6.
Like Power
Anders Reventlov Andreas Olesen
18.3. - 26.3. 2023
For the second exhibition within PROJECT 1-4, we, Anders Reventlov and Andreas Olesen, will be talking about power, a word which implies the ability to wield force, authority, and influence. But there is also the power to decide and act for oneself. Power and agency are two sides of the same coin. We might lust after power, but what most of us want is agency.
Regardless, let us not digress too much, we are here to talk about an exhibition of art. For there are other, more average ways of exercising power – which thus also relates to the arts –, three of which happen to be taking pictures, making drawings, and writing texts. All three can be aggressive or peaceful in their outset and all take agency.
As others have pointed out, the camera is a tool of power, the applier of context, the colonialist wet dream. It shoots, it captures, and it takes. Drawing(s) pertains to action(s): It’s primal and powerful in this way. It’s a tool of the mind; we draw before we can even write. Both are powerful.
Andreas Olesen aims to blend historical and contemporary ideas of what photography means to us, to create new meaning. He wants to talk about us, about what photography represents about us, and what photography represents about photography: It’s an evolving technology made in our image, and we are reflected in the material. He works primarily with analog photography, cultural artefacts, historical pictures, and with image making technology. He wonders a lot about where the medium meets the message.
Anders Reventlov works are generated around his ideas of writing as drawing and drawing as action. He works with this concept and continues an ongoing series of works that he understands as traces of actions. These traces are connected through writing and drawing actions, in a never-ending process. Referring to writing as action and thus writing as drawing. Reventlov insists on working with black on white, to remain close to the aesthetics of writing. Within a world that constantly presents us with colorful ‘noise’, demanding our attention, he continues this work in black and white.
For the exhibition Like Power, Anders Reventlov and Andreas Olesen have created an installation, made up of photographs, drawings and sculptures using the metaphor of power as the central and shared theme in connecting these.
