I search for artistic, relational areas where the imagination can transform perceived reality for an individual or group.
Sidsel Christensen is a visual artist and currently Ph.D research fellow at the Art Academy in Bergen, Norway. She maintains a crossdisciplinarity focus, that traverses the artistic areas moving image, sound, text, installation and performance, while remaining a working relationship throughout Scandinavia and the UK.
Throughout, she explores how interactive and relational mechanisms can shed light on the formation and reproduction of various identity constructions. The focus has been on capturing a somewhat idealised ‘space’ in between the artist and the subject/audience, where creative input and framing on both sides creates the work. Initially this is a space of potential, power struggle and friction. The tension also lies between a factual / didactic language and more fictive, poetic modes. In this border-space, Sidsel wishes to give a voice to experiences that normally seems unarticulated or invisible.
Selected shows between 2013/2021 include two commissioned solo works at Stavanger Art Museum and an exhibition at Kunsthall Stavanger, Norway, as well as UK exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary art (ICA), Open Gallery, Hjellegjerde Gallery, Photo London and The Tetley. In the same period, Sidsel has showed work at New Shelterplan, VEGA Arts, X and Beyond in Copenhagen, Kunstnerenes Hus, Perfomence Art Bergen in Norway, Ancharpark, Insitu in Berlin, as well as The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
A Conversation at the Edge of the Object
HD Video / 19:16 min / 2015
This video sets up a conversation between artist Sidsel Christensen and art collector Thomas Frankenberg which encompasses philosophical reflections on his collection, including the status of the object in terms of an exploration of texture, proximity, meaning, preservation and disappearance. As the camera travels through the collection, and the conversations unfolds, we are presented with a journey through a landscape bordering on abstraction, in which fragments of art objects and natural elements join in unexpected ways, suggesting their own logic of encounter.
In loving memory of Thomas Frankenberg.
Artists featured from his original collection: Ana Genoves, Brian Reed, Amikam Toren, Luke Gottlier, Wilson Sisters, Angela DeLa Cruz, Simon Pettersen, Martin Creed, Art Lab, and others.
Sound design and mixing by Erik Medeiros
Study for Composition IX
HD Video / 20:00 min / 2013
A series of video sequences portraying a landscape pushed to the borderline of abstraction, where the vertical and horizontal reading is caught in a more free interplay. The body of the artist is an element in the landscape and is red as a physical object similar to the landscape and the sea. At the same time the artists’ presence frames the image, as the elements take on a bodily and subjective meaning.
Produced by commission for Open Gallery, London and Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, UK.
Sound design and mixing by Erik Medeiros
The Curvature Singularity of Erin Hunter
HD video – 2 channels / 19:40 min / 2011
I use this project to investigate the possibility of immersion and ecstatic experience in contemporary spaces, to look at how inner, emotive visions can be linked to the visual language of abstraction in art.
This work exists as one piece in a series of video portraits of young women in the East London night club scene. I use documentary film devices to capture the immediacy and rawness of the nightclub, at the same time as tracing how a few women propose the possibility of interacting with the nightclub lights, through hypnosis and a methodical, ritualistic immersion and thereby entering a heightened, abstracted space of ‘Light’. The video aim to weave together the documentation of this activity in the nightclub with a constructed and changing reality of the space.
Performance by Erin Hunter
Sound design and mixing by Pål Asle Pettersen