Terje Abusdal is a Norwegian artist. This episode is sponsored by the Norsk Fotografisk Fond
Episode 395: Norwegian artist Terje Abusdal joins me to discuss his photobooks and background. Terje is a friend and someone whose work has grown exponentially since I first met him in 2016. His dedication to the medium of the photobook is noteworthy.
From Slash and Burn
I met Terje in Latvia in 2016 at an ISSP workshop that Aaron Schumann was invited to host. I saw what would become his book Slash and Burn, a fascinating book about a marginalized group of Finns in Norway whose slash-and-burn farming denoted their agricultural differences. An outsider group in Norway, the Finns have become a mythical community. Terje photographed them over the years.
Other long-term projects can be seen in Terje’s ouevre, such as Hope Binds Reason, a book that explores the melancholia of roaming alone, making images in a place that is not one’s home. The work was made from several trips across the Indian continent and are an analogy to the artist’s own inner psychological state at the time. Drak and brooding, Hope Binds Reason is a special book.
From Hope Binds Reason
Terje also makes work from archival images, and his book Radius 500 Meters as well as his forthcoming book Costa Bravo both deal with his grandfather’s archives which Terje has re-purposed and edited with an artistic eye for the details found in the family archive while also interrogating the notion we have of travel as well as historically overviewing the brief period before Norway’s petrol-ascendency, when the tides of neoliberalism was about to change the country forever.
Abusdal’s career is varied, intelligent and is very much worth investigating. Please tune in and once again, thanks to the Norsk Fotografisk Fond and Norwegian Photography Now for sponsoring this episode.
The Norsk Fotografisk Fond sponsors this episode, and it will remain free.
