360

Excerpts of text from Kunsthall Oslo

Kunsthall Oslo is very pleased to present 360, a solo exhibition by Anna Sofie Mathiasen, the third in our current series of Studio Reports.

“I am that distant mountain, I drink the blue of those trees that I can barely make out as distinct entities, I slip down the quarry way over there … the spin continues to the point of vertigo, the vertigo one gets in rare moments of life with 360 degree vision that annihilates and creates at the same time.” (from Autonauts of the Cosmopath,” Juan Cortàzar and Carol Dunlop, 1983)

Mathiasen’s installation 360 is an autofiction, a circular path and a series of drawings – based on found objects, memories and fragments – that concerns the possibility and impossibility of self-understanding. The motif of the circle alludes to a recurring desire expressed in the novels of Julio Cortàzar for “an absolute vision in which the ego would be annihilated and disappear,” and is echoed in a visual quotation from Eric Rohmer’s film The Green Ray, which also concerns the quest for a transcendent revelation.