Severed tongue / Now my sails are burning

Isak Eldh and Thomas Laurien have been touched by the place around the mouth of the Viskan River into the sea and have spent time there as a way of giving something back – an act of care. In the mouth there is an islet, a tongue. The parts in the exhibition are about the memory of a specific sound – a faintly intrusive tone that can be sensed in the area, perceived on a quiet winter night. Can a perceived tone or sound be recreated through recordings on site? The tone can be perceived as coming from the nearby Värö bruk, but once on site it becomes all the more complex. Not only does the concrete and steel of the infrastructure cut through the area, the sounds from the roads, trains and winds also cut through each other and dominate the soundscape. Yet it is always there in the background, the tone. In the work with the field recordings, memories and imagination are also allowed to take place, and the boundary between what was actually heard and what is ultimately heard is blurred. In parallel with the search for the tone of the place, the filming took place where the tones of the light shift in a corresponding way. Severed Tongue consists of the three video pieces: DIES (day), VESPER (dusk) and NOX (night) which together depict the place during an imaginary day. The time horizon is broadened through the titles in Latin which create a link to the now forgotten medieval monastery that once stood on the site, and which has given its name to the fjord where the Viskan flows out – Klosterfjorden.

Between heather heaths and former natural harbors on the Onsala Peninsula lies an old stone labyrinth. From here, Henning Rehnström Ring’s film work Now My Sails Are Burning moves through coherent events and broken moments. The memory of the place enters the personal. The film follows the form and logic of the labyrinth – with circuits that mark proximity and distance. Here, rocky bottoms and nautical charts, everyday life and water surfaces, cemeteries and horizon lines, Florentine garden paths and constant sunsets are connected. Now My Sails Are Burning has emerged from a period of grief and explores the contradictory state of lingering. In the presence of what is lost, the film searches for its own echo, rather than for an ending.

About the artists

Isak Eldh (b. 1972 in Gothenburg) is educated at the Valand School of Art, University of Gothenburg and currently lives and works in Sätila, Mark Municipality. Eldh’s art is physical, bodily and always exploratory. He works site-related and, often in collaboration with others, with music, sound, sculpture, installation and visual expressions.

Thomas Laurien (b. 1967 in Jönköping) works as a teacher and researcher at HDK-Valand at the University of Gothenburg. His artistic practice and the research projects he is part of – as well as his involvement in the Nature Culture Association Skimmer och härvor – focus on representation and rights for more than people and on relationship-building nature conservation.

Henning Rehnström Ring (b. 1987 in Västervik) is an artist, active in Stockholm, with a master’s degree in fine arts from Konstfack. He works with video, text, installation and performative walks – often in slow and place-based processes. Various forms of storytelling run like undercurrents in his work, where labyrinthine connections between place and memory, man and nature, life and death, are opened and closed.