Galleri K is pleased to present her third solo exhibition with photographic works by the artist Mette Tronvoll. The gallery exhibition coincides with the artist’s mid-career retrospective entitled Mette Tronvoll – At Eye Level taking place at Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen (11 May - 12 September 2010), Landesgalerie Linz am Oberösterreichischen Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria (17 February – 15 May 2011), Haus am Waldsee, Berlin (24 June – 28 August 2011) and Brandts Museet for Fotokunst, Odense (September – November 2011). The museum exhibition was co-organized by Rogaland Kunstmuseum, Stavanger, where it took place from 3 December 2009 until 5 April 2010.
Mette Tronvoll primarily works within the medium of photography, through which she portrays people and their environments in a direct and non-artificial manner. Significantly, Tronvoll captures her subject matter devoid of sentimentality and any form of voyeurism, whether the subject portrayed comes from her personal environment or from a culture completely different to her own. By means of building up a relationship with her subject matter first, Tronvoll manages to put herself on an equal level with the subject and consequently places the viewer in the exhibition space on that same level of communication and respect.
In the Goto Fukue series from 2008, Tronvoll portrayed elderly Japanese women collecting algae on an island called Fukue, located in the Goto archipelago of Kyushu, Japan. For this series Tronvoll kept returning to the same place on Fukue to meet women engaged in a daily activity, which helps them to earn their living. Comparable to Tronvoll’s earlier series Mongolia from 2004 or Isortoq Unartoq from 1999, it was the silent and/or steady communication that allowed Tronvoll to take the seaweed pickers’ portraits and picture them in their everyday working environment. And also in the Goto Fukue series Tronvoll not only portrayed the people in their everyday environment, but photographed those landscapes, which shape the lives of the people portrayed: the partly flooded, rocky island shores of Fukue.
In the series Rena 006 from 2006 Tronvoll photographed elite soldiers belonging to a Norwegian Armed Forces Special Command Unit at the military camp Rena Leir. Although access to this camp is usually restricted, Tronvoll was given special permission to photograph the soldiers. Significantly, these portraits reveal neither the soldiers’ faces nor other parts of their bodies. None of the men wear personal clothing that could express individuality. They could thus stand in stark contrast to the Goto Fukue series. But here it is the combat uniform that characterises their personality. The combat gear functions as an extension of their own bodies to replace individual facial expression and posture. It is this expression of individuality, which links Goto Fukue and Rena 006 to each other, however distinct they appear to be.
Stephanie von Spreter
