KWESTAN JAMAL BAWAN
Landscape - Mindscape
08.04. - 05.06.2016
Opening speech by Anne Guddal
Author and poet Anne Hellen Guddal is Research Fellow in comparative literature at the University in Bergen. Editorial member in Vagant. She is named to be one of the 10 best writers under 35 by Morgenbladet and Literature Festival in Lillehammer. At the opening of Kwestan Jamal’s exhibition she will give us a poetic approach to Landscape - Mindscape.
Poem by Anne Hellen Guddal (Norwegian) >>>
The Bergen based multimedia artist Kwestan Jamal Bawan maneuvers between the landscape and an inner, implied landscape – the mindscape in her recent paintings. The works activate and interlink these two aspects. Her work reminds us that in painting our primary concern is always the paint, the scale and color before all else, but at its best, the painting also leads us outwards; towards the world.
The painted surface can create a state of expansion and offer an opportunity to discern between materiality and traceable painted surfaces in Jamal´s work. Creating layer upon layer of connotative possibilities. It seems like Jamal is making interchangeable movements and colors of a landscape she is extremely familiar with, but also specific places familiar to all of us. Maybe the landscape Jamal encountered on her flight from Kurdistan has impressed itself so deeply on her senses that it has become ineradicable in her work, or the landscape she encountered in the fjords of Norway where she was welcomed as a political refugee.
Jamal´s references lie in art history and reflects on art history, but also on a sincere and considered engagement with autobiographical content, contemporary events and the essential human conditions of life, survival and conquest in its broadest sense. The paintings also bring forth what might be called a point of maximum ambiguity, where they accommodate to every viewer´s interpretation. Jamal sustains the possibility of ambiguity as the spectator is fixed in his or her own intersecting cycle of attention. These pictures are inexhaustible. It is impossible to empty the work of its meaning triggered by the individual aesthetic experience.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog in English, with texts by Malin Barth, Rita Marhaug, Ali Jola and Haci Hackman.
[www.kwestan-jamal.com]