LEDIGGANG OG OMKRINGDRIVEN

Kunsthall Oslo,
2012

The exhibition Lediggang og Omkringdriven (Vagrancy and Idleness) is completed by a major new sculptural work, improvised from found materials during the exhibition’s installation period, that interrupts the architecture of the gallery and connects it to the simultaneously controlled and chaotic development of the surrounding city.

Etyder [Studies] is a series of analogue photographs made with a ten-second self-timer, capturing Tallerås’s improvised physical explorations of ‘spaces that don’t have any function for humans or that for other reasons are rarely used’. Limiting himself to one photograph at each location, Tallerås leaves the final image to chance, and the artist’s body describes a series of off-balance hieroglyphic shapes as he scrambles away from the camera and climbs and clings to the architecture.

The short video Climbing, Swinging, Leaping, projected onto an improvised screen draped over security fencing, documents forays into the gaps and spaces of the city, where Tallerås’s fluid navigation of his unorthodox routes is set against the steady flow of passers by.

A key work in the exhibition is the sculpture Inntrinn, Opptrinn og Tristesse, an apparently abstract form that is in fact a cast of the accidental oozing of asphalt down a set of steps on a street in central Oslo. Tallerås set up an unauthorised construction-site tent around the steps and spent seven days and nights building up layers of silicon to make a mould, encountering every kind of curious nocturnal visitor in the process.