Morten Torgersrud + Elissif Wessel

The exhibition Virvel (Vortex) by the artist Morten Torgersrud is a collaboration between Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF), the exhibition space NOUA and the Borderland Museum. The exhi˝ˇbition was on view at NŌUA during the spring of 2024 and consisted of a series of photographs from Morten Torgersruds immediate surroundings in Kirkenes alongside a selection of photographs by Ellisif Wessel from the period 1890–1920.

The documentation of infrastructure and industry interleaves with photographs from the artist’s family album. The material is presented side-by-side with the artist’s own photographic works, and the juxtaposition sparks an interaction between the images that brings them into play. The abundance of images creates new, spontaneous and apparently random connections that transcend traditional division and classification.

As a self-taught photographer, the revolutionary communist socialite woman Ellisif Wessel documented the multicultural life on the border with Russia, in the midst of the progress of industrialization. When Morten Torgersrud places Wessel’s landscape photography side-by-side with found images and his own photographs, it’s as if the fluid transitions between family album, archival materials and the viewfinders of the two photographers create a new, overriding subject. Wessel’s photographs of waterfalls, rivers, trees, ice caps, coastlines and mountain ranges were taken in an era where industrialization gained serious momentum and defined a border area characterized by continuous negotiation and displacement Along with the photographic material he makes use of, Torgersrud’s photographs create a mobile space for an associative and improvised exchange of meaning spanning from the formal exploration of water, light and infrastructure to photography’s materiality and relation to the production of knowledge. The exhibition was part of Lofoten International Art Festival 2024 and formed a run-up to the festival opening in Svolvær.

Morten Torgersrud (b. 1971) lives and works in Kirkenes. He studied photography at the University of Brighton and the University of the Arts in Bergen. Torgersrud works based on his immediate surroundings in Kirkenes and with the local photographic history from the area. Torgersrud has, among other things, exhibited at Hordaland kunstsenter, Galleri Hippolyte in Helsinki, Murmansk Oblast Museum, Sami Centre for Contemporary Art in Karasjok, Treignac Projet in France, Nordnorsk kunstsenter, Preus Museum and the Kunstnerforbundet. Group exhibitions include the Art Museum in Norr, Kiruna; Lillehammer kunstmuseum; Fotogalleriet, Oslo and Konstnärhuset, Stockholm. In 2011, he was awarded BKH’s photography prize for the text and slide work ‘Circulating sites’, which was shown at the Vårutstillingen at Fotogalleriet in Oslo. Torgersrud has published six books and has been purchased by the North Norwegian Art Museum, Preus Museum, KORO, and is represented in the Sami collections in Karasjok.