Interruptions

Abstract

Interruptions, KODE3, Rasmus Meyers Samling, Bergen. Christensen, Jeannette (Artistic production, 2020)

An intervention in the permanent presentation at Rasmus Meyer Collection. A continuation of my investigations into an Aesthetics of Interruption. Whom do we encounter on the walls of a museum, and who is it that is being represented? How do you make a static image move and a moving image static?

Since the mid-1990s I have worked on the Polaroid series entitled The Passing of Time. The pictures are based on portraits by the Baroque master Jan Vermeer. I am preoccupied with the actions that the women in his paintings are performing. Vermeer has captured them in the middle of an activity – whether it is pouring milk, reading a letter or studying music. A Polaroid is a snapshot, and in Vermeer’s paintings you can find something similar, they depict a frozen moment in time. I have repeatedly photographed the same models, in the same postures. The models grow older and the formats have also changed. In this way process and time become integrated in the work.

The video portraits, Woman Interrupted, (8 in all) are adjusted down to an extremely slow speed as a logical continuation of the Polaroid series. A starting point for the videos is Vermeer’s painting Girl Interrupted at her Music (1660–61). In the everyday motif of the woman in the picture, something suddenly happens that makes time tangible. Interrupted in her earlier state of concentration, the sitting figure turns towards us. She exists partly in her own time, yet, when our gazes meet, also in ours.