Deterrence and Reassurance, 2024

Rag rugs woven from military textiles. Cotton warp with tents, uniform pants, camouflage fabrics, sleeping bags, t-shirts, long underwear, field shirts, overalls, scarfs, thermal pants, personal clothings.

Textile installation, variable dimensions.

Created for the exhibition «Deterrence and reassurance», The Festival Exhibition 2024, Bergen Kunsthall.

The work Deterrence and Reassurance consists of handwoven carpets in the form of rag rugs (filleryer) woven with used military textiles.

The textile materials used in the carpets are purchased from private individuals and from the second-hand market for used military surplus materials, and originate mainly from Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden. These are cut up into thin strips and woven by hand into long rag rugs, in total 300 m2.

Installed on the floor and assembled into one large carpet, the work is made for being walked on and to sit on. The carpets have details such as labels, emblems, buttons and other remnants of their initial purpose. In contrast to the classical striped rag rugs, traditionally home made from worn out textiles, most of the carpets are monochrome throughout and they change colour only when the resource of a specific material is finished.

The title refers to the strategic foreign policy concept of deterrence and reassurance, the dual strategy that has long been at the core of Norwegian security policies – the balance between deterrence on the one hand and reassurance on the other. It’s a strategy of importance in Norway’s relation to Russia, previously the Soviet Union, and of particular noticeability in the border region in the north. With Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 and the war against Ukraine starting in 2022, the security landscape has changed significantly, also in Norway.

These changes and how they affect everyday life and the experience of security and unrest, is my starting point for the work. My idea with the work is to give form and space to reflections on deterrence and reassurance as a human experience in an everyday sense, as an alternation between feelings of danger and unease, protection and security. By combining the familiarity of the rag rug as a domestic form and phenomenon, with the charged history of the military textiles, the work is an attempt to process how politics and military presence intervene in daily life, creeping under the skin, becoming noticeable and tangible

The work was created for the exhibition Deterrence and Reassurance, Festspillutstillingen 2024, at Bergen Kunsthall, and was shown together with silkscreen prints from the series Presence, the series Colloquial place names linked to military activity, the stencil prints Reliability Diagrams, and the installation The Seedlings. Extracts from an unrealised memorial site project. The works in the exhibition follow thematic threads that touch upon the geopolitical situation in the High North in particular, and the presence of military in the landscape and the social imaginary in general.

A book with texts and other material related to the exhibition will be published in 2025.

Production:

Production assistants: Margrethe Kühle, Sofie Hviid Vinther, Marte Dahl, Henriette Mauritz Nordbeck

Commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall
Curators: Axel Wieder and Silja Leifsdottir

Supported by: Bergen Kunsthall, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, Kulturrådet and Regionale prosjektmidler fra Kunstsentrene i Norge

Thanks to Ingebjørg Monsen and Bjørgvin Husflidslag, Kiyoshi Yamamoto, Hilde Hauan, Tim Parry-Williams/KMD, Kristina Austi and Siv Støldal for textile guidance; Monica Mandal and Fosen vevgarn for warp winding; CS55 Kunstnerverksteder and Aldea for production facilities; and to Åse Løvgren, Kobie Nel, Anne Szefer Karlsen, Magnhild Øen Nordahl, Hanne Hammer Stien, Runa Johannessen, Inger Karlsen and Arne Skaug Olsen for conversations, input and practical help along the way.

Thanks to the entire team at Bergen Kunsthall for production assistance, installation, coordination and mediation of the work and the exhibition.