De sovande/ The sleepers
c-prints, 2015
Installation view at Galleri Thomas Wallner, 2015

The legend The sleepers talks about a group of prosecuted prophets that, when they find refuge, falls asleep for 300 years. When they finally wake up - in the belief that they’ve just been gone for one night - they recognise the change the world has gone through before falling asleep again, this time forever. The hiding place in the myth, a myth that exists both in a Muslim and a Christian version, has been ascribed to many different places like a cave in the desert or deep under the sea. In The sleepers their resting place is discovered in the melancholic and lonely Nordic forest, occupied by mist and growing spruce trees.
Like then, today we live in a time characterized by anxiety about the future. This piece can be seen as comment on the insecurity we feel when approaching it. The photographs contain the stillness of an early forest walk, but also the uncanniness when the human returns in a another and strange form on the border between dream and reality. The sleepers are seen without knowing it. We do not know when in time we are – before or after an event - but the mist is thick and bronze coloured, polluted or tinged by the red skies that presage storm.