VIDEO ROAD – KJELL BJØRGEENGEN
Norwegian artist Kjell Bjørgeengen’s VIDEO ROAD is a video sculpture composed of multilayered experiences and ideas, exploring movement, time, and communication. Artist Peer Bode writes in the exhibition publication:
“We encounter a stony path, digital stones, an ancient walking route, a driveway, a communication tool, a practical mosaic grid, roadwork, linear stone panels, a flat, ground-bound sculptural form within the museum walls. Between these are markers: video monitors, electronic display screens, and colored rectangular lights that glow and move internally. The monitors showcase, for instance, transport equipment used in bridge construction and subway train journeys. These have been altered through electronic image processing, digitally capturing spatial and temporal elements and presenting them in ‘real time’ or ‘continuous’ time.
The work is heavy, with tons of stone, and ancient, existing in slow geological time. It is also light, existing in the fleeting present, in electronic cyberspace. This is the external aspect of the piece. There is also an internal aspect, within the viewer, the audience. That internal aspect belongs to the realm of perception, memory, and imagination.
Kjell Bjørgeengen has found a way to go beyond metaphor and association by causing a break in association, a disconnection, to create new associations, new connections around the subject and the image. In this way, he incorporates observations about observations, encompassing the full spectrum of imagination, memory, and knowledge. VIDEO ROAD is a topology of the internal and external: the internal is perception, experience, and thought, while the external is material stone and electronic phenomena.
What is this electronic phenomenon? Contemporary magic or shamanism? A spectacle of modern/postmodern power? The power of science and analysis? A calculation, a formula, a model? Recording and processing? The artificiality/cybernetics/automation of intelligence, vision, and existence? Artificial and false time? An element of uncertainty, partial chance?”
In VIDEO ROAD, there are two paths: a stone path and an electronic image path, which intersect and mark each other. We feel at home among the stones. We know them. We trust them. But what about the image we control as a signal, the electronic entity? Is it a window? A mirror? A control panel? An information table? A network form? Or perhaps not an image at all, but merely lines—lines marking and delimiting time?
Despite our knowledge and experience, we are uncertain. Yet we know, we perceive, that time, lines, information, images, and stones flow. They move, they travel, they wander through space and time. VIDEO ROAD is a landscape within a landscape, a break in knowledge and perception, yet simultaneously their domain.
Kjell Bjørgeengen employs technology to transcend the technological view of life that dictates everything—including ourselves—must be used as efficiently as possible. VIDEO ROAD is not about efficiency; it is about the slow unveiling and opening up, like a journey through the space of diverse observation and thought.
Kjell Bjørgeengen was born in Norway in 1951. He studied sociology, psychology, and philosophy at the University of Oslo between 1973 and 1976. He has worked with photography since 1969, initially without a camera, using direct applications on photographic paper through heat and chemical treatments. From 1979 onward, he primarily created photograms. Bjørgeengen has worked with video since 1981, receiving most of his training in the United States at institutions such as Portable Channel (Rochester, New York), Downtown Community Television (New York City), and The Experimental Television Center (Owego, New York).
VIDEO ROAD will be presented in three different spaces during 1990, as a collaboration between three Nordic museums: Pori Art Museum in Finland, Randers Kunstmuseum in Denmark, and the newly opened Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. The project is supported by the Nordic Cultural Fund, the Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs, and Vederlagfondet.
Publication:
ISBN 951-9355-25-1 Kjell Bjørgeengen: Videotie
Pori Art Museum 1990
Editing: Jari-Pekka Vanhala
Article: Peer Bode, New York
Translations: Ritva Päivömaa (article), Virpi Vainikainen
Photographs: Fin Serck-Hanssen, Esko Nummelin, Jalo Porkkala
Lay-out: Hilkka Kuusijärvi
100PRINT, Pori 1990
Translated with ChatGPT