Even before entering Sjur Eide Aas‘ exhibition Old Dog Learning New Tricks, ones gaze is drawn to two large-scale paintings. From a distance, they appear to depict pastel landscapes or geological formations. But as one comes closer, the view into the supposed distance is obscured and a doorway emerges. At the latest when one notices a doorbell sign, one realizes to stand in front of a roughly plastered residential building façade. The impression is finally completed by a sidewalk, an orphaned tennis ball, shimmering insects, plant fragments and a suspicious liquid forming a yellow trickle at the base of a concrete pillar.
Suddenly, the viewer’s senses become attuned to objects and scenarios rarely expected in an exhibition space, yet familiar from every day walks through the urban landscape. A black awning, designed to protect storefronts and cafés from direct sunlight, becomes a polygon in the exhibition: a purely geometric object that has shed its original function and now offers itself up for pure contemplation.
This transformation from functional to aesthetic object is characteristic of Sjur Eide Aas’ work. It’s particularly evident in the cast-iron bollard on display – a familiar figure that, in its countless incarnations, flanks the city streets in neat military formation..
Isolated in the exhibition space, against the white of the walls, it takes on the presence of a memorial to a forgotten event – a reference to something that once was and no longer is. Around its base, one can discover seashells, snails and fossilized remains of life forms that populated the world long before humans. The cobblestone pavement has been blasted, individual stones are missing or scattered around the bollard. It seems as if the sandy Berlin soil is oozing out from between the stones and shells. Inevitably, the expression “Under the pavement lies the beach” comes to mind – a slogan from the 1970s Sponti movement, alluding to the fact that cobblestones were popular projectiles in street fights with representatives of the state executive for the “Kreuzberg bohemia”.
The Polaroid photographs in the exhibition were taken during the artist’s walks through Kreuzberg neighborhoods. They refer to the actual objects and situations on which Sjur Eide Aas modeled his ensembles. Despite the randomness introduced by the casual nature of strolling, the photos appear like clues or pieces of evidence from a narrative or a crime scene. One feels compelled to line them up or rearrange them in order to reconstruct a route, a story or a some kind of logic. But the attempt would be in vain.
Sjur Eide Aas does not offer a reproduction of an event to the visitors of his exhibition. His work rejects all encyclopaedic, lexical and historical methods of systematization and recognition. Instead, the entropic dynamic of a natural genesis seems to be the creative maxim. Order and logic are revealed as paradoxes. In Old Dog Learning New Tricks the artist undertakes a deep geological core drilling through our idea of Kreuzberg’s urban history. Political upheavals, layers of rock and shell limestone, random natural phenomena: all this is inscribed in the beach beneath the pavement and has shaped our environment and perception over decades, centuries, and millenia.
The artist draws no clear line between political upheavals (street battles), banal everyday acts (a puddle of urine) and natural sedimentation processes (fossils). Everything leaves ist makr on the city, creating different traces–some more visible than others. In his work, Sjur Eide Aas questions how humans perceive and navigate spatial and urban conditions, and integrates experiential potentials into various architectural structures. In doing so, he expands a disciplinary understanding of the city to include the sensual and geological nature of urban space. In his exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, the physical and sensory reality of a place merges with ist memories and residues, forming a surreal topography.
