Years of Streaming
2 January - 2 February 2024

Julie Riis Andersen
Rebecca Krasnik Years of Streaming is based on liquid and light, as essential parts of transformative processes. The works make use of both analogue and digital images and processes – with hand-cast paper, analogue photography, chlorophyll prints and computer-generated images, old and new technologies merge.

Kindly supported by Statens Kunstfond, Statens Værksteder & L.F. Foghts Fond



Years of Streaming is a collaboration between visual artists Julie Riis Andersen and Rebecca Krasnik. With a constructed white cube occupying the center of the room, they have created an exhibition design that acts as a kind of negative evocation of the room. The exhibition examines image creation between the analogue and the digital, light and dark, movement and stillness. In an age where online mode is a condition and we are constantly influenced by algorithms and where the media's flow of images feels endless, the exhibition calls into question our perception of reality and imagination. In that context, Krasnik and Riis Andersen both work with the combination of the fluid and the static, both concrete and symbolic. In each of their work processes with the creation of the motif, they make use of chemical processes that create a tense relationship with AGA Works as an exhibition space and former gas factory.

Context and belonging
The idea of an objective perception of reality is gradually non-existent. But in the digital world, the sense of reality dissolves completely. How does digital development affect us today and how quickly does an image lose its relevance in that context? From the time an image is posted online, it is quickly detached from its physical reference, only to be repeated endlessly, as a copy of a copy of a copy, totally diluting the original subject. "A photograph is a collaboration with reality," says Krasnik, who in her works creates her own subjective version of reality - without limitations. According to her, the physical world is an artistic limitation, and therefore Krasnik develops her works in the digitally adjustable space. She works with light-sensitive photographic paper limited to the phone screen and produces from it "handheld" photographs in the darkroom, with the subtle movements or tremors such a process imparts to the final result. In Krasnik's works in the exhibition, she uses a horse as a motif, created as a 3D figure in a digital space that mimics the real exhibition space, AGA Works. But the scale and weight of horse and space do not match, creating a displacement of the experience of time and space in the computer-generated image. The analog and the digital meet here. And although the horse appears to be in motion in the images, then it was born digitally – without direct affiliation or reference to reality.

Organic orientation
Julie Riis Andersen works with an organic procedural slowness in great contrast to the digital. The production of Riis Andersen's works uses photosynthesis – the oldest chemical process in the world – which she uses to create chlorophyll prints. Chlorophyll is the protein in plants that captures sunlight and gives them their characteristic green color. Riis Andersen exposes her motifs on hand-cast grass paper that will fade over time and eventually disappear, creating an embedded temporality in her works. The close work with grass and fibers as materials connects Riis Andersen with her natural surroundings, the industrial history and papermaking as a craft with a climate-conscious orientation. Her choice of motifs in the work series 'Mainstream' are still images derived from the most streamed content online. In this way, Riis Andersen focuses on how culture is perceived individually through the digital infrastructure of e.g. social media. The algorithms that influence and shape our view of the world through targeting and seduction also help create a sense of fragmentation and isolation that often creates a separated and sometimes false sense of community.

Years of Streaming
The exhibition title comments on the constant digital image flow we encounter through the media and the internet's seductive search flow, the laptop's blue glare and the dance with social media. As a constant expansion of consciousness - a stream of consciousness. The contrast between an analogue and digital consciousness thus flows as an underlying theme in the exhibition. At the same time, an exchange between control and surrender is present, while the white cube occupies the space as an imaginary Trojan horse, penetrating our world with the question; can we trust what we see, or will the trend eventually turn against us?

- Rebekka Elisabeth Anker-Møller