Sabine Popp: Relay (how to use a ship to press the button of a camera)
Published
Stian Ramvik at BEK is helping Sabine Popp with synchronization of video material for the upcoming exhibition Relay (how to use a ship to press the button of a camera) which opens at Visningsrommet USF on December 3. The video material forms the framework for a performance, and Popp need to easily control the synchronized videos as part of this. In order to be able to pause the videos at the same time and restart all of them accurately, it is necessary to connect a manual button and write code that controls this process.
In January 2019, Popp presented the performance lecture Common Notions at BEK. Common Notions forms a central element of the exhibition at the Visningsrommet USF, where it takes as much form as an installation of mobile elements as a performance, exhibited on a similar mobile platform. Relay (how to use a ship to press the button of a camera) is seen as an intermediate station in a negotiation of perspectives on forests under the sea surface, and originates from Popp’s artistic research project Agential Matter (Invisible Landscapes) at the Academy of Arts at the Faculty of Arts, music and design (UiB). The work is based on journeys along the coast in search for different spaces, where observation of algae is driven by different interests for an undetermined future.
Performativity in a changing ecology of algae, objects and bodies, at observational moments guided by various interests for an open – individual or collective – future, has been central to, for example, experimental plants for growing kelp, a temporary marine biological field station, or a tare reception. The project is to some extent characterized by the documentary, where fragments of what has been met in ‘the real world’ are shifted and (re)presented in the gallery space. At the same time, the sojourns that are the source of the material are understood as intervening attention or care for the processes that take place in a collective space.
Photo: Sabine Popp
About Sabine Popp
Sabine Popp studied at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design, with periods at the University of Barcelona and the Glasgow School of Arts. After some years’ focus on arctic and subarctic areas, and inquiries regarding the local as connecting to a larger geographical understanding, she was involved in the artistic research project Topografies of the Obsolete (at KhiB), which investigated the post-industrial landscape, and has since 2016 contributed to Oslofjord Ecologies (at HiOA). Autumn 2016 she was accepted as research fellow of the Norwegian Artistic Research Program, affiliated with the Art Academy at the Faculty of Art, Music and Design at Bergen University (UiB).