| EXHIBITION HALL |

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Marianne Morild

"Septentrionalis"

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12.11.2021 - 16.01.2022

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Opening event: Artist talk with exhibiting artist Marianne Morild in converstaion with Anne Marthe Dyvi.
Anne Marthe Dyvi´s work can be described as interdisciplinary, site-specific and process-orientated. She has a special interest for technology and time, and works with the behaviour and survival of nature and humanity.

more info >>>

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Curated by Malin Barth.

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The exhibition Septentrionalis is about resources and values and our ability to adapt to change— the new reality that is coming. The background for the project is investigations of how landscape painting can be a medium for a problematising of a nature under stress and the relationship between humans, landscape, and nature. Viewed historically, landscape painting lies in a national-romantic tradition with imperialist connotations. Marianne Morild’s contemporary landscapes query whether this tradition has been exhausted. Having previously mirrored this historical gaze, with this exhibition she gives us the opportunity of looking in a new way. Septentrionalis becomes a metaphor for our present condition.

 

The title, Septentrionalis, is a Latin word meaning ‘from the north’ and refers to the seven stars of the star formation known as the Plough. The expression can be found on maps from the 1600 and 1700s, indicating unexplored regions in the global north-west. In Marianne Morild’s new paintings we approach a place that refers to a landscape we know, where we are asked to think over where we wish to end up when we stand with a map in our hand and venture out on a new journey. What is it we wish to find and what is the dream that got us to venture out toward a new coast in the first place? What challenges face us there?

 

Previous to this exhibition, Morild has in the last five years worked with digital maps from the oil industry as source material for paintings. She has looked at how the aesthetics of these maps and their use value represent our epoch’s relationship to nature and landscape. In these earlier works she developed a formal language in which painting functioned both as image and as map of fragmented landscapes or planets seen from a far-off perspective. The works explored our attachment to basic resources and our transgression of the earth’s limits.

 

Septentrionalis creates a tension with Morild’s previous, more iconic work in which the gaze captured something that lay beyond a self. The new paintings represent a quite other way to view the world. The perspective has moved from an external standpoint where we only see fragments detached from context. In the new work Morild has produced for this exhibition, vegetation, geography, and atmosphere are explored from within, where humans are surrounded and are a part of the landscape. This shift in perspective gives us agency in the encounter. The narrative now appears considerably more alarming and suggests how we must now understand the world. Morild implies that our relationship to the landscape must be reappraised. The situation demands that our image-world is challenged. What is the definition of value today if we don’t first base it on capital gains? What is it we search for in landscape painting? There are major contradictions in the ways of approaching terms like landscape and value today. The big question is and will continue to be: how should we look at the landscape? In a timely manner, the exhibition opening coincides with the conclusion of the international climate conference COP 26 in Glasgow.

 

Kunsthall 3,14’s ornamental exhibition space becomes the frame for this exhibition and elements from the architectural ornamentation are reflected in the paintings. They also function as a reference to, amongst other things, Baroque maps. The canvases on the wall give space for closer exploration of the landscapes. Between the pillars in the room, a few plaster sculptures are like their own macrocosmos. Cartography also functions as a structural principle for the installation of the exhibition along similar lines to those cartographic elements central to the images themselves.

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Marianne Morild studied in London at Central Saint Martin’s College (MA Fine Art) and Chelsea College of Art (BA Hon. Fine Art Painting). In November 2021­–April 2022 she will show a selection of paintings at Centre Pompidou-Metz, France, in the exhibition curated by Martin Guinard and philosophy Bruno Latour, Toi et moi on ne vit pas sur la même planète. The exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz is a continuation of the Taipei Biennale 2020, where Morild was invited by the curators to take part. The biennale was about democracy and ecology and was shown at the Taipei Fine Art Museum from November 2020–March 2021. Morild has also had a number of exhibitions in United Kingdom and Norway.

 

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- Kunstkritikk review (Norwegian) >>>

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