Line Bøhmer Løkken
Dry Eye – Dripping Stone
Halls on the Second Floor
19.10.23 – 19.11.23
The exhibition Dry Eye – Dripping Stone shows several photographs and a still image video. Visual artist Line Bøhmer Løkken has in the recent years directed her interest towards a phenomenological reading of the photograph. She aims to create images that trigger the entire sensory apparatus of the body and asks whether this is possible through a medium that, to such a large degree, is related to vision.
To explore this question, Bøhmer Løkken brings in the concept of haptic visuality as the theorist Laura U. Marks describes it: Seeing as if you are touching what you see, or in other words, that the sense of sight works almost like a sense of touch. It can be seen in contrast to the optical visuality, where the eye identifies figures in an image and extracts information. Such a gaze can be the starting point for a semiotic reading of the photograph as we are traditionally taught to meet it. Bøhmer Løkken’s photos explore both haptic and optical qualities: What we see can create sensations as bodily experiences, and at the same time open for interpretation and narratives. The objects in the image fade away, while rough, wet, dry, etc., surfaces become prominent.
The fragility of relating to the world mainly through the visual has gained a new meaning for Bøhmer Løkken after her daughter lost her vision on one eye, two years ago. The experience has also made firmer Bøhmer Løkken’s relationship to the camera as a physical extension of the body. The relationship between the sensing body behind the camera, and the mechanical camera eye, fascinates the artist. The camera twists and turns reality, and creates new images on its own. The artist investigates the camera’s ability to create a presence in her images and looks for the intersection between the optical and the haptic gaze. Rather than representing and describing reality, the photographs are a record of the artist’s experience in a given or a possible “space”.
She does not see the photographs as something final, but rather as a beginning, a starting point for new narratives. The past and the future are linked to a sensuous here and now in the meeting with the viewer.
Line Bøhmer Løkken (b. 1970, Vågå) lives and works in Oslo. She mainly works with photography and is thematically interested in investigating how we relate to and experience different places, through the architecture, people or objects that define them. She is educated at the University of Film and Photography, University of Gothenburg. She has published a number of artists’ books, the most recent of which are; Tigersprang og Svalehaleskjøt (Tiger Leap and Dovetail joint), Choreography with Potatoes and Flour and Wood Works. Løkken has had exhibitions i.a. at Kunsthall Oslo, Gallery F15, Fotogalleriet, Henie-Onstad Art Center and Galerie für zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig. She has done public art commissions for KORO at the Veterinary Institute, NMBU, Ås and at Hulda Garborg’s House, Stavanger. Together with Marte Aas, she runs the publishing house Multipress, which has published close to fifty photography books.