The Guest Studio at Vestfossen Kunstlaboratoriet is a resource that is offered to professional artists who might profit from a sustained period of work at Vestfossen. The studio is part of Arena Vestfossen, a studio collective that is housed in the same building as VKL. One of the purposes of the Guest Studio is to contribute to an exchange of artistic ideas among both Norwegian and foreign artists. Hilde Honerud was guest artist at the studio in August 2016.

 

Hilde Honerud (b. 1977) lives and works in Kongsberg. She has her education from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, leaving with a master’s degree in Fine Art in 2010, and went on to take a bachelor’s degree in Photography, Film and Imaging at Napier University, Edinburgh. Honerud has received several awards and stipends, and has an impressive sequence of solo and group shows behind her both in Norway and abroad.

 

From the exhibition It's Not Easy to Make History, 2016. Photo: Hilde Honerud

 

«It´s not easy to make history»
Hilde Honerud

 

It is a fundamental human problem that one is systematically limited in one’s possibility to project oneself as one sees oneself. This is especially the case for refugees at an asylum reception centre. They have lost the positions and the references that conveyed their identity. Many have lived in transit reception centres for many months. They’re just waiting. For interviews, documents, and transit to a new place where they will await further answers. Waiting overshadows everything. It is a weighty mental challenge to go through.

 

“It’s not easy to make history” consists of a series of portraits of people who have lived at the Raumyr Transit Reception Centre in Kongsberg, as well as a series of sculptures. The portraits are the result of lengthy interviews and conversations. During the spring I was at the centre pretty much every day.

 

All of the images have been taken in a studio I set up at the reception centre. The neutral grey background reveals nothing about locality, it is a studio that might have been anywhere at any time. All the photographs have been taken with flash and with long shutter speeds, hence the blurring.

 

 

Photo: Honerud

 

I don’t believe in documentary portraiture. To me it seems more that I am intervening in the reality of the people I photograph. It is in the meeting between them and me that I can create something honest, and where the border runs between fiction and documentary will always be unclear. At the same time, my work is informed by my interest in the single person as an expression of a group, or an event, or phenomenon – and this means that the image is not primarily a portrait of an individual, but rather of something that members of a group have in common. In this way, a portrait can be a portal to something universal.

 

I work with the photograph as an object. For me, the two-dimensional aspect of a photograph is not a problem, I enjoy its challenge, both in how I approach the making of the image and in how I present it. 

 

Photo: Honerud

 

Photo: Honerud

 

Photo: Honerud

 

From the exhibition It's Not Easy to Make History, 2016. Photo: Hilde Honerud

 

From the exhibition It's Not Easy to Make History, 2016. Photo: Hilde Honerud

 

From the exhibition It's Not Easy to Make History, 2016. Photo: Hilde Honerud