ABOUT
In the Process of
In the Process of... an online anthology where ten artists present their creative processes together with a selection of artworks/art projects in progress. Based in different countries, and working in disparate fields, the artists all share the practice of process based working methods.
​
Loosely connected through professional encounters and friendships, the artists are also connected by their decisions to live and work away from what might be considered the dedicated centres of art.
​
This web based exhibition showcases works in progress. Presenting a selection of ongoing projects and processes, in which they convey substantial aesthetic statements.
Background
In April-May 2022 John Carberry and Gustav Hellberg started to discuss one of Carberry’s ideas to make a kind of an exhibition project together – an online project. John Carberry, living in Albany, Western Australia, and Gustav, Hellberg who is based in the region Goheung on the southern tip of South Korea, discussed their own situations of being located away from those art centres that people might consider being the nodes of art production in the world. Their talks also circled around the process of making art and how some artists’ process based working methods also compose an essential component of their individual practices.
With these two, loose thematic ideas, they decided to contact a group of artists who work in such processed projects. They are spread out in the countries Australia, Germany, Indonesia, Korea Russia and Sweden. The foundation of the project is an online work anthology, where the artists present a work in progress. The artist are loosely connected through professional encounters and friendship. Further they are related by their processed based working methods and their likeminded decisions to live and work away from what might be considered the premier centres of art.
Artworks in Progress
Time, space, abstraction, image technology
John Carberry’s video Pinioned is inspired by David Hockney’s polaroid works. Carberry slices video footage of two dancers carrying out a free dance routine. The horizontal strips are combined to one distorted video image. It has a resemblance to the Dadaist cut-up technique of texts, which was later popularised by William Burroughs in the late 1950s. Time and motion are distorted in Carberry’s vide. The footage seems to shift from being a realistic representation of dancers in action to a composite of abstract video elements.
​
Time, memory, fiction, non-fiction, biographical, life and death
Håkan Carlbrand’s video Stairwell to Dollhouse is a documentary about Martin who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. We get to follow Martin in his last chapter of life, where he discusses his imminent death while he is working on a dollhouse. The dollhouse is a peculiar auto biographical remembrance of a life dedicated to music and community engagement. If this is representation of Martin’s life lived or his ideas of his life gives this documentary a parallell narrative to a story about the inevitable ending we all have to encounter. Carlbrand calls the video “a film about life”. It is a film that focuses on the part of life most of us rather look away from. Martin cannot do that any more. Maybe he never did? Håkan Carlbrand show us the beauty of a person’s last stage of life.
Time, space, nature vs urbanity, biographical, life and death
“My farm has become a ready made in my view and I use it both as a spatial and conceptual construction as well as the place for production and a place to show art.” This is how Johanna Karlin presents her gesamtkunstwerk Kläppinge 1:18. In this perpetually ongoing work Karllin plays with her illogical interactions with domestic and wild animals, buildings in decay as well as life life and death.
Participatory, environmentalism, nature vs urbanity, fiction, non-fiction
Borahm Kim’s works often revolve around audience participation. Interactive technology as well as a keen interest in game construction are vital elements in Kim’s creations. Moving Forest v2.0 : 2050 Urban Planning is board game where visitors can participate in a policy study by becoming a novice researcher at the ‘Future Forest Environment Research Centre’. In the game you are supposed to realize carbon neutrality. Trees must be planted by securing half of the urban area. The game is set in the future in the fictive South Korean city. Playing the game you will experience the complexity of political and city planning policy making. It presents a bleak reality that prevents societies to change. From a Korean perspective it is a harsher reality, readily dodged by many of its citizens.
Detecting meaning in the seemingly insignificant, Image technology, photography, process, conceptualism
Over the years Roman Korzhov has been working with a series of videos where he trains the camera lens onto things and situations that at first gaze seem insignificant. There’s no immediate and evident action. The camera adamantly lingers on a subject and forces the viewer to register slow action of something like shadow’s minimal motion, water ripples or dust. In the new series Stabilization Korzhov is using camera’s or image editing software’s image stabilisation functions as an analogy to what he calls “an endless process of striving for balance, the state of which is infinitely short”.
Painting, photography, image technology, process, conceptualism, representation
Nelya Korzhova uses photos and videos as inspirations for her paintings. She allows various aspects of cinema to influence her paintings such as incorporating the black letterbox bars and movie theatre curtains es image elements. For the project In the Process of… Korzhova sat out to follow a transition of her painting into the digital space. “New technologies have greatly influenced the concept - what is a painting?”. The painting Flying. â„– 12 shows a wintery looking landscape of what looks like a sandy beach. The dark water is covered with ice floes. On the edge between water and beach we can see a small human figure. At the right end of the painting some yellow structures resembling football goal posts can be seen. The scene is seen from above and is somewhat tilted, which probably indicates the painting has a photography as origin. Both the human figure and the yellow structures look insignificant and misplaced. The scene is tilted. It is as if the painter is loosing a grip of the surroundings. The instantaneous character of a technical reproduction is there. A technical object, such as a camera, can only create an image according to its settings. It doesn’t use experience and craftsmanship in its creation. The painter’s activity focuses on making a painting according to the conventions of painting, where experience and craftsmanship are elemental. Korzhova’s reproduction of a photograph is more interesting if we take in her entire process and not only the motif. It is easy to see the frozen landscape and little human figure. However, the painting depicts another image, a photograph and not just the landscape we all probably see at our first glance. It is an interesting play with reality and fiction and it also leaves us to the question if this is a mere painting or more readily a work in the domains of conceptual or process art.
Memory, environmentalism, nature vs urbanity, fiction, non-fiction
With the video On Off Shore Gustav Hellberg is revisiting a film project he started out four years ago. Using the research video material, scenographic outlines and manuscript he is trying to recreating a work that came to a standstill. The video uses location footage mixed with manipulated digital scenographic material. In the video we follow two groups of people who are looking at Korean tidal mudflats with opposing understandings, perspectives and prospects. One group represent the Korean economical elite, with the solitary goal to make as much profit as possible through the traditions of Korean finance, industry and politics. The other contingent has a more scientific and observing approach, with an attitude resembling activist and hacker oriented groups. The video is a collage mixing mudflat footage with staged and theatrical scenes presenting stereotyped situations such as executive board meetings and the activist hacker den.
​
​
Detecting meaning in the seemingly insignificant, process, biographical, memory
Hacke is a video where we can see a grey wall framed by wild grown greenery. In the middle of the wall there’s a hole with irregular edges. Wit irregular intervalls the shadow (only) from the greenery that falls on the wall shakes violently in concert with the sound of a woodpecker’s pecking noise. The video is projected on the wall next to a group of six drawings. Four are made by Peter Ojstersek, one is a Joseph Beuys print and one is made by Ojstersek’s grandfather an autodidact artist. Ojstersek’s grandfather was thrilled about Beuys’s "Jeder Mench ist ein Künstler" (Every man is an artist). The wall seen in the video belongs to a shed in the forrest used by metal thieves to hide their loot. Ojstersek passes this shed everyday on his way to the studio. The drawings have been hanging above his desk in the studio. As Peter Ojstersek explains this work is a way to capture a notion of those thoughts that emerges and reoccurs by observing certain objects in your daily life. Knowing that we can probably relate to a for the most part futile endeavour we encounter when we’re trying to puzzle our thoughts together, looking for and hopefully finding or creating meaning. At the same we can look at this work as an observation of the artist Ojstersek’s activity, or at least the fraction he allows us to lay our eyes on. We are watching fragments of something that has some importance to his work and his life. Considering that Peter Ojstersek for many years has worked with a time consuming close observation of growing plants as method and medium we might understand that we, in this work, are experiencing a reversed situation. We have to contemplate and engage in these fragments of the artist’s process, as difficult such a pursuit may be to grasp.
Detecting meaning in the seemingly insignificant, emancipation, environmentalism, process, biographical
Slowly curling smoke is the visual centre piece of Linda Petersson Ödbring’s video A Pilgrimage in the Footsteps of Hildegard of Bingen*. The background is an even field out of focus blur. Against this contemplative setting we hear a voice reading a text inspired by Hildegard of Bingen’s writings. A bumble bee queen is communicating with the narrator. The dialogue unfolds into a self confidence invigorating monologue. The bumble bee queen becomes a catalyst for an undefined emancipation. We might also understand the text as a memento to slow down and listen to nature. The negligible bumble bee queen receives the significance to pass on a subject matter with a gravity that should probably not be ignored.
​
*Hildegard of Bingen was a German Benedictine abbess and polymath active as a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary, and as a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages (Wikipedia)
Detecting meaning in the seemingly insignificant, abstraction, image technology, environmentalism, process
Algorithmic Catastrophe, Artificial Earth, Close Proximity, Entangled, Mud Matter and Superorganism are the titles of six photographs in the series 2Dbody3Dcode by Rebecca Ann Tess. The photographs display close-ups of organic matter, sometimes in combination with human limbs. Some of the photographs have a more abstract characteristic, it takes a while to recognise the photographed subject or subjects. The technical or mathematical direction of the series’s title as well as the individual photograph’s titles contrast the displayed organic subjects and create meaning beyond the obvious image elements. A lead into Rebecca Ann Tess’s work is following quote by the philosopher Yuk Hui that she associates with the series 2Dbody3Dcode: “Our computers, smartphones, and domestic robots are no longer mechanical but are rather becoming organic.”