A short background on my work
For several years, I have worked with artistic projects concerning the problems that arise in the meeting of art, science and ethics.A colleague and I did, i.e., an artistic collaboration that we called«Norwegian folk types», which we showed in many venues in Norway. We looked closely at the scientific research that the Norwegian anthropologist Halfdan Bryn did during his extensive travels in Norway in the 1920s. He took measurements for a Head Index of a broad selection of the Norwegian population, thereby drawing his conclusions on the origins of the Norwegian people and of the racial differences between the different parts of the country and the folk types.
By reworking this material, and the presentation of it as an artinstallation, we wished to focus on questions concerning the historical premises of national identity and of the scientific definiton of the concept of race, at the same time shedding light on contemporary currents in today’s society.
I have also taken a closer look on the research done by the Norwegian racial hygienist Dr. Jon Alfred Mjøen at Vinderen Biological Laboratory in the 1930s. I also sought out several archives in Germany and France, where I gathered documentary photographic material from the medical experiments executed on humans by German doctors during the Second World War. Some of this material was also used as a basis for a series of paintings in black-and white tones, which I exhibited in Bergen Kunsthall and Galleri LNM in Oslo.
During a study trip to Paris, I met the known Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeldt, a meeting which had a great impact on my art. Along with her husband Serge Klarsfeldt, she tracked down the Nazi criminal Klaus Barbie, and got him expedited from Argentina to France in 1984, where he was tried in court and condemned for crimes agains humanity.
This work also inspired my interest in the esthetics of fascism, in particular within film and painting, and how this esthetic was used as propaganda for fascist/stalinist regimes. The German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s films have also been important to me – films that are propaganda, but also art.
This gave me a greater awareness of the phenomenon of fascism.
My works today have become centered on a set of motifs where I work with painting, photography, text and video, presented as a sort of installation where art, science and ethics, or rather the absensce of ethics, meet each other and with a perspective that also shed light into our contemporary. It´s a critique of the human longing for purity, a longing that has lead to widespread genocide. This Utopian Longing for purity has occupied my thoughts and work for many years. The reading of «Modernity and the Holocaust» has been very important for the development of my current artproject «Visions of purity»
I work, apart from painting, photographs and texts, also with video works circling the same theme. I have previously made a video (see attached video) which takes as point of departure texts based on the German writer and war hero Ernst Jünger’s diary notes from the 1930s until the 1950s, which I have called
"War Diary – Inspired by Ernst Jünger". It has been showed in Cinamateket in Oslo, and a German version has been shown in Berlin.
Frithjof Hoel
