Ever since Toril Johannessen graduated from the Bergen Academy of Art in 2008, her art has addressed fundamental questions associated with visibility and perception – and the various techniques, technologies, and infrastructures we use when we make the world appear to us. She has done this through artworks executed in a somewhat cold and analytical, yet at the same time deeply humorous style that I would describe as ironic-scientific. While her works are certainly informed by theory, she seems primarily interested in the empirical: in the real world, how it works, and what is required of us to access it. There is little affect in Johannessen’s art, but it is full of the most human of all input factors: labour. What is more, she has displayed a distinct flair for interesting issues – certainly, for issues that seem interesting to us now. This is how she has become, to my mind, the foremost Norwegian artist of her generation.
But whereas Johannessen typically occupies a position impeccably poised at the forefront of current trends – not so far ahead of the curve as to become incomprehensible, or so close to the topical that it comes across as forced – she presents us here with an exhibition that feels more obviously reactive than anything I have seen from her before. While her oeuvre is, of course, political, her works have featured few signs of the everyday politics we read about in newspapers. In this exhibition, however, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine precipitated the artworks’ creation, or at any rate a radically new interpretive framing for them. The key insight brought about by the invasion is that the military is just as prominent and central a social infrastructure as the ones previously investigated by Johannessen.
The large Gallery I, which contains the exhibition’s main works, presents this insight with all possible clarity. Large rag rugs woven from cut-up military surplus material such as sleeping bags, uniforms, and tarpaulins cover the entire floor, and in the adjacent room we are asked to take off our shoes so that we can really feel the “soft part of our defence,” as Johannessen put it in an interview with Norwegian Newspaper Morgenbladet. The fact that Johannessen has elected to make homey rugs out of these military materials could be interpreted as a classic critical cross-cutting manoeuvre: two different life worlds are set against each other in order to make us take a closer look at them. In this case, however, I read the approach differently: rather than being primarily about paradox and contrast, the juxtaposition functions as a metaphor emphasising similarities and mutually conferring meaning. The link between defence and home is reinforced by the title Deterrence and Reassurance (2024), which also serves as the exhibition’s name. Here, a sense of security simultaneously implies the possibility of aggression.
Moving our attention from the floor to the walls, we find a series of five prints, Colloquial place names linked to military activity (2022/2024). Johannessen has used oral and written sources to map out exactly what the title says in five regions of Norway. The results are presented on maps executed with the same stylistic flair and authority we expect from Johannessen, with the important exception that the place names are handwritten. With this move, she highlights how the military is, through its past and present activity in regions near and far, part and parcel of the familiar landscape of everyday life, and not just an intergovernmental entity.
This reflection pre-empts our sense of disappointment upon first encountering the rugs. A carpeted floor is all very fine, a tactile break with the surroundings and so on. But obviously it would all have looked much more striking if the installation had asserted itself more. In some places, the rugs are still rolled up so that we can sit on them or use them as pillows. These rolls could have been larger, more emphatically sculptural, making the room more eye-catching. However, such a change would have taken the work in a completely different and less interesting direction. The human dimension is a fundamental point.
The rest of the exhibition comprises documentation pertaining to an unrealised war memorial and more map-based works. Most of them are associated with areas in the North, and all raise questions regarding visibility, borders, and security. The most typically Johannessen-esque work consists of five silkscreened maps entitled Locating the High North (2023), for which the artist perused Norwegian official documents from various periods in order to determine how the term “the High North” has been defined historically. She then traces these outlines onto a map of the North Pole and surrounding areas, alongside another tracing showing the extent of sea ice during the same period. Here, we are safely back in a critical register! The same can be said about the map that compares Sensor Prohibition Areas & Species Observations (2023) at the Evenes Air Station.
By contrast, the two language-themed maps I! and WE! (both 2022-2023) are less obviously critical interventions; rather, they celebrate and highlight linguistic diversity and language communities in the North. Here, too, Johannessen uses the rich possibilities inherent in maps to communicate many things at once, juxtaposing language and nature as well as language and infrastructure in immediate and fun ways. Even so, it is clear that a map of northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia that does not show national borders can quickly become both political and critical. The joke that a language is just a dialect with an army certainly springs to mind.
The last maps, however, are clearly different from Johannessen’s usual mode of expression, being both abstract and somewhat garish. She calls them Reliability Diagrams (2024), denoting a type of diagram found on military maps – the kind used when bombing an enemy, for example – to show how reliable the map’s individual parts are. Here, Johannessen’s playful games with maps and their representational functions take on a sudden gravitas.
Looking at the exhibition from a biographical perspective, it is hardly surprising that the Russian invasion would prove such a watershed moment for Johannessen. She grew up in Harstad, where Russia is a close neighbour. However, people from the North are not the only ones affected by Putin’s war. The former Conservative Party politician Torbjørn Røe Isaksen was, like Johannessen, born in 1978. Last year, he published a book about how those whose political worldview was shaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall are now forced to rethink their place in the world when faced with the new global political situation. On this point he is probably right, and Johannessen’s Festival Exhibition is an example.
