Halvor Bodin
I Halvor Bodins arbeider fremstår vannet og mørket som grunnleggende symboler – ikke bare som motiver, men som resonanser mellom stabilitet og forvandling, kropp og element, forgjengelighet og skapelse. Formene glir fra anatomi til natur, fra vekst til nedbrytning, og oppløses i organiske og mikroskopiske strukturer som stadig unndrar seg gjenkjennelse. Bodins praksis kan ses i forlengelsen av både symbolismen og en nordisk mørkestetikk, men også i dialog med Black Metal-universet han selv har vært med å skape. Her blir vannet et overgangssted og mørket en kraft som rommer både destruksjon og transformasjon. Arbeidene peker mot menneskelivets skjørhet, men åpner samtidig for erfaringer av det uutsigelige – et poetisk rom mellom undergang og mulighet.
Denne tradisjonen gjenfinnes i Bodins praksis, og får en særlig tydelig form i denne utstillingen. Her vises tegninger, silketrykk, fotografier, fotomikrografier, film, installasjon, skulpturelle elementer og filmen Amoc/Coma fra 2025.
halvorbodin.art
THE BLACK ROOM AS ABYSS,
ART AS INFECTION
Here, images are less objects than processes – unfurling, eroding, coagulating. Organic forms – membranes, spores, nerves, tissue, cells – flicker between visibility and disintegration, relics of an anatomy never wholly human. The result is a continuum where body is water, water is blood, and the black noise of silence hums beneath all things.
Black noise: a silence never pure, always seeded with disturbances. Darkness is not absence but density, the pressure of too much nothing, a void swollen with unspent potential. The black room becomes a metaphysical laboratory: a crucible where fragility is tested against thresholds, where the psyche either collapses or mutates, edging towards hidden reserves of awareness.
Like the Book of Revelation, these works unveil the end not as an event but as a process – apocalypse as slow diffusion. Forms undergo what machine-learning theorists call reverse diffusion: images born from noise, dissolved back into it, only to re-emerge in new guises. The sea as algorithm. Creation as denoising.
Yet the work is also zoological, even pathological. Parasitism appears everywhere: infestations, attachments, lunar cycles of disease and decay. Man is not merely descended but dissolving – an ecosystem of parasites, membrax, and fluids, mutable rather than sovereign.
What emerges is a cosmology of black metamorphosis: salvation as a merciless hand from below, hauling the viewer into abyssal clarity. Not transcendence but submergence. Not liberation but the recognition of fragility within the planetary churn of water, blood, and darkness. In this crisis of form the works find their clarity: a vision of dissolution as creation, apocalypse as perpetual rehearsal, and darkness as the most generative element of all.
“And the sea gave up the dead which were in it.” — Revelation 20:13
Hydrophobia: the inability to drink from the element that birthed us. Rabies in the veins, throat constricted, foam at the lips. Terror of water, terror of swallowing the abyss. Convulsion between thirst and fear, immersion and suffocation. Not landscape but scripture of drowning, gospel of fluids.
Revelation speaks of beasts rising from the sea.
The North has its own bestiary: Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, coiled in the abyss until Ragnarok; the kraken, bloated with drowned men; the draugr, dead sailors risen to drag the living into kelp-wrapped graves.
The sea floor is a theatre of apocalypse. Oil rigs like Babel-towers suck the black ichor from the bedrock, wealth distilled from rot. Black gold – blood of the earth, drunk from the harlot’s cup. Whales, once harpooned until their cries became empire’s chorus, return as phantoms. Salmon, confined to cages, devour their own shadows. Coral reefs bleach into bone. Plundered, the sea begins to gnash its teeth.
And yet, in the deepest trench, light survives. Creatures without sun evolve their own infernal luminescence: lanternfish, gulper eels, jellyfish like living chandeliers. Octopuses curling like apocalyptic seals, their arms unfolding secrets never meant for human eyes. Not organisms but heralds – bioluminescent angels of the abyss, announcing the inversion of creation.
The hydrophobic tremor – the terror of water – becomes ultimate metaphor. We recoil from the element that sustains us. We cannot swallow, cannot drink. The ocean has become poison, yet it is also the only salvation: baptism by drowning, apocalypse as immersion.
Revelation ends with a promise: a new heaven,
a new earth, “and the sea was no more.” But here the sea survives as black room, as parasite, as rabid mouth. Not erased, but enthroned, crowned as the sovereign of apocalypse.
Ragnarok is not coming. It is already here, foaming at the edges. These are scriptures written in water, in oil, in blood.
The sea is the last scripture.
And it is writing us back into itself.
Ameba Phenol Jerk
Graphite is the philosophy of impermanent inscription — fossilised time that writes only in shades, always in danger of erasure, always already haunted by its disappearance.
Graphite is the most human of materials:
finite, unstable, restless. It teaches us that creation is always dissolution, that clarity is always shadowed, and that every inscription is already an erasure.
To hold a pencil is to hold the ruin of ancient light, the shadows of leaves long disintegrated. Each line is a fossil in motion.
It sacrifices itself in order to become line.
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The hand, which writes and draws, which caresses, which strikes — under radiation it becomes anonymous. No fingerprints, no warmth, only the white glow of calcium suspended in blackness. The intimate becomes alien.
Bone is a record of age, of labour, of fracture. Each joint a hinge of history, each line an echo of motion long past. The hand is no longer the instrument of will but the relic of use. It is a fossil still attached to the living.
The hand becomes tree, becomes root system, becomes constellation. Within the void it shines as both ruin and map, a diagram of the human folded back into the cosmos.
To behold it is to understand: the hand was never ours. It belongs to light, to dust, to the slow archive of death.
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Human tissue under glass: a labyrinth of fibres, membranes, capillaries. The skin no longer boundary but a field of threads. The muscle no longer strength but a lattice of trembling filaments. The blood no longer life but pigment diffused into channels of light.
The photomicrograph is a metaphysics of exposure. It shows us that flesh is neither sacred nor stable, but porous, fragile, and endlessly dissolving. Each captured cell is already dying, each structure collapsing even as the shutter opens. The photograph is a mausoleum of tissue, a frozen instant of decay masquerading as form.
And yet — in this abyssal vision — there is a strange poetry. The fibres glisten like constellations, the membranes shimmer like veils. Tissue, seen too closely, becomes indistinguishable from galaxies, from coral reefs, from alien cartographies. The body is no longer itself but part of the same fabric that binds sea foam, mineral, and star.
Photomicrography reveals: the body is not singular. It is multiplicity, swarm, diffusion. It is an image that undoes itself.
The body was never ours.
It was always a landscape.