All the Whisperings of the World – with artisits Siri Ekker Svendsen, Emanuel Cederqvist, Nicolai Howalt and Ori Gersht

The group exhibition All the Whisperings of the World features four artists who each in their own way address the relationship between nature and human identity, how we explain ourselves through nature, how we seek refuge in it, and how we relate to what is about to disappear before us.

Inspired by her own deadly allergy to Brazil nuts and the accelerating loss of nature worldwide, Oslo-based Siri Ekker Svendsen explores the connections between the complexity of nature and the vulnerability of the body in the seriesAll the Whisperings of the World, from which this exhibition lends its title. Ekker Svendsen employs various tools in her artistic work: analogue and digital photography, mobile phones, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, magnifying glasses, and electronic micro-scanning, each functioning as different pairs of eyes representing different perspectives on reality. The exhibited images are an excerpt from the book with the same title, which was published in 2022 by Multipress.

The spruce tree “Gamla Tjikko” stands in a deserted landscape on a mountainside in Dalarna, Sweden, and is considered the oldest tree in the world with its impressive 9,600 years. A single photographic negative of this exceptional spruce has become 97 unique images in Danish artist Nicolai Howalts latest installation, Old Tjikko, collectively forming a portrait series of one of the world’s oldest organisms. Howalt’s practice encompasses documentary photography, installation, and conceptual art, often rooted in chemical processes, science, and artistic exploration.

Emanuel Cederqvists artistic practice explores how we interpret and read the forms of the landscape in the light of our own memories, experiences and our common cultural heritage. In his series Observatören he presents photographs of an abandoned weather station in Sarek National Park, which was inhabited by two weather observers between 1914 and 1918 until one of them disappeared in a snowstorm. The mystery remained unsolved, and the weather station remained untouched until Cederqvist’s photographic documentation over a century later. Cederqvist lives and works as an artist and photographer in Gothenburg and is a member of the artist collective Blackbook Publications.

Throughout Ori Gershts career, his work has been concerned with the relationship between history, memory, and landscape. In the video work The Forest, he traces his wife’s family history to the prehistoric forest around Kosiv in Ukraine, where the camera glides through a wooded landscape as one tree after another begins to fall to the ground. Gersht finds not only a backdrop in this landscape of trees and hills, but also a player: a participant in personal, national, global, and geological history. Gersht was born in Israel in 1967 but has lived in London for over 30 years.