x Trond Hugo Haugen (born 1975) creates a scenography, a game between acts for the observer to navigate. A network of symbols like ravens, crosses, wings, and black flags repeat and create their own narrative. The installations are often introverted tales that resist our desire for readability. Haugen’s work shows glimpses of information, of instructions, but lacks rationality and logic. Haugen abandons all forms of irony and places trust in the viewer’s own associations. He works with drawings, books, and installations. Curator Jessica Segerlund (SE) x The starting point for Haugen’s artwork is drawing, even if the finished piece is not a drawing. The work is about the process, about the line on the surface, about black on white – about drawing as thinking. x Haugen’s works have a quiet, absurd, poetic tone that addresses the ways we slowly lose track of the present. Haugen speaks to our need to travel to parallel worlds, out into fantasy or into our own body. x Death waits around every corner of the exhibition. Haugen’s melancholic humor builds bridges between entirely separate spheres. This is one of the best exhibitions I’ve seen in ages in Malmö’s galleries, and a clarity is conveyed both through the individual works and in their relationship with the space. Critic Pontus Kyander (SE) x Haugen’s latest work is the series “Adventures in Wonderland.” The series consists of sixteen spam addresses printed on 13-inch plates. Haugen has used his work to challenge the traditions of conceptual art and placed them into new contexts; in this case, the virtual world that is perhaps most clearly expressed on the internet. Trond Hugo Haugen sticks closely to the graphic tradition and works to show the range of black and white that the inkjet can express. He plays with the contrasts created by transforming the image into text and the books’ texts into image. x It made me crazy to read the obituaries on Bergman in the American press. All the outlets wrote that he was an “intellectual” filmmaker. Bergman wasn’t the least bit intellectual. He was a purely emotional person. Critic Stan Schwartz x It’s really hard to talk about this. Insight is limited, no matter how hard you try to open yourself up. It’s hard to see what you are really doing. x Color, intended for the wall. Black isn’t content to function decoratively. Which of the pictures should we serve? / The image that can’t bend itself to the message in a text has to tell its own story. Create its own mythology. A life story. A voyage. A picture book. / We must believe that art can change the world. Affect the downfall of man. A deeper impossibility. / Forget beauty as an artistic strategy. Artist Palle Nielsen (DK) x Drawing is a lonesome thing. www.trondhugo.no