Åslaug Krokann Berg/Joakim Blattmann/Susanne Fagerlund/[krig] /Karin Bäckström /Jon Perman/ Bettina Hystad/Simon Lerin/ Magnhild Opdøl
Silva Melancholia

The forest as battlefield and inspiration in the time of ecocide.
Audiovisual installations, sound, drawing, sculpture,objects and video.

3rd of June until 26th of August

New opening 17th of July!

Official opening with the artists present at 1 PM Saturday 3rd of June

The exhibition will be open to visitors from 11 AM the same day.

The exhibition has been made possible with support from the Arts Council Norway, the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, the Norwegian Artists’ Remuneration Fund.
MRK is supported by Møre and Romsdal County municipality and Molde municipality.

The nature around us has for millennia been a source of inspiration for the arts. Forests have appeared in countless paintings, books, films, songs,video games etc. Not only as a beautiful place and mysterious force, artists have also always been concerned with how man uses and exploits nature. Silva Melancholia presents various artists who have in common that their practice is based on their own experiences of the environment, nature and forests, and using artistic exploration to develop artworks where themes like the ongoing climate crisis and the role of humans in the future of the planet are also present.

Electronic Flora
- an audiovisual installation by the duo Lerin/Hystad.
Electronic Flora by the duo Lerin/Hystad is a project where the artits are working with recordings of bio-electrical signals from plants. The duo’s sensors pick up electrical voltages inside the plant’s leaves. The plants use the electrical signals to communicate both internally and with other organisms. Research by, among others, Stefano Mancuso, professor of plant neurology at the University of Florence shows that plants are complex, socially interactive and communicative beings. They cooperate and develop advanced relationships with both fungi and insects. Through sonification, the duo transforms the plants’ electrical data into music where the plants themselves determine tones, melodies and rhythms.
Lerin/Hystad presents his works in audio-visual installations, soundscapes where several plants compose music and video together. Inspired by botanical drawing, Bettina Hystad also studies the plants in pencil. But Hystad’s drawings are not perfect holotypes, they do not attempt to idealize or beautify the plant. Instead, Hystad encounters the plant in its natural environment, her drawings embrace imperfections to highlight the particularities of the individual plant and do not omit or hide anything that science might see as flaws. It is in the leaves infested with lice or in wilting flowers that we can see traces of the plant’s inseparable relationship with its environment, with the insects, fungi and organisms in the soil.

The project is supported with regional project funds from The Artcenters Norway/KIN.

Magnhild Opdøl
17th of July -26th of August
New works in various media, drawings, photography and sculpture by Magnhild Opdøl. Exquisitely craftedartworks that remind us of the fragility of nature.
The artists practice touches on subjects such as nature, value systems, transience, representation, natural resources, power and materials.

Battlefield (Slagmark) is the name of a series of drawings by Åslaug Krokann Berg The starting point is fields with broken trees within a forest, where the associations go to both battlefields in war, and degradation. The drawings are developed layer by layer, built up and erased in a combination of techniques such as chalk, charcoal, pencil and electric eraser.
“I often start physically and raw, then go in with adjustments and details; draw out the darkness, blur out the light. The traces of what is erased become part of the drawing and add the physical expression I am looking for, where precisely the traces become an important part of what has happened. It functions as a sign of both process and passed time. I have worked in different ways and given myself challenges as I`ve been drawing. I explore the raw and unpredictable and challenge myself to how ugly and raw I can draw. Some drawings have been made over time and are very detailed, while others have been worked on quickly, almost sketch-like. Some are chaotic, as if we are inside them, while others are small pieces, which are lifted up as fragments of all the chaos that is otherwise present. The perspective in relation to the different drawings and the idea of a battlefield has been (is) important to deal with here. The driving force behind the works is a larger mourningwork, where rage and despair over the worlds current situation and the planet’s future ,go together with a quiet meditation on our own mortality" http://www.krokannberg.no/

Marshwater, wood and stone (2023)
A soundinstallation by Joakim Blattmann

The work documents the complexity of the sound information found in nature, starting from recordings of small movements inside trees, in the forest floor and in a marsh. In, for example a tree, natural mechanisms such as small twists inside the tree trunk, or movements from insects that live under the bark will also emit sound, but these signals are hidden in the material itself, or at such a low volume that our hearing cannot perceive it. Blattmann is here working with an acoustic micro-world where he magnifies and emphasizes hidden sound material.
Throughout the exhibition, bioelectric signals are recorded in the installation’s moss, which via sensors control how the sound is played in the gallery space. The materials in the work become part of the speaker itself by the sound being played through contact speakers. The work presented at MRK is supported by the Norwegian Artists’ Remuneration Fund.

3rd of June -14th of July
Vibrant Landscape and Textile preparations
[krig] presents a collection of works from a project where the duo explores how our experiences and relationships with a landscape, and ideas about its future, are affected by global phenomena such as pandemic and climate change, but also local weather phenomena such as rain, hail and calimas. Inspired by the vibrations of the landscape and prepper videos on YouTube that are filled with doomsday theories, but also textile crafts, they have investigated the four places – Blanca, Lumsheden, Sandviken and Moskosel. At the various locations, they have made recordings based on the landscapes and human influence in them, using piezo elements that pick up vibrations. At the same time, they have investigated the textile techniques presented by the YouTube channels, using materials they find on site. Slowly they build up a collection of installations and performances, linked to these landscapes and their issues, but also to the time they spent in them. The project develops in the shadow of an ever-present doomsday perspective – mixed with global consumerism and rediscovered craft techniques.
The project is carried out with the support of the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Region Gävleborg and KC Nord Sweden, and has been developed at AADK in Blanca, Spanien and Moskosel Creative Lab, Moskosel, Sweden.

Nature carved into our bones
Video 2022 (6 min loop)
In the video installation the artist Susanne Fagerlund has collaborated with artificial intelligence. The projection shows machine learning in action, where AI recreates images of forest landscapes based on the artist’s photographs in nature reserves. The video is a part of Ithe project ‘THE DOPPELGÄNGER SERIES’ Mourning Mirrors for what is being lost , where the artist Susanne Fagerlund explores the loss of biodiversity and unique biotopes. Fagerlund reflects on human’s relationship with, care for and belonging to nature. The forest industry’s increasing use of clear-cutting old-growth forests causes a dramatic reduction in biodiversity and raises carbon dioxide emissions. When new trees are planted, they imitate woods. Still, the artificial monoculture lacks the benefits and resilience that only time and a diverse ecosystem can provide. Fagerlund collaborates with artificial intelligence in parts of the project, feeding an algorithm with her own photographs from nature reserves. The algorithm then tries to mimic the images of nature through machine learning. The result is a kind of vague memory of the landscape. A “Doppelgänger” (double) is often seen as a harbinger of future misfortune in fiction and mythology.

About the artists

Lerin/Hystad
Simon Lerin and Bettina Hystad are both educated at Konstfack and the Royal Konsthögskolan in Stockholm, as well as at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen, Norway. The duo has participated in a number of individual and group exhibitions internationally. Lerin/Hystad are also active as musicians and have toured in Europe, China and Japan. Vimeo More

Magnhild Opdøl lives and works in Sunndal. Opdøl has an MA (2007) and BA (2004) from the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. In recent years, she has exhibited at, among others, the Vestlandsutstillingen 2023, Haugesund Billedgalleri 2023, Galleri BOX (Gothenburg), Norsk Skogmuseum (Elverum), Hå gamle prestegard, Risør Art Park, Art Museum Nord-Trøndelag, Møre og Romsdal Art Center, Art Museum KUBE, Butler Gallery (Ireland), Gallery LNM, Tegnerforbundet, Akershus Arts Centre, Buskerud Arts Center and Royal Hibernian Academy (Ireland).More info

Åslaug Krokann Berg was born and raised in Gausdal, lives and works in Oslo. She has worked with video art since the mid-1990s, but in recent years drawing has mainly been in focus. Her work includes installations, objects and scenography. She has been represented at a number of galleries and at video art festivals, and has collaborated with musicians, photographers and other artists. She has also been an examiner and course instructor, held several posts and written articles and reports on the field of video art and performance art. She has received the State’s Guarantee Income since 2012.More

[krig ]( meaning war) is the name of the duo Karin Bäckström and Jon Perman.
They gave themselves the name, inspired by the traditions of punk, and with an idea to fight for the freedom of the soul, creativity and DIY ethics.Together they release records, create installations, run a self-organized gallery/culture center Backbeatbolaget/Galleri Lars Palm in Sandviken, Sweden, and organize artistic projects including Art Promotion Gävleborg. Their artistic practice revolves around emotions, craftsmanship and textiles in relation to making, social order and creating new spaces. Underlying is an interest in collectivity and creativity. Homepage

Joakim Blattmann is educated at the Art Academy in Trondheim and lives and works in Oslo. Among other things, he has exhibited at Buskerud Kunstsenter, Høstutstillingen, Meta.Morf biennale, Atelier Nord, Bærum Kunsthall, and in Ekebergparken. In 2022, he released the cassette album Stegla on the label Dinzu Artefacts. More info and https://joakimblattmann.bandcamp.com

Susanne Fagerlund is based in Sweden and received her master’s degree in fine art at Valand Academy in 2021. During the spring of 2023, she completed a post-master course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. As an artist, she works project-based, and human and non-human relationships is a central theme. Her installations oscillate between digital technology, video, sound, sculpture, and photography. Previous and upcoming exhibitions consist of, among others, Hasselblad Center (SE), Galleri Duerr (SE), Sergels Torg (SE), Borås Art Museum (SE), Copenhagen Photo Festival (DK) and Gothenburg’s Museum of Natural History (SE). https://www.susannefagerlund.com/