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Christian HougeMount Hadley, Oslo 2021. -from the series `In;Human Nature`-painting glacier 2021
2021
About the Item
Images from soloshow a Buer Gallery, oslo. 2021
The need for images that can change us.
– An account of Christian Houges images.
“For example, one could say. A people is a “group of rational beings, bound together in agreement about what they love.” The kind of “people” they are, would be determined from what they “have loved.” If we then have a group of rational beings (animals excluded) who are “bound together in an agreement about what they have loved”, then it makes sense to call them a “people”, no matter what they may have loved. And for better or worse, what it is that they have found in common, through better or worse they are considered as a people”
– Augustin, De civitate Dei – The City of God.
A glacier is melting in the Alps. The consequences, if it completely disappears together with the other glaciers, will be catastrophic: The ocean will rise and livelihood will vanish for many. Yes, the very place we inhabit each and everyone of us, nation, the earth we walk on - the home we seek refuge for safety - will in part be completely gone.
.....In this context, another series by Christian Houge becomes interesting, because it not only sheds light on the national romanticism and the kind of historical movement it is part of, but also because it provides us with a critical look at how we imagine landscapes, and we are reflected in them, in the historical and social sense. In; In;Human Nature, Houge transforms Svartisen - an ideally typical Norwegian landscape - into a topographical wireframe landscape showing shapes and volumes, but also heights, widths and all conceivable dimensions. In this way, he relates more to the landscape presentation that the surveyor's or cartographers' ambitions sought, which, of course, were to turn the landscape into quantifiable forms. Which in turn can be translated into something that can be divided, mastered, colonized and - in the end - refined into resources and raw materials. This grid is placed as a topographical landscape, namely on the Moon, more specifically NASA's images from the lunar landing in 1969.
This double exposure leads us to the essence of what the human urge for conquest springs from: On the one hand, we will conquer new places, peoples, and natural areas to use them as raw materials for the production of goods, on the other hand, the landscape is used as a mirror of the human urge to to surpass oneself as sovereign in the broader sense. When the American flag was planted on the Moon, it was marked as a conquered territory and thus it could also serve as a mirror for humanity - in this case: the excellence of the Americans. When the contours of Svartisen form the background for the first steps on the moon, two imaginary communities are as a result connected and root the human colonial thought in the form of desire for control which has led us into the disability we and the Nature around us have ended up in. It is as the national romantics and its avatars show us, that Nature itself is not that which is important, but how we can transform it into either a surface we can reflect our uniqueness on or a mass that can be transformed into something we can generate money from.
Houge once again radicalises how we think about our relationship towards ourselves and towards the world around us, but this time it is not only the destruction of Nature or the planet itself that he addresses, but also the background for this development: the aforementioned idealization of the landscape as the scene and its attachment to an imagined community. The radicalization lies in how the nation-building's idealization of landscape is reduced to its basic forms. That man's urge to transform everything in his own reflection or transform everything foreign into something familiar, covers, after all, the vulnerability that both the individual human being, animals and nature itself are most deeply defined by. As long as we do not understand this, we will as a consequence overtake everything and everyone, including our own fragility in the whole, immersed in our own reflection, even if we find nothing there but blindness and fantasies about our own invincibility. For we are no better as people, as Humanity, than those we hold dear and cherish, as Augustine says, for if we think only of money or conquest we will be poor in spirit and lose touch with what we care about. Or to put it another way: if we only care about our own reflection, we will never see the one who reflects - yourself - because the reflection replaces the original. But conversely, even such common objects of love as the care Houge shows the glacier I started this text by describing the potential to create community and directions for community that take into account both who we are, what we love and what is worth gravitating towards.
Sooner or later, this fantasy will burst, that is if it has not already done so, and so it may be too late - the damage has already been done. Not so much on ourselves, perhaps, but on the world we have navigated in. That is why it is so important to create images that make it possible to penetrate this rather silly mirror image that prevents us from viewing reality outside and inside ourselves and how essential it is to show care. This is where Houge's images have their roots in what we love most: life itself. Both our own and the world we live in. If we manage to recognize how far from ourselves and life the colonial fantasies have taken us, we may be able to save the remains.
-Kjetil Røed
- Creator:Christian Houge (1972, Norwegian)
- Creation Year:2021
- Dimensions:Height: 51.19 in (130 cm)Width: 51.19 in (130 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Oslo, NO
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU160028668742
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