WONDERS BEYOND YONDER
Solo show, Lydgalleriet (2008)
Lydgalleriet is happy to present Ingvild Langgård´s first solo show in Norway, Wonders Beyond Yonder.
Langgård received attention at the Astrup Fearnley Museum earlier this year with the claustrophobic piece The Beast, which is now shown at Lydgalleriet in one of our dark attic rooms. Her work circles around themes like transgression and altered realities. At Lydgalleriet, she shows both video and sound pieces from the last two years. Nature is a starting point for several of these pieces, often distorted, or used as an expression for human traits like ambition or fear. Elements from occultism and mythology are recurring, like reversals, ritual magic and mystical symbolics. The sound pieces are built upon field recordings of natural sounds, voices and acoustic instruments, while the films are shot on 8 mm and 16 mm film, in pieces where light, shadow and selective focus creates a world changing between the visible and the hidden, the sharp and the blurred, light and darkness. In The Beast the audience meets a rhythmical composition of black fur, an incomprehensible and ever-changing, circling animal. Alone and in complete darkness, surrounded by sound, the spectator´s perception is altered. The knowledge of a limited, claustrophobic space is changed into an experience of an endless black void. In the sound piece The Orchard pieces from different mythologies are weaved together, like the myth of Isis and Osiris, norse poetry like Voluspa and Hyndluljod, as well as shamanic elements, creating a journey through time and space, guided by a thousand year old lady.
The exhibition draws lines to symbolism and to the 50s film rebel Kenneth Anger, with its baroque, esthetical tableaus where beauty turns grotesque, pleasure turns into discomfort, and something strange and dangerous is revealed. Like Mircea Eliade describes the sacred, as the manifestation of something completely different that suddenly reveals itself in the midst of the profane, this exhibition seeks to show glimpses of the other side, like when something slips, and the picture of reality is altered.
SUPPORTED BY Norsk Kulturråd, Notam