IF YOU DO NOT LOVE ME I SHALL NOT BE LOVED

If You Only Knew the Darkness Of the Days Ahead #2
(2022)
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2480 × 3437 pixels

 

‘If You Do Not Love Me I Shall Not Be Loved’
(2022)
a slide show and a image (and some other altered archival gems)

A contemporary corona response, a mental whiteout, or perhaps just one more artist slowly becoming the polar bear. A response re-mediated through a slideshow, where images from a Polar Institute stand still while the snow dances Cascando, a technical term that, in music, indicates a decrease in volume or tempo, and a word the writer Samuel Beckett titled one of his most famous poems about unrequited love, and all the incommunicability that derives from it… Because, as this unpredictable situation requires, as Samuel says: “You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on”. The polar bear replies: “If You Only Knew the Darkness Of the Days Ahead.”

The work presents us with awkward images created out of anger, and energized by a drop of modern despair. Trashy, repulsive, corrupted and childlike - digital and analogue, at the same time unclear, much like society, and feelings arising. My Heart Is Closing Like A Fist. While trying to make everything painful beautiful, and failing in the attempt, ending up with all things beautiful becoming pain.

If You Do Not Love Me I Shall Not Be Loved (2021) is a result of an artists’ life and its surrounding chaos derived from the pandemic through the years of 2020, 2021, and steadily ongoing into the year 2022. 

Frank O’Hara sums it up in his poem Mayakovsky from the Meditations in an Emergency (1957):


Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

KJETIL DETROIT KRISTENSEN (b 1981 Stavanger)
is a Norwegian artist who works in various fields, including installation, film, and performance. His long-term aim is to explore and erase the borders between art and everyday life. In his artistic practice, Kristensen works both in galleries and in public spaces, building bridges between the two and searching for intersections.

www.kjetilkristensen.com