NO BEGINNING, NO END BY SOLVEJ HELWEG OVESEN
What I’m looking for is an expression where you are not quite sure of the situation,
the story is not fully told, and there is suspense. I’m fascinated by the unspectacular
everyday, the trivial.
CÅ
Carla Åhlander mainly works with photography and uses the media to
point at and question profane acts and settings. The immediate
situations Ahlander is attracted to and documents in her photographs
are rather subtle appearances of power relations – in all shades and
from the vocabulary of everyday life. Feminism is a point of recourse
for her, however this awareness of gender specific issues is sediment
in her gaze rather than an explicit theme in her work.
Carla Åhlander's often captures situations that function on a
metaphorical level reflecting gender roles, consume and power
relations on a micro-scale. Situations where something is about to
happen or could happen, taken from a multiple of contexts, often with
no beginning or end in narrative terms: a coffee table with cups and
cans are “lined up” for a meeting, firemen testing their water canons,
football goals at the foot of a mountain, men about to train their dogs
in a public square, a horde of pregnant goats on grass and a male goat
on its own, chairs in deserted waiting rooms. Åhlanders gaze turns
“normalised”, rigid conventions and structures into evidence of the
systems of organisation that influence our lives.
I would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of
power relations and the “agonism” between power relations and the
intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all
social existence...1
Michel Foucault
By presenting the bi-products and surface appearance of societal
power relations Åhlander in a humorous way distances herself from
them. She strips down her subject to minimal scenarios often framed
by a vast landscape or architectural space that make mechanisms of
organisation appear small and helpless. Åhlander seem to question the
1 Michel Foucault, the Subject and Power (1982), “Michel Foucault, Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics”, University of Chicago, p.208
necessity of these structures for our being – whereas there is no
question that we are necessary for their existence!
Åhlander avoids seductive elements or effects in her images and
thereby she redirects the eye to situations and moments usually
eliminated from our visual memory. We never see a close up of persons
or objects in her photographs, but must accept a slightly withdrawn
glance of the daunting ‘order of things’. Most of her photographs are
devoid of humans and if persons appear, they are captured from afar
as little figures, which makes them and their acts look stereotypical
and absurd. Details are purposely hidden when seen in the context of a
wide-reaching landscape, giving the impression of the human world as
miniature. Put in different way, Ahlander distances the viewer from the
settings on her photographs: we are in a position of the “voyeur”.
“Five Variations of a Woman being interrupted...
..from crossing a street”, 2001, is a photo series of five images. A
female figure is about to cross the street. She stands on the side
anticipating. However there is no progression within the five images –
she stands, waits, looks and stands while cars pass. Whichever way
one interprets the situation, the title twists the obvious understanding
of the situation: the woman’s desire to cross the street becomes the
main concern of the situation. However the female figure is in a static
situation: hesitant, awaiting, and powerless. It looks as if nothing
happens in these five similar images. Meanwhile however, and in a
broader perspective, identifying the feeling of anticipation, one may
wonder whether the constraints women experience in daily life are
imposed by existing systems, others or by their own limiting
interpretations of how it is possible to reach their goals?
Powerlessness is also the theme in her series of photographs
portraying empty waiting rooms in registry offices in Berlin, Untitled 1-
13, 2003. A “Meldestelle” is the site, where a person moving to a
German city makes his or her first bureaucratic encounter.
When I went to a ‘Meldestelle’ for the first time, I immediately wanted to take photos
in there. It felt like a place that you do not quite believe you will ever be able to
leave. It was partly a culture chock. I had never experienced authority as it is
performed in such places before.
CÅ
The waiting rooms in official offices of registry in Berlin fulfil all the
characteristics of modern architecture in terms of transparency,
functionality and monumentality. They are settings of disciplining and
anticipation, which is why Ahlander in this series decided to portray the
chairs in a selection of offices. The seats are often bolted to the floor,
placed symmetrically in serial position. While Ahlander presents the
scenery of such waiting rooms in a sterile manner, the images have an
inherent ambivalence as the slightly sadistic, functional anti-design of
bureaucratic interior reveals its photogenic qualities.
The theme of disciplining structures takes another format in “Untitled,
Malmö”, 2000, which is a picture of 6 men with their dogs sitting next
to them. The men are positioned in a circle on central on a square in
Malmö, Sweden. The all watch each other. This image captures a
situation of power ‘innocently’ exercised through supervision and
training. Again Ahlander purely points her finder at a mode of
behaviour, perhaps even a ritual for these beings – but viewed from a
distance the setting seems theatrical in front of the prominent houses
defining a central site in Malmö.
I’m interested in the systems of organisation, which we live in; by the creation of
power structures and how we become part of them, yet I’m also fascinated by the
fact that they only exist if we participate in them.
CÅ
Structures, repetition and regulatory settings become focal points in
this body of work – not in a direct way, but more like if someone was
constantly pointing their finger at oblivion structures of government
and order. Like the photo of export cars parked in a steam at a port
with the sea in the background, Untitled, year?, or the small football
field with two tiny goals next to a high-rising mountain. On an image,
probably taken the same day as that of the parked cars, we see a girl
glancing over the sea from the ferry deck (Untitled, year?). The
geographical or national context of Ahlanders images seems less
important than the context produced through the constellations she
makes of her images and the vast landscape surrounding most venues.
In yet another couple of situations/photographs men in orange
uniforms are sweeping the street – their outfit match orange garbage
cans on the other image. The orange colour appears with such
persistence that the domain of public cleaning takes a clear visual form
in the urban landscape. This couple of images again plays with the
economy of attention and importance devoted to certain forms and
gestures – the orange colour detach the figures and the garbage cans
from their context to a degree where it is not about cleaning, but
about the division of things from their surroundings. In another piece,
three woman vacuum clean while a man looks at them – an image that
alone reifies traditional gender roles. But if we look at it in the context
of the two above-mentioned images there is a balance of men and
women, who perform the same kind of acts with an identical purpose –
only the purpose is detached from the act.
The latter is one of the artist’s tactics of interrogation: bribing the
acts of ordering and organizing their immediate purpose by recontextualising
them in a way that attributes absurd analogies to
them. I call it a tactic, because the way Ahlander deals with
mechanisms of power and organisation is from a powerless position.
However Ahlander turns the gaze on these structures around in a way
that makes them appear powerless and that is a tactic depending on
shooting at the moment and from a perspective that triggers ridicule:
(...) a tactic depends on time – it is always on the watch for
opportunities that must be seized “on the wing”. What ever it wins, it
does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn
them into “opportunities.” The weak must continually turn to their own
ends forces alien to them.2
Michel De Certeau
Åhlander has found a tactic that by way of a distanced gaze gives her
a tool present everyday life as miniature events and structures in
panoramic land- or cityscapes. In this way Ahlander gives the viewer an
overview of the structures that we normally find ourselves living under
in.
2 2 De Certeau, Michel: The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) (French orig. 1980) p. xix.