Stiftelsen Bjørka

The publication consists of portraits and texts of people who identify outside the gender binary. The participants in the project come from various parts of the world but share many of the same experiences

New book from Rebecca Jafari: Joonam is an artist book with collage, text and photography. A personal story about a reconnection back to my iranian roots, family and ancestors. A hope was to find a way back home, through looking at memory, loss and love. The work became about revealing these layers.

After an earthquake in 1968 left Gibellina buried under rubble, architects and postmodern artists rebuilt it from scratch. Alexander Rosenkranz went to stay in this new city to present it from a perspective that is as experimental as the site’s urban planning. As he wandered around it, at all times of the day, he explored various methods for taking photographs to vary the possible interpretations. Back in his studio, he photocopied the pictures he had taken and rearranged the printouts following strict protocols. In renewing the genre of architectural photography, Gibellina Model Studies questions the complete reconstruction of a city that has now become an artistic urban model.

Siri Ekker Svendsen’s All the Whisperings of the World is a photo book examining the visual connections between nature’s vulnerability and the effects of an allergic shock to the body. To accomplish this, the artist takes us on a journey to contemporary rainforest areas in South America. The locus of this process is the Brazil nut.

The book weaves macro and micro perspectives with Svendsen’s classic black and white photographs, revealing the human body within a diverse ecosystem of complex interdependency. Images via microscope — body cells that have been destroyed due to allergic reactions — lead to images from scientific research on the body, flora, and fauna. A fragile connection is visualized, creating space to contemplate, fear, and grieve — All the Whisperings of the World is an elegiac yearning for the loss of diversity in nature, which we see is also our own habitat.

Svendsen’s project raises essential questions for a species learning in real-time about its irrefutable interconnectedness with the planet. We ask questions that once appeared distinct from the human experience — how do different plants in nature stand in a mutual dependence with each other? — as we spiral to the heart of the project. Examining the impact of flora on the body, we inevitably ask: To what extent is the human body included in this ecology of interdependence?

Interventions is a photobook by Adrian Bugge presenting 57 images of human intervention in Norwegian nature. Bugge has been taking photographs for fifteen years, from Kirkenes in the far north to Sokndal in the south. Along the way he has stumbled across interventions on a magnitude of which many in Norway are unaware and he shows how man has become a geological force. The book contains a foreword by Bugge with an account of the background to the project, and a research-oriented text by geologist Henrik H. Svensen, who addresses the consequences of these interventions.

New book fro Katja Høst: Omroert, commissioned by LANDART Gjerdrum, is a photo-based book project with the re-establishment of the landslide pit after the catastrophic mudslide in Gjerdrum as the pivotal point. The book offers an artistic and text-based reflection on the mutual influence and adaptation of nature and humans, as well as processes and goals related to the way forward after traumatic events. Central to the book is the municipality's choice to retain a small piece of ravine forest that came with the landslide and has now established itself on new ground. Some perceive this little forest as a painful wound, while others see it as an important time witness. By highlighting the ravine forest as a naturally created memorial, the book address the practice of memorial sites and memorials.