Burls and ropes and sticks and stones. Wire, tarpaulin, pipes, and poles. Silje Figenschou Thoresen’s commissioned installation brings texture and palpable scale to the Astrup Fearnley Museum, a privately owned institution for contemporary art.
 
Thoresen explains her practice as grounded in indigenous Sámi traditions­—not through literal crafts but as an improvisational mentality. Objects from a vast repository are stacked or bound into precarious configurations of varying sizes, exploring material properties through juxtapositions and multiple combinations.
 
The present configuration is just one moment in the ongoing lives of these fragments. Nothing is pristine; each surface shows use and weathering. Nothing is permanent; every composition can come undone by loosening a nylon knot, shifting a steel clamp, or even by the accidental brush of a passing coat. The artist’s refusal of irreversible change in favor of perpetual recombination begs the question: is this pragmatism or romanticism? Hard to tell without her undisclosed criteria for selection and sorting.
 
While labeled site-specific, both site and specificity are ambiguous. The gallery faces some of Oslo’s most expensive balconies along the peaceful but polluted fjord. The installation was assembled elsewhere before reassembly in Renzo Piano’s sterile concrete expanses. Its fragments (and histories) are sourced from Kirkenes, Northern Norway, and can be associated with coastal industries, demolition sites, and Arctic nature. I miss a sense of place, signs of exchange.
 
Everything has its own history of being. During my visit, a spider claimed a piece as its own, stretching a fine web between a plank and a rough-hewn pillar. Its unscripted intervention speaks to how we are but temporary custodians, cyclically reusing and reinventing. Thoresen invites us to recognize the latent potential of the present. How we treat things along the way determines whether they exceed the sum of their parts or fall into obsolescence.

idr.