Solo exhibitions

On the continent, something is always growling, rumbling, screeching, squeaking, whistling, knocking, tapping, chattering, chirping, wailing, whooshing, bleating or hooting. On Spitsbergen, however, everything falls silent — like a hot coal thrown into deep snow. If the wind isn’t blowing, very little makes a sound there. Sometimes a glacier creaks, sometimes the snow shifts with a deep, distant thud — but beyond that, in the middle of a day as short as mossy October light, it is utterly quiet. Silent. The landscape reflects back at you, like wrinkles straight into the soul, without the shimmer of any background noise — until the cold begins to creep into your bones.

At its core, Cichobiel is a story about inaccessibility, hostility, and the primal landscapes of Spitsbergen, captured — how else — in dreadful weather: fog, rain, snow, or gusting winds. It is also a study of silence, stillness, and photography itself. There is a fundamental difference between memory, the image on a screen, and the final photograph that once again becomes part of the physical world. I feel as though I borrowed the raw Arctic light — and for many months I’ve been trying to give it back on paper, but so far, I haven’t managed to recreate the white I saw there. That beautiful sense of incompletion has taken shape in the form of this exhibition.