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TARJE EIKANGER GULLAKSEN
UNFINISHED SYMPHONY
06.03. - 10.04.2010
Opening: Friday, 5 March 2010, 6 – 9 pm
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click the picture to launch gallery
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Krome Gallery presents its first exhibition with the Norwegian artist Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen, “Unfinished Symphony”. The central piece of the same title is a filmic portrait about the laboratory of the Austrian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957).
For the filmset, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen circumstantially reconstructed William Reich’s laboratory as it might have looked in 1956. In the same year, Reich was accused of being a quack and sentenced to destroy all remaining examples of his most controversial invention, the so-called orgone accumulator, along with all of his related writings.1 In his son Peter Reich’s autobiography, which provided Gullaksen with his main source of information, the author describes having to participate in the destruction of his father’s work as absolutely forma-tive in his childhood, when he was just 12 years old.1
That eradication not only represents a turning point in the life of both Wilhelm and Peter Reich, but also stands for the culmination of Peter Reich’s childhood conflict – of being torn between the norms of social reality and the unconven-tional cosmos of his father’s inventions.
"Like the sky and the trees, these dreams were pressed together, but I could only see one at a time; enough to know that some other life ran parallel to this one but it was not here. Two stories ran together and mingled their reality… I realized the two realities were not parallel at all, but were aimed to meet at some point in the future." (Peter Reich) 2
In “Unfinished Symphony” the camera cautiously guides the viewer through
an investigation of the deserted laboratory, closely focusing in on the different objects, thus creating a fragmented view of the whole space. The camera’s slow-motion gives the images a distant and meditative quality that undermines any idea of a subjective view.
"The twilight atmosphere in the room underlines an inbetween state and points to a place where time has turned into space. Here thought’s trans-gressive abilities are frozen within the limits of the real and a melancholy gone astray in time succeeds to appropriate its own object, only to affirm a loss lurking in the shadow of potentiality." (Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen)
Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen was born 1973 in Norway and moved to Berlin after his studies in fine art and art theory at The Royal Danish Art Academy, Copenhagen in 2005. He has had solo shows and took part in group shows in Copenhagen, Oslo, Paris and Berlin.
Pursuing an investigative research-based approach, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen works in a varying range of media such as text, installation, sculpture and draw-ing. “Unfinished Symphony” is his first filmic work, and had its world premiere at Artspeak in Vancouver last year, and will be part of Gullaksen’s upcoming solo show at UKS (The Young Artists Society), Oslo this year.
Currently, Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen is working on a new film project he will be realizing during a working grant in China.
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1 After having 'discovered' the orgone energy in 1940, a universal bioenergetic force, Wilhelm Reich created the accumulator in order to use the orgone energy for curing diseases, particularly cancer. The accumulator was a box constructed of layers of or-ganic and metallic material designed to attract, increase and draw the orgone energy in towards the patient inside. Refusing to stop his investigations on and therapeutic practice with orgone energy Wilhelm Reich was detained in 1957.
2 Peter Reich. A Book of Dreams. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1974