Hanna Sjöstrand — Velferden

Hanna Sjöstrand (b. 1978) is a visual artist living in Oslo. She was born in Karlskoga in Sweden. The city is the center of the Swedish arms industry and this is a recurring theme in her art.
Sjöstrand is a graduate of the Malmö Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2009. She is often involved in various collaborative projects, mainly in theatre. Most recently, she was involved in Knockouts, a performance about MMA, in which she participated as a performer.

Her paintings can be seen at the Norwegian School of Sports and Recreation in Oslo, the School of Economics in Gothenburg and the hospital in Malmö. They are represented in private collections and museums in Sweden. Sjöstrand has received awards and grants, including from the NBK and the Norwegian Arts Council.

Entering

"There was a superstitious belief that the spirit of a deceased person could take up residence in a portrait. To avoid such ghosts, the nose, which was seen as the way into the sculpture, could be cut off. Via the nose, the survivors' burnt offerings also reached the spirits of the deceased in the realm of the dead. If, for some reason, you wanted to make life in the afterlife difficult for someone's spirit, it was easiest to cut off the portrait's nose." 

– Ur Where are the noses and noses? The World Culture Museum's website

Note1

 Witch fur; kvarlämningarna of an old mythology inside a new one?

Note 2  

HS: What do you think happens if I make a mask of the Rossland god?  

IU: Then maybe you will be him.

Note 5 

Where are the roads that lead beyond the landscape into the living?

Note 7

 How are the gods shaped by the place and how are the gods shaped by the place?

Note 9  

How were the gods moved out of the mountains?

Note 11

Velferden behind my back, the mountain on the other side of the road. Dark moist heavy. The lightness of heaven. How did it happen when the will of the people became greater than this mass? A sudden blast tear stelnad primeval? The laws that prohibited the cultivation of trees, springs and rocks.

Note 13

The gods were forced out of the material. They are replaced by yet another god, beyond the world, in a heaven.

"In our time, everyone, wherever they are, must learn to separate abstract concepts from concrete manifestations" 

– Vandana Shiva (antecknad ur minnet, probably nogt förvanskad)

Note 19

 But then what is abstract and what is concrete? Suggestions and/or examples:

Trees - concrete - can create mass of carbon dioxide with the help of light energy.

Rock - concrete - silence, a rigid fluidity.

Sjö – concrete – form out of formlessness.  

Money – in the abstract – presupposes common belief in order to have value.  

Religion – abstract – dependent on a present fråvaro … (och letters?)

Note 21  

The body's encounter with its surroundings, the framework from which the world emerges. The diversity, all forms of life, all connected, nothing outside.

Note 27  

The Abrahamic religions, the mythologies of the desert. A monoculture must be forced onto the landscape of diversity by force. Then new deserts are born. An extracted creative force that forces more and more monoculture.

Note 28

 The blackness of the whitest whiteness, dust and death..... utspränga hårum, sand deserts, the desert floor in the fjord. And then the red: the runoff from Sandbekk towards the green moss.

Note 30

 The lake inside Blåfjell. I choose one of the masks from The Painters , dip it in the water. Surface and depth are one. I shiver.

Note 31

 Living life. Breath taken. The vote. The animation. The duck.

Note 35

 Visiting Rosslandsguden at Jøssingfjord Vitenmuseum. Rosslandguden consists of Noritt. Noritt is a local rock with a high iron content, it weathers quickly and gives rise to fertile soil. The process began in magma chambers that arose deep inside the earth's crust 930 million years ago.