Lena Katrine Sokki (b. 1980) completed her master's degree in fine art at Trondheim Art Academy (KiT, NTNU) in 2013. She lives in Trondheim, from where she works both with her own art practice and more broadly within the art field. For the past ten years, the artist duo Lena Katrine & Heidi-Anett has been the central part of her art practice and together with fellow artist Heidi-Anett Haugen (b.1985) they have explored the symbiotic and parallel conditions of being two artists behind one artistic expression. As an artistic entity they have held a number of solo exhibitions in Norway and abroad, and participated in group exhibitions such as Høstutstillingen, Vestlandsutstillingen, Nordnorsken and Trøndelagsutstillingen. The duo's work is represented in, among other places, the collections of Trondheim Municipality and Haugesund Art Museum.

 

Lena Katrine Sokki (f. 1980) avsluttet sin mastergrad i billedkunst på Kunstakademiet i Trondheim (KiT, NTNU) 2013. Hun bor i Trondheim, hvorfra hun arbeider bredt innen kunstfeltet, både med egen kunstpraksis og kunstformidling. De siste ti årene har kunstnerduoen Lena Katrine & Heidi-Anett utgjort den sentrale delen av hennes kunstpraksis, en duo som har utforsket de symbiotiske og parallelle sidene ved å være to kunstnere med et felles kunstnerisk uttrykk. Sammen med den andre halvdelen av duoen, Heidi-Anett Haugen (f. 1985), har hun avholdt en rekke soloutstillinger i inn- og utland, samt deltatt på gruppeutstillinger som Høstutstillingen, Vestlandsutstillingen, Nordnorsken og Trøndelagsutstillingen. Duoens arbeid er representert blant annet i Trondheim Kommunes og Haugesund Kunstmuseums samlinger. 

 

Some Notes from Outside the Frame

 

How proximal, how intimate, how folded into everyday life can photography be while still maintaining the ambitions of serious art? These selections in the work of Lena Katrine and Heidi-Anett draw upon art historical categories such as `the nude`, `landscape`, `monument` and `still-life` in a re-thinking of the site and motif of portraiture. The nude in Sisters (Homage to Unknown Danish Female Artist) is actually two figures. The artist(s) pay homage to a found photograph, whose authorship they could not trace, and which was always unlikely to come to the attention of male-dominated art histories. This alternative nude is grainy, low-tech, shot in a toilet; it should, however, still be potentially worthy of consideration in the genre. Homaging (Gestures) I refuses the male gaze, and when it is permitted in Black, White, Green it is so far from the classical positioning and representation of the nude that one feels as much in the territory of organic sculpture as the human form.

 

The category of landscape is undermined, and its subject-matter broadened, in the series Landscape I, II and III. A landscape emerges out of a mound of house plants, a carefully stacked pile of books takes on geological weight, and a collaboration between two artists becomes a sculpture project - another kind of `scape`. Unknown Monument, showing beets held up as if in affirmation of the heroic work of women in a Soviet inspired social-realist monument, is not only parody, but also a comment on the ephemerality of the monument itself. Unknown Monument II is another kind of still-life, but, perhaps just as important, suggests a new kind of potential for what a monument, and photograph of a monument, can be.

 

These are all `studies`, only cleared of the clutter of portraiture; they have other stresses, different balance, alternative placement and focus. In terms of form, there are tensions between verticality and horizontality; compaction and extension; roundness and angularity; and smoothness and roughness. The `subject(s)` implicate or insinuate themselves into the environment from which they are inseparable.

Landscapes, monuments, (body) sculptures: we might be talking about grand or public art, but instead these are intimate portraits - indoors, on a small table or on the floor, in a corner – an everyday exotic. Even with these unusual subjects, though, there are new, alternative art histories in-the-making.

 

(Simon Harvey, Associate Professor at Trondheim Art Academy, NTNU)

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The works presented here are from the collaboration with Heidi-Anett Haugen.

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