Cutting away
My ambience is about the relation between utopism and determination, between individuals and the collective, or put more simply; about Living. This overwhelming subject, with distinct political and religious overtones, is so firmly earthed by Bodil Furu, that it is turned into good art. This is not an easy thing to pull off.
All the productions of Bodil Furu have a free-spirited and at the same time respectful approach to the aspects of reality she is working on. Maybe this is why her interview objects appear with such clarity and potency. You can see it in 6 x 17 (2004), where six 17-year olds struggle with the balance between being themselves and being like everyone else. Or in Kabul Ping Pong (2004) ,
an experimental documentary from Afghanistan, where the single voices are woven together to form a crucial question: How is democracy possible if no trust exists between individuals?
Formally My Ambience gives proof of Furu´s advanced technical skills. Handling space and time in a dual channel projection is very challenging, but through this Furu succeeds in avoiding the most common clichés of the portrait documentary genre, opening up for a more complex orchestration of the visual form. The double image, the soundtrack and the excellent editing, encloses the interview objects in a rhythm, which offers justice to the ambiguity of their appearance and statements. The images are not perceived as existing side by side – to use Fatima Suslus precise description of how Norwegians live their lives – but together as one.
In western art there is an attraction towards new aesthetics. The quest for a unique and undiscovered formal language has been an important force in modern art. In this race for individual expressions, the common issues and sides of reality are less interesting. Instead reality is isolated, quoted, exaggerated, staged or turned into a self-critical form. Furu counters by showing what others discard; the banal, the common and the politically correct. She lets the well-spoken Fatima Suslu puncture our expectations and prejudice related to immigrants and fundamentalism. She dwells on insecurity and clumsiness, dull pauses as well as difficult questions about life, death and responsibility.
The artist role is about selection, says an ageing John Baldessari in an interview with Doug Aitken.
A main feature of Bodil Furu´s art practise is her ability to cut away, and thereby liberate herself from, esthetical conventions and conceptions of what art must be like.
Marit Paasche
1 Kabul Ping Pong was made in collaboration with Beate Petersen.
2 See the text “Upside down, boy you turn me. Inside out. Round and round.” by the Norwegian artist Beathe C. Rønning.
3 Broken Screen – Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative, Doug Aitken, D.A.P., 2006.
BODIL FURU
