Stian Ådlandsvik - Furnace Voyage in Petrol Gardens

About

Stian Ådlandsvik (Oslo, NO) considers the processes, techniques and materials that make up his practice as poetic tools that are connected across different timespans, geographical locations and fields of knowledge and ideas. More specifically, he considers all these things as carriers of their own biographies, existing as relics or objects that are capable of narrating their own history.

Cultural history is a means of understanding our time through (or as) change, in itself always changing through new or different perspectives. Each attempt to give meaning is therefore also an act of obscuring, hiding or oppressing. Yet we know, we feel, we learn that everything is always connected – even if the connections themselves cannot be fully determined or have become part of the realm of myth or an ancient past that we may feel alienated from. Manmade things, whether material or immaterial, are there to both bear witness and serve as props or communicating actors.

The sculptural installation that Ådlandsvik is presenting at P/////AKT proposes an understanding our present time as being clearly connected with ancient myths and magical thinking, questioning whether they are all that different from what we consider to be rational. The simple act of bringing together objects that normally wouldn’t share the same space or context, and giving each of them the same treatment of being turned into (otherwise dysfunctional) sculptures, is a way of making them equal conversation partners amongst themselves, talking of how they differ in age, meaning, material and function, what brought them about, but also about what they might be sharing in the greater scheme of things.