Peter Norrman: i speak to ghosts and listen to echoes

The work hovers between coastal landscapes, storms, births, shipwrecks, ancestral echoes, and optical vision. In the film, Peter Norrman connects his daughter’s birth in a caul to both small and large narratives surrounding water: hydrofeminism, the spiritual implications of the “veiled” birth, and how, in Old Norse belief, one is said to have the special ability to navigate between many worlds. The artist’s ancestors were sailors, and in the work, water contributes as a planetary archive of emotions.

Visually, the film is based on processed and abstracted material filmed underwater. But also sequences from a slow but stormy coastal landscape outside Stavanger in Norway filmed through a window, which is linked to The Window as an exhibition space.

Norrman is interested in the limitations of older digital technology and the visual surprises that make the digital material more interesting. There, the camera becomes a tool for greater presence and processing of the film process. Perception also becomes part of the film here, and the work in many ways also tells about the filmmaking itself.

Peter Norrman is an artist who works in the borderland between experimental film, photography, sound and sculpture, often in installation or published format. The archive as a strategy and working method is recurring. His work revolves around poetic ideas and perspectives on time, memory, place and the limits of perception. He has an MFA from Konstfack (2019) and has also studied at the Royal Institute of Art and the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York, where he previously lived and worked. He is now based in Stockholm.

A livestreamed conversation with the artist will take place through Centrum för fotografi’s Instagram, Friday, January 31 at 1 PM.