Hanni Kamaly
and yet what remains of former times
—
Hanni Kamaly works mainly with sculpture, video and performance. Kamaly’s practice examines how notions of the Other are generated and maintained through language, images and historical structures. Based on archival material and historical sources, Kamaly operates in a field where sculpture, text and the body intersect, and where questions of power, representation and memory are central.
The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall marks Kamaly’s first solo exhibition in Norway. The exhibition’s title, ‘and yet what remains of former times’, is drawn from a poem by Aimé Césaire, and takes as its point of departure a specific artistic dialogue and a close, personal collaboration earlier in Kamaly’s career. Elements from this working method are recreated here in a new context.
The exhibition examines the portrait. Not as a genre, but as a fundamental human impulse: the need to create images of others. With references to photography as a historical and colonial tool, Kamaly explores how such forms of representation both produce and limit an understanding of the human.
However, none of the works are portraits in the traditional sense. Rather, they point to the absence of what they ostensibly attempt to represent: hints of the body and its presence without actually depicting it, as a form of perceptual reflex where you project and read the figurative into materials and structures, even when it is not present.
Alongside a video work, the exhibition includes sculptures composed of steel and industrial elements, assembled in articulated, often fragile forms. The works can be read as parts of a fragmented monument, where each element relates to the question of how life can—and cannot—be represented truthfully.
A red thread in Kamaly’s practice is an exploration of dehumanisation: how people are reduced to types, objects or categories. In this exhibition, such mechanisms emerge indirectly, through fragmentation and displacement, where the human does not appear as a given, but something that is constantly being negotiated.
Hanni Kamaly (b. 1988, Norway) lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. Kamaly’s work has been exhibited internationally at, among others, the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art #13, Malmö Konsthall, the Sharjah Biennial (15th edition), the São Paulo Art Biennial (34th edition), the Luleå Biennial, and Accelerator, Stockholm.
