Solveig Settemsdal. OK GREAT SWALLOW exhibition, 2024. RIXC Gallery. Photo: Lelde Gūtmane
The artist Solveig Settemsdal exhibited the video installation OK GREAT SWALLOW at the solo exhibition at the RIXC Gallery and created a new THERE’S ONLY SKY video artwork based on the field work at Irbene Radiotelescope.
Solveig Settemsdal is a multidisciplinary artist working across mediums including sculpture, video, photography, drawing and sound. Her practice studies the fluidity and transience of materials alongside how objects and ideas transform over time, through analog and digital media.
She was born in Norway, did her art foundation at Strykejernet Art School in Oslo and has been based between Norway and the UK since 2007. She completed a BA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2010 and an MFA in Sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2018. She received the Jerwood Drawing Prize for her video work Singularity in 2016, the first video to win the accolade.
Selected exhibitions include Timescapes, Schtager&Shch Gallery, London (2023), As Far As My Eye Can Sea, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal (2021), Entangle, Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2019) CURRENTS New Media Festival, Santa Fe, New Mexico (2022) AI: Das Andere Ich, Ars Electronica, Linz (2016) Oceanic Feelings, Landesmuseum Darmstadt (2019) Sonica Festival, CCA Glasgow (2017) Imagine, Gippsland Art Gallery, Australia (2018).
OK, GREAT, SWALLOW. Exhibition at the RIXC Gallery, 2024
OK SWALLOW GREAT explores the connections and disconnections of physical and digital realities. Real footage is juxtaposed with Google 3D algorithmic visualizations, and the membranes between these are pierced through text, interrogating what happens between these versions of reality. The film was shot during a research trip looking at man-made structures bracketing water in the deserts of California.
She followed the waterways and the Colorado River, whose man-made irrigation canals overflowed in the 20th century into the Salton Basin creating the Salton Sea. Both the Colorado River and the Salton Sea are heavily polluted today, with runoff from nearby farms containing fertilizers, heavy metals and toxins. With water supplying much of the southwestern US, both the Colorado River and the lake are drying up and the wind is carrying away the dried-up and toxic sand of the lake bed. The artist contrasts these ecological disaster zones with the wealthy oases nearby, filled with man-made structures.
The text in the artwork provides links and distortions between footage, delving in and out of the real and the virtual. The videos are unsynchronised, allowing new connections to form between word and image at every loop.
The exhibition was on view at the RIXC Gallery, Lencu iela 2, Riga, Latvia, from February 16 to March 28, 2024.
PHOTO ALBUM >>>> OK GREAT SWALLOW Exhibition Opening. Photos: Lelde Gūtmane
Solveig Settemsdal. OK GREAT SWALLOW exhibition, 2024. RIXC Gallery. Photo: Lelde Gūtmane
THERE’S ONLY SKY, 2024
As part the residency, and based on the field work and the videos shot at the RIXC residency partner location Irbene Radio Telescope, the artist created a new video artwork (work in progress) consisting of 2 videos titled There’s only sky, complemented by text. The video artwork creation process was curated by the Latvian artist Rasa Smite.
During the residency with RIXC the artist grappled with the complexities of learning Unreal Engine – a programme for games design – and the science behind radio telescopy, finding tangible analog and visual proxies wherever possible.
In the work, a selective transcript from an Unreal Engine workshop overlays footage from the Ventspils International Radio Astronomy Center at Irbene, Latvia. The soundtrack is a field recording of rain hitting the decommissioned radio antenna dish at Irbene; rain forming a physical proxy for the gathering of signals from space.
Layers of reality and unreality are intertwined with a liquid interpretation of radio reception, and an unreal fern. Ferns originated some 400 million years ago. In this experiment, it is ever accelerating, splitting, eventually fully fragmenting.
Solveig Settemsdal. There’s only sky, 2024. Video stills.
ABOUT THE RESIDENCY PROGRAM
RIXC Art, Science & Techno-Ecologies Residency program featuring three Art, Science and Techno-Ecologies residencies, two-month each, for Baltic and Nordic artists took place at RIXC in Riga, Latvia, during the time period from February 1, 2023 until March 31, 2024, supported by Nordic Culture Point.
The Residency Program took place for Baltic and Nordic artists who work on the edge of art, science and techno-ecologies, exploring the complex relations between the human, nature and digital technologies, and focusing on new concepts such as “naturecultures”, “sensing environments”, “living technologies”, “terrestrial coexistence”, “naturally / artificial intelligences”, which recently have been re-examined at the heart of our society.
RIXC Center for New Media Culture has received mobility funding from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture to establish RIXC Art Science Residencies.
