Trained as a photographer, she thinks about and looks at things through an imaginary frame. By capturing an object, she freezes it in time and gives herself the opportunity to study it accurately. Sometimes the photo turns out to have an autonomous quality. Sometimes the investigation goes further and Bjarland experiments with imprints in other media, such as the plaster casts of balloons. She is always able to give the objects splendour and dignity, with an almost animistic sensitivity, as if she 'animates' the dead things.

From a theoretical point of view, you can speak of an emphasis on the 'agency of matter', on the consciousness that matter is not passive. This is in keeping with recent philosophical movements that try to free philosophy from Kant's anthropocentrism. This discourse pleads for a revision of the relationship between human beings, material objects and non-human forms of life. Sara Bjarland contributes to this consciousness, not in an abstract, theoretical manner but by intuitively experimenting with living and lifeless materials. She points out the elusiveness of nature; the insight that 'natural' floats between the material and the immaterial.

Take a good look at those two bare sticks in the corner. They stand there, inconspicuous, almost shy, as if they were still lying on the street a minute ago and accidentally ended up in the gallery.

Nina Folkersma, independent curator, editor and art advisor based in Amsterdam.

Sara Bjarland (*1981, Helsinki) lives and works in Amsterdam.

Recent shows include Rumination Tale at Plan B Projects, Amsterdam (2016), Die van Aalst - contemporary art from private collections, Aalst (2016), The Prophecy of Bees at Kunstfort Vijfhuizen (2016), Vectors of Kinship at Shanghai Biennale (2016), Formations at Witteveen Art Center, Amsterdam (2015), Invasive Exotics at RAM Galleri, Oslo (2015), Meditations on a Hobby Horse at CIAP, Hasselt and Viewfinders - Nordic and Baltic Contemporary Photography,            Riga Art Space (2014). In the summer of 2016 Sara Bjarland took part in an artist residency at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios in Dublin, and in 2012-2013 she was a resident artist at HISK in Ghent.

Her work is part of private collections in Belgium, The Netherlands and Finland, and was recently acquired by the ARTIS-collectie in Amsterdam.