Tobias Hansen
Burned Out Bright
4.4.24-23.04.24
With the burst mode setting you can capture any moment with ease. A gauze-wrapped fist impacting the jaw
bone, then continuing through. The graceful splash of the cannonball dive. You managed to shoot something,
but you could have just as well told me a joke. My face is too close to the page to make sense of it. A
photograph isn’t a portal to anywhere else, it’s a reduction of event into symbol and figure. If you blow up the
picture enough, it loses the minimal stability required for any sense of motif. Speaking in absolute terms, no
longer can it say “it is” or “it is not” in a decisive way.
If the age of reason gave way to the age of critique, which has now also ended, we would need a new mode of
absorption. No more seeing as speaking, but rather a wilful subjectivity, have things be intense as opposed to
real. Knocked out to a common unconscious. At least here the images have lost all meaning, they no longer refer
back to a shared reality.
Boxes of photo transfer sheets promise to carry new images, instead they are saturated, compressed, into
something picturesque without depiction. A video that flickers with scenes and surfaces, but all the characters
leap off screen before they grab hold of us. The space is stretched and concentrated by found objects, objects
that witness and affirm a materiality of image as activity, as a series of moves and impacts, not captured, but
ongoing.
text by Fritjof Krabbe Nørretranders
Very Unique, Untitled, 2023, National Graphics, Blow-up correction, Burned out Bright, Retroduction,
Limits of Control edit, Back-formation (all 2024)
Dye-sublimation, found wood, found boxes, polyester, wooden frames, found metal, acrylic varnish,
video-projection