if you know where the treasure is, you can rob it – Line Rolf

What does it mean to exist in the hesitating gap between knowing and not knowing. This show might be such a gap; intimate, political, fictitious and real, collapsed and wide. An art show is just another situation of being in the process of perceiving, feeling, and making sense.

I find it hard to distinguish between realities and fictions. The more I think about them, the more they seem to lose their distinctiveness and boundaries.

Someone told me that two doubts cancel each other out, or something like that. That if you are working with doubt as a theme, you can’t doubt that, or you end up with nothing.

I find myself in this oscillation between wanting to be precise and wanting to be very imprecise; wanting to say something intensely, and not wanting to say anything at all; being visible and then invisible; believing deeply and doubting everything. There are more than enough facts telling us that we are moving towards a place of more violence and exclusion, toward more systems of oppression, more fascist tendencies. The realities before us carry traces of this. These realities seem to demand a wild sort of presence from us, to intimately understand what we might already know.

Making sense can be like a restless attention that can’t decide where the important part of the image is. Like catching a glimpse of something from the corner of your eye, making new decisions upon new decisions, catching a strain of logic just for it to disappear again. 

Making an image can be many things: placing perfume samples on the glass surface of a scanner one washed out evening, catching the dust and greasy marks on the glass withthe light that slips in and the light that escapes; following a friend through a meadow, oscillating between their hands, ass and the bushes; recording yourself recording emptiness.

As the images in our immediate reality are eating us alive - our attentions, thoughts and feelings - it would be nice to take them back to ourselves. Images and the fictions they produce should be for our own sake and imagination. 

There is something in the relationship between things, the intimacy in those relations that seems off: between the wall and a bent piece of aluminium hanging on to it; a horizontal pane of glass and its reflection beneath it on the wall. 

It’s in the gap where something is about to be something but isn’t yet. The hope that the meaning of things will at some point align with the realities. And that there is a possibility for reconciliation inside the awkwardness and instability in this gap of making meaning - and relief in recognizing that something really is off, it isn’t you, and that everything is part of everything.

Line Rolf

Graduation show, Malmö Art Academy
Gallery KHM1, Friisgatan 15, Malmö
6. - 21. March
wed - fri 12-18
sat - sun 12-16 or by appointment: linerolfmo [at] gmail [dot] com

Opening 6th March 17.00-20.00

The Master's programme in Fine Arts (MFA) is a two-year graduate programme which includes presenting a solo exhibition at the Academy's gallery.