Anne-Karin Furunes: Illuminating Nordic Archives

Photographs preserve the past by recording the present, but it is our memories that hold the particulars of personality and the experience of events. Artist Anne-Karin Furunes combs Nordic libraries and archives—the Special Collections of the University Library of Bergen, Carolina Rediviva (Library) at Uppsala University, and the Norwegian Polar Institute, among others—for documentary evidence of people and places largely forgotten. From this raw material she creates works that evoke the texture and richness of memory.

Furunes reproduces the images captured in her source photographs by perforating the canvas repeatedly in an imitation of halftone printing, using handheld hole-punching tools to vary the size and spacing of each hole. In earlier work, her primed, monochromatic canvases resemble black-and-white photographic prints. Later, Furunes began incorporating painted dots of cyan, magenta, and yellow—the three colors most commonly used in color printing processes—to create full-color images. These paintings are singular works of art, but are made using methods inspired by the reproducibility of prints.

"Anne-Karin Furunes: Illuminating Nordic Archives" aims to immerse the viewer in the archives Furunes draws upon while highlighting the complexity of memory. The large scale of Furunes’s paintings, informed by her early training as an architect, is central to this project: the artist works on a monumental scale to shape the spatial experience of her pictures. Natural and artificial light penetrate Furunes’s porous canvases and illuminate the image from behind, an effect evocative of a lightbox—an important viewing device used in photographic studios and archives. For this exhibition, the Museum team created lightboxes to further this visual allusion with two paintings from the “Of Faces (Portraits of Archive Pictures)” series.

The exhibition "Anne-Karin Furunes: Illuminating Nordic Archives" brings concealed history to light, embedding memories in our consciousness and forcing us to confront both our past and our present.