Ane Graff
Your Groundwater
2 February–28 April 2013
SKMU Sørlandets Kunstmuseum
Skippergata 24B
Kristiansand, Norway
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11–5pm,
Sunday 12–4pm
T + 47 38 07 49 00
post [at] skmu.no
Ane Graff has come to SKMU with an ambitious exhibition, one that takes her artistic practice a significant step further. A new direction can be traced in this darker series of works dealing with the theme of radical loss. Her customary themes—structures in nature explored in minute detail, processes of decomposition and the unrelenting disintegration and final disappearance of something through a process of decay—gained a personal dimension in 2012 due to a death in the family.
Your Groundwater is thus a new direction but also a completely logical continuation of her artistic practice to date: as before, it involves a patient process of dissolving content and emptying out meaning. Graff scrutinizes how a material or organism is constructed, then how it undergoes a transition process that results in a state of decay and dissolution. But now she draws physical humanity into the cycle of such material, adding an emotional dimension.
In the exhibition title Your Groundwater, Graff combines the personal pronouns you/your with a natural material. This she has also done in You Are My Marble, a recent, smaller show of related works on show at Vigeland Museum in Oslo. By addressing to a material as if it were another (specific) individual, she once again destabilises the distinction between human and non-human phenomena.
Groundwater, for Graff, is a metaphor for slow destruction. When water droplets burst their way through, the moisture can quietly change and destroy its surface and structure. There is something radically uncontrollable about solid matter that becomes—or leaks—fluid. The liquid state can be threatening, for when the contours of something become fluid, what is there to keep this something in place and contain the contents? Without external boundaries, what is it that defines you—Graff’s you—as an individual? What holds you together?
(From a catalogue essay by Johanne Nordby Wernø)
Ane Graff was born in 1974 in the northern Norwegian town of Bodø. Now she divides her time between Oslo and Amsterdam. She graduated from Vestlandets Kunstakademi in Bergen in 2004 and has since participated in many exhibitions at home and abroad.
