Ephemeral Matters

Artist, critic and organiser Ina Hagen and PRAKSIS’s Nicholas John Jones discuss how immaterial elements such as language, ethics and time can be self-consciously “mattered” within art practice.

Ina Hagen, Round Robin Reveries: Gathering for the Other Magic Fountain, Barcelona, 2017, BAR Project, Barcelona, Spain. With contributions by Luzie Milena Weigelt, Mario Kissme, Irina Mutt, and Rafa Marcos Mota. Photo: Cristina Inocencio

Nicholas John Jones (NJJ): Ina, alongside your practice as an artist you engage in political advocacy and you write about art. You also used to coordinate an art space. Where do you perceive the boundaries of your art practice? What is included, what lies outside?

Ina Hagen (IH): I see it as a process of interconnecting parallel strands. I’m interested in questions of how artists help shape society, and so I see all these activities as facets of my artistic practice: exploring the discourses and practices of political advocacy, critical writing and thinking about art and its wider field, and collaborating in organisational work. These activities have greatly informed how I think about making, sharing, and exhibiting, although they may not always be explicitly present in my exhibition practice.

NJJ: So we might say that while your practice and research are entangled with lived experience, the work grows in its own direction. Can you give us a concrete example of this?

IH: An example would be a series of works that I think of as “gatherings”. In each work, a group of people is brought together at a specific time in a public space and invited to write collective responses to a set of propositions that they receive via smartphone through a local area network (LAN). So, the works make use of an anonymous chat room within a public space to investigate and “practice” that space: to unpack its history and consider how people encounter it within the “present” of the work. Pre-existing materials within that place plus contributions by collaborating artists help unlock the conversation, and the invited participants may have a pre-existing and specific group identity.

The work has many layers. Importantly, there’s the relationship between digital and physical realities. The LAN chat room creates a digital “layer” accessible only to those who are physically present at that place and time. Although the participants have a veil of seeming anonymity, a certain collectivity emerges, in which some of the internet’s Utopian promises are deployed and others erased. The internet frees participants from identity markers, but because they are in the same physical space, they have an awareness of the ‘reality’ of their fellow discussants. The situation prompts different kinds of behaviour and probes the border between anonymity and responsibility.

Ina Hagen, Detail from The Mariners' Round Robin, 2021, commissioned by Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven, Germany. With contributions by Sol Archer, Irla Franco, and Emilie Wright. Photo: Jenny Rosentreter

NJJ: The anonymity of some digital spaces allows people to behave in a way they wouldn't in face-to-face encounters. In this work, you combine the parameters of the chatroom with those of a shared physical space. In that in-between space, you can see who will read your words, even if it’s not clear who is writing what. The behavioural dynamics of both digital and in-real-life spaces are brought into focus.

IH: Yes, and these dynamics are materials in their own right, ones that I want to explore. I assemble a framework for that exploration by carefully selecting the site, the time, developing explicit guidelines and rules, choosing what audience participants encounter on their route to the site, and highlighting specific environmental, visual, contextual and sensorial cues that are embedded in the site. Cues are also provided before and during the work, for example, via the invitation that introduces participants to the project in advance. A writing prompt is shared ahead of the performative moment and within the live event, a story is delivered via the chatroom.

All the gatherings have taken place in public outdoor space, and so far, they have been connected with water: around a fountain, for instance, or on a beach. I look for spaces that are not obvious, that have to be actively sought out. The participants are not there by accident and they are aware their fellows have also sought the location out, so an inside and an outside are established. Temporarily, the participants are “inside”, while the “outsiders” who just happen to be present are offered an image of a nebulous but definite assembly.

NJJ: This issue of PRAKSIS Presents brings together a varied selection of makers who are self-consciously and reflexively exploring ideas to do with “medium”. It seems to me that your ephemeral works foreground elements such as time, space, light, language and relationships as media: the status of these intangibles is changed and “mattered”, rendered substantial. Do you agree? If so, are any of those immaterial media more or less important to you?

IH: Agreed! I definitely relate to conversation as a material, and whether I’m working with it alone or with others, I experience language as pliable, moving, active matter. Plus, taking the gathering series as an example, I would characterise my working material as something that's infinitely expanding. By focusing on specific elements in each work I discover more and more within them. I seek to sensitise myself to the range of elements existing within each piece.

The technological platform of communication that I deploy in the work I’ve just described, and the ways that people access it, are not abstractions. They have a form, and they also give rise to particular visual qualities. I use a very simple interface that feels both familiar and “stripped down”. I’m interested in the possibilities and implications of the digital – what digital communication is in society today: how it functions, how deeply integrated it is into the way that we live, the political implications of social media, and what sharing information online means today. All these thoughts inform my choice of the chatroom as a form of material or medium.

The social codes and internal dynamics of groups are also, arguably, media that I work with. In the gathering projects, the dynamics of digital and real-life interactions intermingle, and that quickly generates varied norms and codes of behaviour and expression. Specific national or regional languages give rise to different kinds of behaviour and interaction, as do differences in age, geographical location and the  vocations or shared interests of the participant ensemble. Specific groups that I have worked with include collectors, young people, or people local to the meeting point. The particular dynamic in each case has been quite distinct.

NJJ: I know that the ethics of working with human participants is an important concern to you.

IH: Yes. The ethics of this kind of practice are complex and profoundly important. Considerations around consent have to be embedded at a deep level, and this forms another layer of material consideration. For example, if content is going to be retained and reused, it inevitably impacts the ways that participants engage with the process and each other. I often travel to make work, and simply moving from one location to another impacts both ethical considerations and my ability to make them responsibly. Ethical questions have a perspectival dimension, because approaches that can seem legitimate “at home” (wherever that may be) may be questionable in a different setting. I try to work as closely as possible with the audience-facing parts of the institutions I work with, which I think makes a difference, and I try to be as clear and transparent as possible about what people can expect and what is expected of them. I need to continuously and actively question my assumptions, and that’s both challenging and exciting.

Ina Hagen, Fire Nation, 2021, installed at Bergen Kunsthall, Norway. Photo: Bergen Kunsthall

NJJ: How do you set a balance between establishing boundaries that will create a comfortable space for participants, and allowing their interactions to be lively and responsive?

IH: I don’t see a contradiction between being responsible and creating a space that can be responsive; rather, I think they are related. I interrogate my intentions in inviting people into co-making. What is it that I want? Am I asking them to fulfil expectations of my own, for example as producers of a specific material? Or is anything that comes from sharing time together with people already enough? Early iterations of the gathering works relied on a built-in function through which the chat-log self-deleted when the LAN device was disconnected from its portable battery. This was a concrete method to prevent my expectations or desires for a specific ‘result’ from overriding the resonance of each conversation as it unfolded.

However, other works that I’ve developed involve much more of an agenda. In Fire Nation for example, a work commissioned for the exhibition The Ocean at Bergen Kunsthall in 2021, I investigated Norwegian oil production in Brazil, focusing on how Equinor (Norway’s biggest, partially state-owned, energy company) manages its Norwegian public image and presents what it is doing abroad to Norwegian audiences. ​​Fire Nation takes the paradoxical condition of Norway's self-image—which projects ideals of fairness and environmental stewardship in the Amazon and elsewhere, while simultaneously operating as one of the highest volume energy miners in Brazil—as an example to examine climate optics, power and powerlessness, and the relationship of politics and capital. The work engages with the rebranding of the Norwegian state-owned energy company Statoil to Equinor in 2018, alongside its shift to so-called "broad energy", with a future-oriented, socially and ecologically conscious image.

Earlier, you mentioned time as a material aspect of my practice. Thinking about works with a political aim, such as the one above, I find myself reflecting that while the time span for making work can be relatively long, the time span for actual change to take place (factoring in government or municipal processes for example) can be glacially protracted. Artists by contrast are often expected to work to short deadlines – to be constantly producing and continuously showing to the public. When I see artists who challenge this temporal expectation I'm always encouraged. I’ve learned hugely from the slowness of political work. It serves as an antidote to the furious pace that drives the contemporary art world. Political processes involve many steps and often become transgenerational – we may never see the change ourselves, so the work is no longer for ourselves. Time as a medium makes us look beyond the scope of our own lives

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Ina Hagen, detail from In the before over shore, 2019, Momentum 10, Moss, Norway. With contributions by Hannah Mjølsnes, Damla Kilickiran, and Valentina Desideri. Photo: Ingeborg Øien Thorsland, Punkt Ø/Galleri F15 and Momentum

NJ: How does the factor of time play out in your gathering projects? As described, they are quite short-lived and ephemeral events, but I imagine that a good deal of preparation is also involved.

IH: Yes, the time of the event is not necessarily the time of the work. If I’m working on a piece involving a group of young people, for example, it takes time to engage  meaningfully, and it takes time for participants to connect to the work. Establishing a conversation that allows for trust and learning, where boundaries and expectations are understood, is not a fast process. However, within the gathering works, it's not necessarily the case that “more time” automatically equals “better relations” or leads to a more meaningful exchange. Limiting the time of interaction can also be meaningful and model the work in its own way, by making clear what is expected.

There is another sense in which we might think of time as a medium, though. My intention behind In the Before Over Shore, a gathering work that was included in the 2019 Momentum Biennial, was to discuss time as a linear structure. I wanted to involve people in exploring the way that language can reinforce an idea of time that is historically, geographically, age-, class- and race-specific. I compiled a script of chatroom prompts that referred to historical strata of Bredebukt beach, a location near Gallery F15, one of the biennale venues. The script referred to geological processes that had shaped that location and historical changes that had remodelled it, and from there it made links to other places. The site features a volcanic stone specific to the southeast of Norway but also present in the Middle East and parts of Africa, a material that was widely used in building the royal courts of the Byzantine Empire. The history of that physical material opened up space to talk about time and society through millennia and across a huge geographical area. Contributions by artists Hannah Mjølsnes, Damla Kilickiran, and Valentina Desideri took the form of protective symbols, and introduced knowledge from herbology, astrology and tarot. The work was designed to function as a ritual in which linear time was suspended and a different kind of temporal world was imagined. Through its remodelling, time became tangible as a material.

Ina Hagen, Detail of one symbol contributed by Damla Kilickiran and hand-carved by the artist for In the before over shore, 2019, Momentum 10, Moss, Norway. Photo: Ingeborg Øien Thorsland, Punkt Ø/Galleri F15 and Momentum