“Storm of Steel” BO - Billedkunstnerne i Oslo, 2023
I work with art installations that explore our contemporary society by illuminating the darkness within societal structures and the human psyche. In this visual world, history, myths, and literature play a crucial role. The installation "Storm of Steel" will create an allegorical representation of our own conflicted time and shed light on the dark forces embedded in history that form the foundations of our society. A darkness that, if we introspect, can be found hidden deep within most of us. Therefore, all works have a "Janus face" where everything can mean something other than what is immediately apparent.
“War Diary”(part two), Arvika Art Hall, 2020
The inspiration for the artwork WAR DIARY is to be found in the diaries of German writer, philosopher and entomologist Ernst Jünger, especially his first novel In Stahlgewittern, based on his experiences as a front soldier in 1WW. Here he writes about the horror of war, but also about heroism and the human effort to maintain dignity in a world that has gone crazy.
“War Diary”(part one), Kunstbanken Art Hall, 2019
The inspiration for the artwork WAR DIARY is to be found in the diaries of German writer, philosopher and entomologist Ernst Jünger, especially his first novel In Stahlgewittern, based on his experiences as a front soldier in 1WW. Here he writes about the horror of war, but also about heroism and the human effort to maintain dignity in a world that has gone crazy.
In his writings there is a strong desire to understand reality in a metaphysical sense. Jünger saw small events in large perspectives, and considered life and death to be the true meaning behind everything. The unique metaphors used by Jünger have led to a wide range of interpretations. The installation WAR DIARY make use of those metaphors and reflects our own conflict-filled contemporary through an interaction between drawing, text, painting and video.
The drawings are from a series of portraits of young men”Men with broken faces”,who have had their faces destroyed in the steel storms of war. The painting Combat scene (180 x 240 cm) shows a battle scene with the faceless participants of war. The installation also shows some smaller painting with the same theme. On the wall, between the windows, are text from the diaries.
I also use several show cases á 60 x 200 cm. Under the glass plates there are reproductions from the Art history as paintings and grafic prints from the battlefields, books and texts from diaries, drawings, artifacts, photos, note sheets, butterflies, beetles and so on.
“A Road to Perdition”, Inter Cultural Museum IKM, Oslo 2017
With the exhibition A Road to Perdition artist Frithjof Hoel addresses a dark side of the Norwegian history, namely the rise of Social Darwinism and the treatment of cultural minorities in the pre-World War II era.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, there was a common belief that the Romani were culturally subordinate and genetically degenerate in ways that could harm the Norwegian people and country. The government sought to eradicate the Romani culture through the implementation of different laws. The exhibition points to ethical issues and the consequences of this ideology and politics to the Romani people, and to the disturbing fact that the government could use science to legitimize its racist policies. Social Darwinism influenced the western way of thinking from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth-century. Principles from Darwin’s evolutional theory of natural selection and the ‘survival of the fittest’ were adopted from biology and applied to society and culture. Furthermore, the scientists and politicians of the times saw it as their task to help nature along, and accelerate the process of evolution through conscious rather than natural selection. The exhibition shows how Norwegian politicians and other influential members of society were coined by the ideologies of the time. However, by implementing Social Darwinism in its politics, the Norwegian government sanctioned racism and racial hygiene, thereby contributing to its longevity and further development.
The busts were made by the swedish anatomist and anthropologist Gaston Backman. They were made as plaster casts of living models, who were recruited among the patients at Säters hospital in Dalarna, Sweden. The busts were part of an itinerary exhibition curated by the Swedish race biologist Herman Lundborg in 1919. They were made to demonstrate the anatomical characteristics of various types of people in the Swedish population, hence classified according to the shape of the skull etc. The busts are part of the collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm. Here they have been hidden away in a dusty magazine for almost 100 years. The historical photos and publications originate from the collection of the Institute of Racial Biology in Uppsala. This was the first state-sponsored institute devoted to racial biology in the world, and an important influence to the development of the Nazi´s racial jurisdiction in Germany.
“1814 Revisited- the past is still present”, Mago A, Eidsvoll 2014
In connection with the Norwegian Constitution anniversary, I and my colleague Rustan Andersson, was invited to participate with a project in the exhibition ”1814 Revisited- the past is still present” in Mago A,Eidsvoll.
Through contemporary art, we made some reflections about the Constitution and the importance it has played in the development of Norway as a nation.
Our project was about a dark and forgotten side of the Norwegian history, the story of the Romani people and the Tater mission. The Tater mission was a private, Christian philanthropic organization that received support from the Parlament to establish a number of orphanages and labor colonies for the Romani people and their children. The aim was to eradicate the Romani culture through the implementation of different laws. The most effective way, however, was to take the children away from the parents and placing them in orphanages. Behind this behavior lay racial hygienic ideas, which was very common in the late 19th and early 20th century. We looked at the Eilert Sundt orphanage. It was a Tater orphanage I was familiar with from my childhood. It was next door to my grandparents home in Eidsvoll. I played a lot with the children and many became my friends.
Here I got a location and person-related project with local ties which we called ”The Mission”.
“Visions of Purity”, Gallery Sverdrup, 2010
The installation "Visions of Purity" was shown in Gallery Sverdrup, University of Oslo. Here I used photo, text quotes, wall drawings, painting and video. The exhibition showed how important the physical anthropology was for the development of eugenics. It was also a commentary to man's eternal yearning for "purity": racial purity, religious purity, ethnic purity, political revolutionary purity. This utopian vision for purity has occupied my thoughts and work for many years, because from great ideas and great ideologies, much cruelty and terror may also come forth.
“Norwegian Racial Characters”, The Holocaust Center, Oslo 2009
The project “Norwegian folk types” is a collaborative project between Frithjof Hoel and Rustan Andersson. It takes as a point of departure scientific research material from the period between the two World Wars by the Norwegian anthropologist Halfdan Bryn. It must be emphasized that Halfdan Bryn was a product of his times, and must be interpreted as belonging to the time in which he lived.
He left material based on photographs and physical anthropological research on the Norwegian people which he had collected through a great many years in his vast travels in our extensive country. This created the basis for his theses on the racial composition of the Norwegian people and of the origin and qualitites of the Nordic race.
This material, in addition to the last of Bryn’s works, “Norwegian Folk Types” (1933), creates the basis of this installation bearing the same title.
By reworking this material, we will explore the problems concerning the historical premises of national identity, and the scientific definition of the concept of race, relating to concurrent movements in today’s society.
The exhibition will be presented as an installation comprised of photographs of various Norwegian folk types, which Halfdan Bryn collected as part of his “scientific” documentation, texts from the dissertations describing appearance and scull types, and different anthropological artefacts on loan from Anatomical Institute.
A simple multiple “Archive for race pictures” accompanies the exhibition, but can also function as an independent artwork.
“Eugenic observations”, Bergen Art Hall
“Eugenic Observations” is an widely based artistic research project where I, through the juxtaposition of text, painting, and photographs, attempt to focus on some of the problems which arise in the meeting between eugenics, science and ethics.
Is it possible to learn something from this meeting, as seen in the light of history, or is it so that science has no ethics, and as such, always must function within the framework of a system of ethics?
What happens when science is liberated from a context of ethics? Perhaps the central, underlying question is that of whether we at all are capable of learning from history?
We already know enough, but it is not knowledge that we lack. That which we lack is rather the courage to realize what we know, and thereby draw the conclusions.
For the project, I have used a great deal of text and photo-material from the writings by the Norwegian racial hygienist Dr. Jon Alfred Mjøen, published at Vinderen Biological Laboratory in the years before the Second World War. I have also sought out archives in France and Germany, where I also found a great deal of material.
“Contemplations on the dead Christ”, Gallery LNM, Oslo
In this project I have made some reflections on the painting of Hans Holbein
"The body of the dead Christ in the Tomb". I have tried to reflect these considerations up to our own present time.
In this exhibition project I have also painted several portraits of doctors and psychiatrists that carried out medical experiments with human beings before and during the second World War.
These doctors had very often exellent academic education and degrees and came from respectable bourgeois families. They where in one way cultivated, sensible private human beings and in another way totaly dehumanized with completely absence of emphaty and with a professional insensibility.
In many countries in the 1920s it was developed a sterilization practice where they with selections tried to get absolute control over the evolution process, over the biological human future. It was called "Social Darwinism".
It started with coercive sterilization on human beings who, in different ways, where a burden to society, such as mentally retarded people, physically handicapped, hereditarely sick people, criminals, socialy missfitted people etc. This developed from coercive sterilization to direct medical killing in euthanasia projects of "life unworthy of life" and culminated in the extermination camps.