The installation «A Hundred Pieces of a Tree (Norwegian Woods" by the Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson will open at KODE 15 November 2019.

Henrik Håkansson (b. 1968) has worked with questions relating to our natural environment in large multi-media installations for a greater part of his artistic career.

Håkansson has a long international career that stretches back to the mid-1990s, with participation in the Sydney Biennial (2014), the Berlin Biennale (2001), twice in the Venice Biennale (1997, 2003), and with solo exhibitions at De Appel in Amsterdam (2003), Lunds konsthall (2012), Kunsthalle Basel (1999) and Moderna Museet (2003), to name a few.

Håkansson often places biological elements such as trees, plants, earth and insects directly in the exhibition rooms, allowing nature itself to play the main role. He has released the song of a Skylark as free records on vinyl, generated projects on wind tunnels for birds, and made paintings out of mosquitoes colliding with the canvas.

Håkansson’s project for Bergen will emanate into a site-specific installation entitled A Hundred Pieces of a Tree (Norwegian Woods). The main elements represented by a dissected black alder tree (Alnus glutinosa) brought in from the forest around "Svartediket" in Bergen. The fragments reflecting an old fractured memory or a presentation of an archeological excavation, as being the remains of another culture organized within a museum context.

Håkansson makes use of methods that often resemble the systematic nature observations of science disciplines, such as dissection and close-up images, simultaneously emphasizing both order and disorder. In Håkansson’s ambiguous staging, the sections of nature appear unexpected and disturbing, and disrupts the image of nature we have been taught to appreciate.

In this way Håkansson debates our complex relationship to nature, not only in relation to ethics and ecology, but also to the very definition of nature that have been cultivated by art and science in the past centuries.