Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén are interested in stories, places and their specific characteristics, and ways of dealing with reality. This is accompanied by a project-based working method on the dialogic principle. The two Swedish-born artists have been working together since 1987. For 15 years they have been living in Oslo, where they also teach at the art academy.
The exhibition at the Salzburger Kunstverein set out from the project »Betrifft Scheibbs. Leben in einer niederösterreichischen Stadt«, which Book and Hedén carried out in 2006 for the exhibition »Art in Public Spaces in Lower Austria«. The focus of this artistic fieldwork was the shrinking city of Scheibbs with its empty shops, and the surrounding region. These are places that contrast with the media-appropriated megacities, but still reflect global situations and developments. To familiarise themselves with Scheibbs, the artists asked city residents to take them to places they wouldn’t have found themselves. The collection of stories about these places, documented in texts and photographs, was arranged for the exhibition at the Kunstverein. Some stories trace the economic development of the city; others are personal anecdotes or sensational reports whose veracity is to be doubted. In posed photographs, the locations were photographed along with the people who talked about them, thus being integrated into the making of history and having their construction exposed.
In 2003, Book and Hedén looked at the interplay between property and capital in the exhibition »Temporary Utopias«: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo is housed in the building of the former national bank, and some elements of the main hall were reconstructed. In this setting, they showed photographs of individually designed gardens, cultivated and fallow land and videos of an excursion with the Norwegian mushroom association or a walk with the society for useful plants. The German landscape architect Leberecht Migge served them as a figure of reference. In his writings, he defined culture as cultivation and set out from the idea of cities developing into autonomous entities without exploiting the surrounding landscape, so that the residents would be in a position to be self-sufficient. One of the places where he put his ideas into practice was in the gardens and parks of the Römerstadt housing estate in Frankfurt, which he helped to plan. The artists confronted these social reform concepts on sustainable architecture with the photo series »The Nine Gardens in the National Bank« – artificial green oases designed with the purpose of covering up the ugliness of air conditioners and light wells.
The artists focused on the culturalisation of landscape in their work »The field / O Campo« for the 26th Art Biennial of São Paulo, where they represented Norway in 2004. Together with residents – most of them with a migratory background – of the small Norwegian city of Lillehammer, where the 1994 Winter Olympics were held, Book and Hedén built garden allotments on a piece of land. Using photos of the gardens and a video of a painting from 1903 showing peasants harvesting potatoes from the exactly the same piece of land used for the allotments, the artists posed the question of how much the picture of the landscape has changed or just its interpretation. In this project too, they set out from a local situation, but drew conclusions about developments of global significance. In the Portuguese-English newspaper »News from the Field / Noticias do Campo« produced for the Biennial, they looked at themes connected with urban agriculture, renewable energy, sustainable urban development and welfare housing and asked whom the land belongs to.
In Book and Hedén’s works, the public space or a piece of land becomes an archive for the collective memory, which is given a productive re-assessment through its artistic treatment. When they concern themselves with ecology and alternative lifestyles in their projects and examine and support powers of self-organisation, there is always an element of yearning to help shape the world by means of artistic activity.
Translated by Timothy Jones