Episode 512: Ole John Andal joins me to speak about his sublime and challenging book Oslo Arkiv, recently published by MACK.
The book is an indexical survey of views fromt the artist’s balcony over the span of ten years. Of course, they are beautiful, quiet studies of skies, Turner-like in their impression, and they radiate a sense of the sublime. The images, in their repetition, present as iterations of observations, but at their heart lies an inconvenient, darker, less-than-ebullient reality. The images reflect a decade-long survey of trauma.
On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik began his terrorist attack on the government quarter of Oslo, before heading on to the mass shooting of people on the island of Utøya. At the same time as the first attack, Andal witnessed this tragic turn of history from his balcony and made an image of the explosion cloud from the first attack. Unable to understand how to approach the image, the artist has sought answers over the intervening decade by systematically photographing the same scene, in an attempt to distill order from the punctuating chaos of that day. The result is Olo Arkiv, a meditative study of the sky over the government quarter, each image creating an alternate possibility to the trauma of lived history.
