Refraction of lightness - Fondazione Morra - Palazzo Spinelli di Tarsia

by Chiara Valci Mazzara

Accumulating, transforming,

creating photographic images and volumes,

materializing the action, I isolate the creative gesture as a moment fixed in time.

HENRIK STRÖMBERG

The Quartiere dell’Arte (Art District), program conceived by Fondazione Morra to foster a new awareness of contemporary art in the city of Naples, presents a new exhibition project created for Palazzo Spinelli Tarsia, home of Shōzō Shimamoto Foundation.

The space will host the show Refraction of lightness, displaying a site-specific installation of serigraphs and hand blown glass sculptures, volumes by the Swedish artist Henrik Strömberg.

The exhibition, curated by Chiara Valci Mazzara, (Berlin, Paris) and Loredana Troise, in collaboration with Fondazione Morra together with Laboratorio Avella Naples with Gianluigi Prencipe, is the result of the three-month residency of Henrik Strömberg.

In the historical spaces of Palazzo Tarsia, glass sculptures and serigraphs are presented as the two main areas of density of the installation, determining the core around which the presentation of further assembled elements, organized in an immersive landscape revolves.

The serigraphs are relocated as a uniqum: a large-scale work mirrors (refracts into) the new series of glass sculptures conceived and created on the occasion of the exhibition.

The work of Henrik Strömberg is the result of a creative process of investigation about form and content, volume and concept, multiplication and refraction of meaning.

Living and recovered materials such as paper, glass, burned newspapers and pigments contribute to the creation of works that allow the viewer to immerse in a landscape organised as a self-sufficient ecosystem that, by suggesting new forms, creates new contents. Where every element becomes part of a whole.

The assembled prints creating a new system of references relating to the meanings and aesthetics they originally had, are now enriched with additional semantics, while, at the same time, the glass volumes reflect the complexity of the creative gesture. In the glass works, a transformation and the alteration of content, occur simultaneously. 

Ultimately, the matter is shaped and transferred through different media, all the elements are commuting back and forth regularly concurring, and eventually, overlaying meanings. Nothing can be isolated, everything mutate as when volcanic magma erupts.

In the spaces dedicated to the master of the Gutai group, the Northern European artist approach the exhibition space through the system of references linked to the creative gesture. At the same time, the references to Surrealism, to the re-evaluation of the object-trouvee and the use of the form to act on the content are perceived as a characterizing elements of Strömberg's work.

In the printed pieces the roots of the past meanings, and -for the sculptural volumes- the references to biological forms are perceived diving into an alternate drift of perspective: Strömberg reduces the source to polarise the content at the very core of the image perception. He doesn’t settle down for clarity, rather he pursues the action of placing triggers to initiate a new existence of the subject. The clarity being left aside, it is consequential that the viewer is exposed to an unexpected outcome and to an ephemeral content.

While the installation of the volumes and the different components takes shape, a sub-ecosystem formed through the combination between seemingly disparate elements appears as a logical consequence. Photographic elements, negative cut outs, paper works and sculptural volumes are coexisting but their accumulation is not left to chance, rather to a multiplication of occasions. The various elements commit to deliver a wider perception of the different pieces, it’s like a dance where every single element concur to a higher harmony.

The sequence of reflections, the portions of images and the verticality of the installation take form as an immersive landscape through which the viewer is moving, absorbing the complexity of the elements, never redundant and always cohesive. There’s not a unique interpretation but rather a kaleidoscope given by the use of different media equally involved in the final result.

Refraction of lightness - Fondazione Morra - Palazzo Spinelli di Tarsia, Naples, Italy

by Loredana Troise

Henrik Strömberg's practice demands to move beyond.
First. We need to abandon abused mythologies, transgress stereotypes, violate consolidated icons. Learn to see otherwise. We need to outline landscapes that preserve a solemnity without patina and, at the same time, we need to engage in to alternative journeys towards different universes, apart from any utopian solace.
Other moves. Between belonging and absence of belonging, we need to leave the tracks, to derail within that coral reef that is the language. Relying on a sequence of movements of the body, of the gaze, of various intentional and reactive gestures; linger on the volumes and lighten the weight of the architectures, including frontal, lateral, total perspectives. By suggesting distances. And, through the spaces, investigating the micro porosity of the surfaces.
Refraction of lightness, as a site-specific installation, which is been conceived on the occasion of the three-months residency at Morra Foundation, combines to the technical-compositional expertise, a speculative exercise. The result is the one of a fusion between ideas, techniques and materials used to shape a thought: we find ourselves, undoubtedly, facing a journey on search of the stinging knots of the aesthetic relationship. A speech that transforms the voice into a sign, into a drawing, into a printed body of works, in the shadows of something that has to do with the light, with the scenery given by the re-assembling act , with pigments, with drawing and the layering of collages. 

Through the creation of a form, we gain access to new paths that take away their weight from things, and which sorrounds and bend the space, inviting the viewer to immerse themselves in a range of chemical and alchemical processes: what is it, really, art, if not an alchemical code? A territory of conquer and production to decant and distill things?

Able to cross over the usual disciplinary boundaries, Henrik Strömberg composes a setting in which, around extraordinary hand blown glass sculptures, precious serigraphs, created in collaboration with the laboratory of Vittorio Avella (Casa Morra), vibrate dialectically above the complexity of the creative gesture. And then photographs, negatives, burned newspapers, and materials that the artist selected with indefatigable attentiveness among the workshops populating our historical center.
 The compositions are perfectly symmetrical and, at the same time, are open, placed beyond constraints and dikes, revealing an intimate taxonomic attitude that is not given as a petrified structure, but as an intimate elaboration of consciousness.
It follows a narrative in progress that outlines a geography of connections between icons, an embodied meaning that coincides with an unmistakable metonymic linguistic-expressive interweaving: the content and the form, the inside and the outside, the signified and the signifier, the oscillation and the becoming, the obsolescence and the metamorphosis, are concurring to build a hyper-historical stronghold, in which Strömberg sets his personal, aesthetic and cultural path: open freely to the viewer, who becomes an actor of his own intimate landscape, of his silent abstractions, but also of wider and markedly random latitudes.
We are witnessing the migration of patterns in which the order of things and the space are redefined: first the artist outlines a space specific. Then, he leads us from one point to another, through different perspectives, multiplying the points of view, gradually spreading them over the different angles. Eventually, his pieces are transformed into a pivotal body that moves to touch the urban space outside, in a play of assonances and differences, interpenetrating the icon of Naples, to the extent of a re-evaluation of its symphony. The magic of this mis en scène is, indeed, consisting in making its different parts work perfectly as for a clockwork device, with the awareness, however, that it will always be impossible to cage it within rigid rules.

Vertical Matter - Dorothée Nilsson Gallery, Berlin

On the occasion of the exhibition Vertical Matter at Dorothée Nilsson Gallery, Henrik Strömberg presents a new body of work which merges the use of photography, sculptural volumes and re-evaluated materials.

The co-existence of these various media forms permits the production of different series. Sculptural pieces, photographs and collages are converged into a self sustainable biotope where each component becomes part of the whole.

The extension of Strömberg‘s practice, from the reconfiguration of pre-existing objects to the production of hand blown glass pieces, suggests the idea of a moment fixed: an action materialised from within.

While the photographs depict the ephemeral abstraction of objects and natural elements, the expanding volumes – the core of the sculptures- are shaped and multiplied through the use of glass grid structures and plaster moulds. Linked to the idea of cellular division/mitosis, the various components are kept as witnesses of this process. The matter of the volumes, vertical, and augmented by paper stacks, expands as a layered compost.

HENRIK STRÖMBERG AND THE COMPOST

On the occasion of Symbiopoiesis (with works by Diether Roth and Nam June Paik) Galerie Papillon, Paris

by Jens Soneryd

Henrik Strömberg is a collector. The floor, tables, and shelves in his studio in Berlin are filled by a manifold of objects of various kinds: corals, trophies, cobblestones, maple leaves, pieces of dry bread, lichens, cloths, blades of grass, metal chains ... Some things are arranged into assemblages and organized into idiosyncratic systems. Others are put aside in storage. 

He spends a lot of time to move his things around, to try out new combinations, and to rewrite the principles for his systems; they appear to always be in a state of flux. This is his way of exploring them–not to find out what they essentially are and to fix their identities, but rather to release their semantic diversity. He approaches his objects as if they could be or become anything–or nothing in the sense of a distinguishable something.  

As an artist, Henrik Strömberg does not oppose processes of mutation or decay. Rather, he supports them, and allows them to take part in his practice. They are important, since they let him lose hold of control. This makes him a peculiar kind of collector. After all, to collect is to remember, not to forget, it is to preserve and to save from ruin. The whole idea with collecting is to keep things intact, to offer a haven, where they forever can remain the way they are. 

The passion for collecting seems to increase in parallel to a heightened anxiety about an uncertain future. Menaced by a flood, Noah–the original collector–started to bring animals into his ark. Not surprisingly, the golden age of museums began with the birth of modernity and the disenchantment of the world. And now, as we’ve entered the unstable era of the Anthropocene–with global warming, and mass extinction of species–we’ve started to collect again, to save what’s left in our damaged world. In 2008, the Global Seed Vault opened in Svalbard, Norway–an earthquake resistant depository for the world’s most important crops.

Collections consist of objects and fragments that have departed the flourishing and decaying world, and been inscribed in an order designed to refuse every kind of change, in which they are petrified. The herbarium is the iconic collection. The pressed plant is not a plant anymore, but a sign for a certain species. The thriving and decaying plant belongs to the living soil; to its fungi, bacteria, and its worms. 

Just like the herbarium, every collection borders to the compost–a site of disappearances, transformation, and resurgence. The compost is also the site of Henrik Strömberg’s practice, and where this exhibition takes place. The compost, however, is never the creation of a single, autonomous individual. It is not formed through autopoiesis, but through symbiopoiesis. It is a collaborative project, whose outcome can never be fully anticipated. Thus, for Henrik Strömberg it is wholly logical to exhibit together with artists such as Nam June Paik and Dieter Roth, with whom he shares the interest in the assemblage and in topics such as technology, media and processes of growth and decay. In the exhibition Symbiopoiesis, the compost is explored as a creative and artistic strategy, but also as a straightforward way to relate to the world. 

The state of flux of the movable content – Henrik Strömberg in reference to Man Ray

 by Chiara Valci Mazzara

Henrik Strömberg’s work starts with the quest for a new signifier: interlacing sources, re-assembling and re-evaluating objects (trouvé) he acts on the form while changing the content.

The medium of photography and the system of connections between the represented subject and the final result is only the beginning of a journey.

By performing his usual ritual, opening and closing, the shutter reveals a new artifact in which new semantic cross-references appear to the eye. Strömberg initiates a thought, an idea, as a possible dialogue: by adding new allusions he questions the medium and challenges the content.

Within the process, the subject - outcome of a re-assemblage of elements or cut-outs - as a pivotal body, reflects different nuances of various signifiers, therefore contorting the habitual coordinates. The meanings are, then, acquiring new values through a drift and, as a result, the object is dislocated from within.

This leads to the perception of the viewer to be altered, prompting the pursuit of many graspable interpretations, each one equally possible.

It is impossible to calculate the result of the content's reconstruction, since it presents itself as the heritage of the objects’ past life, joined with their new manifestation - all given by the process to which Strömberg commits consistently.

Ultimately, his photographic works, as well as with his collages, are picturing, at the same time, the evolution and the outcome of an action, while other signifiers are now challenging the viewer to a new dialogue. The strength of the result appears in each piece, where receding to the new forms, the works are delivering a poetic yet sharp innuendo.

In Strömberg's pieces, the pictured subjects are not the only foreground protagonists, but also the different levels of space and depth, which are suggesting a wider interpretation and create a surreal landscape.

The evidence of the “re-assembled” object/s (trouvé/s) materializes as vibrant and forceful, subordinating to no obvious reference, placing the 'trigger' of an idea.

The evidence of Man Ray’s objets trouvés leans to the use and re-evaluation of everyday objects as the subjects of his photographic works. Natural or man-reassembled pieces, they are kept, bought or found thanks to their intrinsic value - with none or minimal alteration - therefore seen and celebrated by the artist.

The signifier being steady, the intervention consists in the action of choosing the object and relocating it as the protagonist of the photograph. Frequently the title of the work itself, as for Tête trouvée sous le lit,allows to recognise a move, a discovery, a choice taken by the artist. The process is, therefore, the act of choosing, to which the outcome of the depiction commits. While the original content persists, the vibration of the meaning is enhanced by the medium.

Furthermore, the final rendering acquires an additional system of references through the gelatin silver print, the chromogenic materials and the process, out of which the black and white photograph earns its strength.

Enigma II - which refers to The enigma of Isidore Ducasse assembled in New York in 1920 - is the evolution of a choice, the outcome of an action. Its roots can be found in Man Ray's Dada objects related to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades. Duchamp had, for instance, wrapped a sewing machine in an army blanket and tied it up with a string. As most of the pieces produced by Man Ray in the late 40's, the process was meant to produce an unusual artifact, subject to an open interpretation.

This photograph of what appears as a mysterious entity, relates to the surrealist vision of what lays beyond the curtain of a rational system of references.

The action is vivid in this work and the content is questioned. Hiding the object, the protagonist becomes the artifact produced by the addition of fabric and string.

Early works by Man Ray (e.g. the collage series Revolving Doors (1916-1917)) present themselves as the proof of the multifaceted oeuvre of the artist. He challenges an alternative perspective, given by the use of a two-dimensional rendering. Moreover, Man Ray explores the mechanical means of the creative process by assembling other figurative collages as, for instance, Dance (1915) which “showed what seem to be two mechanical-looking figures, evoking tailors' dummies, performing stiff-legged dance movements.”

Man Ray states: “The concern of a period of time often leads to the disappearance of material space. That is what the images in two dimensions shown here tend to prove; by a mutual action, they give birth to a series of events escaping from the control of all diversion. '

New York, 1916–17

The two artists connect on the level of creating by mutual action, enhancing the two-dimensionality by -as Strömberg- using the relicts of cut-out negatives and intuitively assembling them within the creative process in his collages and his Compost(ed) landscapes.

With the project The Compost, Strömberg refers to a wider angle, where the symbolic meaning is not graspable anymore by the acceptance of the role of the objects themselves.

The quest for an unexpected outcome, realized by overlapping layers of cut photographs, polaroids, negatives, photocopies and objects is vivid and encouraged by placing them together as a surreal watermark. Together with Jens Soneryd, the artist broadens the edges of the works. Working on written words, Soneryd pictures a beginning and and end, the inner content and a poetic response.

As for Lacan - quoted in The Compost Manifesto- the real concerns the need whereas the imaginary concerns the demand.

The symbolic, then, is all about desire. The question remains open. Interpretation awakens the dialogue between the two artists.

Thirdness (extract)

by Tamara Branovic 

The group exhibition thirdness brings together works by the artists Carsten Becker, Henrik Strömberg, Johannes Wald and Michaela Zimmer, as well as a performative literary piece by author and poet Jens Soneryd.

Conceptually, the exhibition deals with the possibilities of perception, drawing on American philosopher of semiotics Charles Sanders Peirce’s phenomenological categories. As the founder of semiotics, Peirce’s life work was dedicated to systems of signs, developing, among others, the triadically-constructed cenopythagorian categories of Firstness, Secondnes, and Thirdness. However, far from the classical approach between the designated (signified) and the designator (signifier) as terminologically established by a Jacques Lacan or Ferdinand de Saussure, the topic at hand here are paths of transmission which can only be perceived indirectly – something which is hidden behind the fixed categories; an open space bearing an idea, a thought, a condition, a movement, but which demands from the viewer more than the deciphering of a clearly communicated object. Thirdness as the simultaneously determinative, only possible and – critically – open connection constitutes the very lacuna located before and after the words “but” or “and”, from which a Before and After are expected. Lacking these meaningful pieces of information, connections emerge out of the individual’s sheer imagination, the unlocking of which is to be found in self-reflection (if at all).

Henrik Strömberg’s Compost project arranges already-existing objects taken from the socio-cultural context into a collage, forming a new visual pattern. By using the medium of photography, Strömberg approaches relics from nature and society and condenses them into new “fertile soil”. In the installation tell tale (2017) consisting of three wooden display cases, he inserts several objects – mostly depictions of coral, plants, ceramics, sculptures, as well as abstract refractions of light and form – into a filigreed collection of the human symbolic world with-each other, recounting a moment created out of different yet disconnected and more than anything oppositional events. The selection and positioning of the pictures and objects are the product of a sensitive structure of feeling, the accentuation of which serves as a guide. In this way, Strömberg combines photographic likenesses which could not be more contrary in their conditioned perceptions – fuel element spheres, for example, dialogue with a nearly full moon shining in the night. The two photographic works, by the trail 1& 2, complement the cabinet in their substantial and formal difference, reflecting the antithesis of decay and growth through their originally natural and graphically formulated quality. Each depicts the vegetational environment of a tropical rain forest, albeit in various stages of Being. Here as well, Peirce’s interpretive triptych can serve as a methodology.

"echoes in dust"

by Rasmus Kjelsrud

Yes, I am warm now,  

but my mind is clear and my vision sharp, as I remember the days without light.  

I was preparing for a dinner party, dressed not yet in white. It was almost noon again, I had 

waited for one hundred days. As the door bell ringed just on time, I knew this was my life.  

On the porch of my house I find him today, the priest of my dreams, the father I never had.  

I kept my linens in my only free hand, and he walked into the room and challenged me to dive 

into myself. 

Many trees have been cut down (I think he was a lumberjack), and many things have been said.  

Some things have been said many times, and I too am young in life.  

I may be a child of yours, I may be Gods own,  

but that nothing springs from nothing, is a truth I know not alone.  

I look him in the eyes and I ask “Is this where it is?”, somebody points to me, and says “It’s his”. 

Across the river I shout “What’s mine?” but I am too late, here it’s no longer noon. 

At noon Orpheus ferried across the Styx, to a land meant only for the Dead.  

Me, I am swimming here, but time was not on my side to be had.  

The water had risen above my shoulders now, but panic still not on my mind. All the varieties of 

experience in the world, yet death, this impossible divine. At least Orpheus didn’t have to 

balance laundry on his head. The Ancient Greeks had style. I closed the door and went before 

my mirror again, there I knew where I were. Here I see myself in full portrait, for a hundred days 

or more. I come back and I come back again too fixate in the glare, every time I see myself I’m 

not afraid because I know I’m here. 

“Artefacts” was the title of the book, but it was nothing but echoes in the dust. “Artefacts” was 

the book I read, starting first page as soon as night lost to dusk.  

But just like the sun dies away in the end, and leaves all in the dark.  

We too, must leave a day behind us, leave all artefacts without light. 

I, for one, cannot read, but I guess it’s many ways to do. My memories were of course 

photographs, and in some sense also my idea of unworn white linen, of thyme, of you. 

THE COMPOST

by Jens Soneryd

# 1. Under the birch tree, at the end of the garden: Covered with leaves, sticks, and branches. The compost needs air to breathe and daydream. We feed it with corals, feathers, failures, bones, useless memories, outworn names, old bread, vegetables, and stories, a manifold of stories.

# 2. The compost is breathing: Air from other planets, various pasts and futures. A smell of fresh, healthy soil–and a bit of a scent of ammonia. The compost is hungry. It’s always hungry. Hungry for change.

# 3. Jacques Lacan was right: Structures do walk the streets. In these days, they seem to be everywhere; patrolling the cities, guarding their borders, haunting our stories. The compost doesn’t go anywhere. It stays with the trouble (in Donna J. Haraway’s sense). It is busy producing fertile soil for old and new languages, imaginaries, and other habitats. 

# 4. The compost is not: A structure (it doesn’t care about differences); a brand (it has no strategy); a concept (at least not a well-defined one…and sometimes it smells); a collection (it has no borders, it doesn´t exclude anything or anyone); nostalgic (it has an appetite for the past, that is true, but it produces soil and continuations, not returns to lost homes); utopic (it’s based on waste and memories).  

# 5. The compost is: Process; metabolism; metamorphosis; a passage between the domesticated (geometrical) and the wild (spontaneous), between the actual and the possible; a temporary refuge; a place that speaks (or murmurs). 

# 6. The compost is not about: Keeping.

# 7. The compost is about: Letting go. 

# 8. Why do we need the compost: Because we think we know what we do. We don’t. 

What is a photograph?

Cedar Lewisohn

What is a photograph? Is it the explosion of magnesium as camera drenches its subject in artificial light? Is it the rays of light that flicker between the lens of the box that houses the technical mechanisms that go together to make up the actual camera, is it this light, as it hits the subjects surface? Or is a photograph simply a piece of paper to be stared at by tourists when they return home from their travels, not a record of memories, but a record of absence of the original event? A sign that reads "I was not here. I was busy taking this photograph." Now cameras are more commonly carried in mobile phones - are the users simply in a state of near constant erasure?
"The images have been interfered with. The negatives have been destroyed or scratched. Polaroids that have been painted over. Prints that have been copied and copied again. The interupted surfaces." Henrik Strömberg (HS)
Photography can be a joyful capturing of memories and times past but mainly its war journalism, millions and millions dead, and mainly photography is pornography, peering eyes, collaborating models baring their flesh to be captured and reproduced ad infinitum by the mechanical eye. And the most hardcore, fetishistic, obsessive, obscene and beautiful pornography of all, the advertisement, the billboard, the bus shelter poster. These are photography's true victory over the western world and any idea of the aesthetic. What Baudelaire say? He'd probably love it, Baudelaire would love the denigration. The flood, the tidal wave of accurate representation, every high street a universe of dreams, desires and choices, the constructed vernacular images are our shopping, even if we're not shopping.
"I can never fully accept the medium for what it is." HS
I used to take house tranquilizers to achieve that since of uncontrollable R.E.M and 5th dimension confusion, now I just walk down Lewisham high street and stare at the adverts.
"Colour can become a subject, so I tune it down. Without colour its easier to go beyond the subject and create narratives without a specific story to tell" HS
So, now we know, roughly, what a photograph is, let's think for a moment what type of person sets out to take a photograph. A collect manic, surely. As we have seen, with the advent of the camera phone, we are now all potentially members of this group, always armed to record "the real" world (If such a thing exists, to borrow a phrase), but here we all are now more technology and finer lens in our pockets than Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre could have dreamed of. Looking back now I regret.

The Incoherent Light

Darren Campion

The question of what photography is, its weird amalgam of potential uses and meanings, might appear at this point to be of largely academic concern. But this view both underestimates the medium (which is, in a way, never finished) and neglects the opportunity to pose questions that cannot be accessed in any other way. So if the work of Henrik Strömberg seems at first to be almost aggressively hermetic, its discontinuous assault on the “condition” of photography can equally be thought of as open-ended and productive, tracing those interstitial spaces that photography occupies, a collision between empirical and fictive states of knowledge. Strömberg demonstrates that meaning cannot be understood as an inherent function of the image - representation is not simply transference. Rather it is, by his account, an elliptical, discursive process, actively creating new realities.

What can we do with a camera?

Tor Billgren

First of all, we can document an occurrence: The collapse of the Campanile of S:t Mark in Venice; or the explosion of Hindenburg in Lakehurst, New Jersey 1937. Collapses and explosions do not exist, they can only be documented when they happen.
Secondly, we can document objects – existing things. A sculpture, a ship or a fig tree.
Ulf Linde, Sweden’s most brilliant art critic hates photography, because of its inability to represent reality. As an example he holds up a photo of two competing race-horses. They are actually equally fast, but in the photo only one of them looks fierce and full of energy. The other one looks like he is standing still. The split second of the camera favoured only one of the horses. Perhaps the following would favour the other one.
In the essay “Against Photography” Ulf Linde explains his reluctance towards the photo so ingeniously, that you nearly start to agree with him... Imagine that you are trying to identify an object from a photo where you can only see a tiny fragment of this object. When you don’t see what it is, everything is possible. A diagonal line can be the stem of a ship, a crack in a window or a shadow of a lamp post. Linde writes: – As soon as I identify the photographed object, the picture freezes. Nothing is possible. You realize that every square millimetre of the surface of the photo is determined. As soon as I see what a photo represents, a feeling of irrevocable loss is overwhelming me.
Standing before Henrik Strömberg’s Source series however, it is quite impossible to be struck by this feeling – simply because there is nothing that can be identified. The photographed objects do not exist. Neither before, nor after the photo session. Everything is still possible. Sometimes I think I see an African mask. Sometimes a microbe, sometimes the sewers of Vienna with Harry Lime just around the corner.
The photographed objects are abstract sculptures. Strömberg builds them out of cellophane, tin foil, wool, and other scraps, around strong lamps. Thus the light comes only from the inside of the sculpture. The frail material cannot stand the heat from the lamp and eventually the sculpture starts to burn. With his camera Strömberg catches it in the inevitable process of destruction. The photos are documentations of sculptures that aren’t objects, but occurrences.

Dark Light, Light Darkness

Fjodor Donderer

In the pictures of Henrik Strömberg one encounters the world, remote, removed, almost as if disappeared. Places become difficult to locate, plunged into darkness, dawn, dusk; wastelands, half empty rooms; left-overs, left-behinds. Slight traces of what one knows, emmerge from a tissue of light, colour, plane and space; deserted: the individual does not occur. The indiviual is the spectator.
Decoding these pictures is not simple. Although they are resonating with suggestion and anticipation, the enigmatic moment always remains, disallowing you to disengage. Once you begin to immerse yourself, you become pulled over to the other, the inner side, beyond the effigy. One is on one’s own. The world stands still. Time stands still.
The quality of Henrik Strömberg’s work constitutes itself in the austere composition, from which results this certain inward-looking nature, a deep and universal self-reflection. His view penetrates the invisible, seizes it and gives it a shape. A connection is created between the inside and the outside, the true essence of things and the mere sense of things. This becomes obvious in the Forest Series in particular.
Single trees or groups of trees emmerge from the one and the same of the forest, from the darkness, plunged into wisps of light. The decided and linger- ing gaze of the photographer reveals the singularity of the tree, makes it an individual, and therefore all trees. This gaze into the forest reveals its soul, and ultimately the soul of every thing, every place.
In Henrik Strömberg’s world such places can appear anywhere, anytime. There is no map for them. Only the willingness, the translucence of the momentum in which a window, a door opens to the other side. Once having arrived there, it is not the time of directly assessing, of merely depicting the things, it is a time of unprejudiced observation, of marvelling, ultimately of recognizing oneself within the things, recognizing oneself being part of everything.
Henrik Strömberg is a photographer, who does not mystify. No bluffs, no sensations. He neither paints us a picture of the romantic, picturesque idea of nature or civilisation, but a picture of the sublime, the unique, which can be found within things. He is a photographer, who photographs the nothing, and the everything.

7 Scenes

Silvia Battista

There is history, the big one, the one they tell us in school, the one chronologically ordered through a list of big events and big names, the one in newspapers, the one beating the rhythm of the collective life. And then there are the stories, the small ones, the ones that are impossible to count for, however many they are, the ones beyond any chronological sense of time, the ones about ordinary things, of the ordinary, but extraordinary events.
Sometimes it happens, even in this age of rational irrationality, that somebody is lucky enough to be totally out of rhythm. This somebody, loosing the chrono- logical way, reaches without knowing the place without names or dates where all the small things become extraordinary happenings and where the big history melts down to the wonderful complexity of small stories.
It is exactly thereto that Henrik Strömberg goes from time to time. Every object, person, little detail starts to whisper. The sense of time changes, night and day disappear in a unique game of light and darkness. The sense of gravity is definitely different, without that heavy sensation of being unable to fly, but at the same time he can walk and sit without floating around.
He walks for a minute or for years, visiting different cities or maybe just one, never tired, never bored, sometimes scared. He meets a lot of people or maybe no one. winter, autumn, spring and summer play simultaneously with colors and black and white. It is an orchestra of silent sounds in images.
Is it reality? Is it a dream? "It is just the perception of our infinite narration", whispers the woman sitting on the red sofa.
How many things do we not perceive? How many things have we lost in our obsessive alphabetic identification of reality. How many stories, how many impor- tant details are covered by history, the well known history of glory and misery, of winners and losers, of here and there, of me and you.
Do we care about all this?
Maybe we are too scared to be out of the indifferent march in the big events, to lose the trumpet of the generals who will decide the names and dates in books of future generations.
I thank with all myself the art that still has the power to unveil the mystery of life, to unveil the impossibility of reducing everything to codes, numbers and sterile classifications.
I thank Henrik Strömberg for having the courage to explore the world of lost stories and letting their whispers reach our senses again.