The forbidden forest - Andreas Siqueland and the Halvdan Hafsten Collection
by Hanne Beate Ueland
Two long yellow curtains hanging from the ceiling flank the doorway through which we enter the museum’s exhibition area. The walls are covered with paintings stretching from floor to ceiling, and smaller paintings hang on top of these colourful works. There are patterned carpets here and there on the floors, and selected pieces of furniture are also placed in the rooms. A film camera moves out into a landscape to the sound of birdsong. The chirping mingles with the faint sound of clocks in other rooms. In the middle of the floor in the largest gallery, there is a desk placed on a carpet woven in nuances of yellow, blue and green. On the desk is a book bound in red leather with gold lettering. The inscription Samling Halvdan Hafsten (Collection Halvdan Hafsten) and eight names provide one of the few textual clues about the background for the capacious artistic installation we are about to experience.
The Halvdan Hafsten Collection is the starting point for the exhibition The Forbidden Forest, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, created by Andreas Siqueland (b. 1973). Stavanger Art Museum has managed the Halvdan Hafsten Collection ever since its 208 works and a large accompanying archive were given to Stavanger Faste Galleri in 1984. At the collector’s request, the pictures have mostly hung in the same place in a separate wing designed especially for them. They are made by artists with an established presence in Norwegian art history. The paintings and drawings are by Alexander Schulz (1901–1981), Harald Dal (1902–1972), Erling Enger (1899–1990), Kai Fjell (1907–1989), Reidar Aulie (1904–1977), Ragnar Kraugerud (1909–1987), Thorbjørn Lie-Jørgensen (1900–1961) and Arne Ekeland (1908–1994). Some of the pictures were made before or during the Second World War, others later. What stories do we tell our visitors about the artworks today? How are they rendered relevant after 40 years in the museum?
The collector helped plan the gallery space in close cooperation with the museum’s architect Per Faltinsen. Hafsten died in 1993, the year after the building was completed.
Wanting to challenge ourselves in our work with historical collections, we invited Andreas Siqueland to create an exhibition both about and with the Halvdan Hafsten Collection. We chose Siqueland because he has spent quite some time exploring landscape painting, a genre well represented in Hafsten’s collection. Some of the artists, for instance Erling Enger, Harald Dal and Thorbjørn Lie-Jørgensen, often created ‘pure’ landscape paintings. In Arne Ekeland’s pictures, the landscape of Eidsvoll, where he lived most of his life, provides an interesting backdrop for the political scenes in his paintings. In Ragnar Kraugerud’s works, the figures almost melt into their surroundings. His group portraits are marked by a simplified expression – it is almost as if he wants to express the essence of a person’s insoluble connection to nature. For Kai Fjell, fragments of landscapes are part of the layered mosaics that surround central figural scenes. Alexander Schultz’s nature subjects divulge the artist’s avid interest in colour and composition. Reidar Aulie paints urban landscapes and spaces as backdrops for the labours and struggles of humanity. We at the museum were interested in how Siqueland’s painterly investigations could converse with the works of these artists. In his book A Picture and a Box, Siqueland examines how his own paintings are influenced by being made in different geographical locations.² Inspired by plein air painting, he has painted landscapes in diverse places around the world. Could the landscapes in Hafsten’s collection function as a new frame of reference for Siqueland’s painterly project?
1Andreas Siqueland, ed. A Picture and a Box (Oslo: Oslo National Academy of Art, 2012).
![2023 12 04 Den forbudte skogen INNGANG V3 LO 03](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2023-12-04-Den-forbudte-skogen-INNGANG-V3-LO-03.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=563&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (winter frost), 2023
Harald Dal
Høstlandskap, 1945
Andreas Siqueland
Trees casts shadows too, 2023
A Critical Look at the Art Institution
Since the 1960s artists have created works that shed light on the managerial responsibilities of art institutions. This so-called institution-critical art seeks to expose what happens to artworks that end up in an institution, and the power the institution’s staff wields over the works. Artists such as Michael Asher (1943–2012), Daniel Buren (b.1938) and Hans Haacke (b. 1936) reveal the social context surrounding artworks in institutions. Asher and Buren look especially at how museums’ physical surroundings affect us, while Haacke’s investigations are important for exposing the commercial interests linked to museums and the relationships between them. Other artists such as the Guerrilla Girls (an artist group founded in 1985) critically explores the amassing of collections and the criteria used to determine whose works end up in museum collections.
1For an introduction to institution-critical art, see Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson, eds., Institutional Critique: An Anthology of Artist’s Writings (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011).
Artistic practices such as these are consequential for Siqueland, who in earlier projects has explored the flexibility of art institutions.⁴ At the start of this present project he was also greatly inspired by the work of the museum director Alexander Dorner (1893–1957). The decade before Hafsten started his collecting activities, Dorner came up with revolutionary ideas about how museums could present their collections in so-called ‘atmosphere rooms’. This he demonstrated in the Hannover Landesmuseum, and also later, through his practice at Rhode Island School of Design.⁵ With a will to disrupt the traditional chronology in museum displays, Dorner presented artworks in thematic contexts. When he came to Rhode Island School of Design, he challenged the exhibition format by, among other things, removing the traditional display cases so that the objects on show would have stronger aesthetic appeal. To create spaces that gave viewers the opportunity to get closer to the objects, he dismantled the barriers the museum had set up around the objects. Inspired by Dorner’s work, Siqueland wanted to challenge both Stavanger Art Museum as an institution and its handling of the Halvdan Hafsten Collection, first and foremost by examining the regulations that are crucial for ensuring the safety of the artworks, for instance how the museum carefully monitors the amount of light to which the works are exposed, but also the institutional practices that have developed over time, such as the way works are often hung side-by-side on white or uniformly coloured walls and accompanied by labels with information about the artist and the artworks. Siqueland experienced these and other institutional measures as inhibiting the public’s ability to engage with the artworks on their own terms. In this exhibition project, Siqueland was always on the side of the artworks. It was therefore also natural for him to challenge the collector’s intentions. The considerations that have led the art museum to exhibit the works in a certain way these last years have always started with the collector’s interests.
1 1Since 2004, Andreas Siqueland and Anders Kjellesvik have comprised the artist duo aiPotu. Their collaboration started that year with the purchase of the veteran camper-van, and their first travel route formed a figure-eight on the map of Europe. Since then, aiPotu has made numerous sight- and situation-specific works relating to journeys. Their works are featured in public spaces, galleries and institutions, both nationally and internationally. In 2008 aiPotu participated in the Biennale of Sydney and the group show Pavillion 7 at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
For a close reading of Alexander Dorner’s practice at Rhode Island School of Design, see Sarah Ganz Blythe and Andrew Martinez, eds., Why Art Museums? The Unfinished Work of Alexander Dorner (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2018).
The Collector’s Interests
Halvdan Hafsten (1905–1993) was the son of a successful scrap dealer and spent his working life in a rubber factory. His employer, the factory owner P.W. Røwde, had many interests. Among other things, he was for several years the consul for the Kingdom of Hungary. Hafsten assisted him in this work, and after many years of service was honoured with a chancellor title from that country. The title must have been important to Hafsten because it is often mentioned in interviews.⁶ Hafsten grew up in the family’s home at Grefsen in Oslo.⁷ Since he did not start a family himself, he continued to live in his childhood home along with his mother. After her passing, he assumed ownership of the house and lived there for the rest of his life. His collecting activity, he claimed, started almost by accident. He saw a picture by Bjarne Engebret on the wall of an acquaintance’s home. He knew Engebret because they had grown up in the same neighbourhood. He then contacted the artist and said he wanted to buy a picture. It was the painting From Aker Shipyard. Workshop (Fra Akers Mek. Workshop) and showed the sternpost of a ship.⁸ Engebret eventually became an important adviser for Hafsten as he built his art collection. He realised he possessed no art historical expertise himself, so was eager to receive advice from professionals. Another important adviser was Pola Gauguin (1883–1961), son of the famous painter Paul Gaugin (1848–1903), who for a time ran a painting school and worked as an art critic in Oslo.⁹
1 1 1 1Fredrik Koch, ‘Kanslerens kunstsamling’, Stavanger Aftenblad, 24 October 1987.
Hafsten’s house still stands at the intersection between Morellsvei and Engveien at Grefsen in Oslo.
I do not know where the painting is today; the information is from Halvdan Hafsten’s Archive at Stavanger Art Museum.
The story of how Hafsten started to collect and who his advisers were, is based on Hafsten’s own words in the introduction to the unpublished archive at Stavanger Art Museum.
Hafsten eventually became close friends with the artists whose works he collected. Although he started with Engebret, he ended up concentrating on eight other artists and continued to collect their works for the rest of his life. In a note preserved in his archive, he writes about his personal relationships with the artists. Short texts give us insight into a time marked by social and material challenges during the Second World War. The scarcity of food and other goods, plus the difficulties of trying to have a normal social life, also complicated the situation. Clearly, Hafsten placed great value on his friendships with the artists.
1During the war I acquired [it while on] a visit to him, together with Bjarne Engebret’s “Spring Picture”. I remember it hanging inside a small bedroom on the second floor of his house, and we had to stand out in the hallway to see it with a bit of distance. It was very large. I didn’t take it with me, but later on, it was rolled up and sent to Oslo. Later during the war, in 1944, I bought the two pictures ‘The Red Rose’ and ‘The Lamenting Women’ – of the same format as ‘Mother and Child’, from 1937. I remember us sitting and talking together for a long time, Bjarne Engebret and myself and Ekeland. Only at the last minute, before the train was about to leave, did we managed to roll up the large canvases that we, after a brief glance, decided to buy, and then in all haste we left the house to catch the train.
— Halvdan Hafsten, ‘Notes on My Collection’, Halvdan Hafsten’s Archive.
When Hafsten gave the collection to the museum, he wanted his desk and archive to be exhibited together with the artworks. It seems to have been important for him to show that his collecting practice had been scientific. All reviews of the works in the collection, all mentions in the press, all literature references – everything is neatly written and referenced in Hafsten’s own archival system. For example, in articles that mention works by other artists, information about these other works is cut, such that what remains in the archive is only about works in the collection. When he lent pictures by Arne Ekeland, Reidar Aulie, Harald Dal, Erling Enger, Kai Fjell and Ragnar Kraugerud to the fourth São Paulo Biennale in 1957, Hafsten pasted the exhibition brochure into his archive. But since the cover image was not of one of the works he owned, it was carefully cut from the brochure.
Andreas Siqueland was given access to the archive while working on the exhibition, but he found little that could elucidate the collector’s personal commitment to the works he collected. There are short texts which some of the artists have written about the pictures in the collection,¹¹ yet nowhere in the archive do we get an impression of Hafsten’s own assessments, thoughts or impressions of the artworks. He explains neither why he chose these eight artists nor the specific pictures. Even so, he clearly states that the collection represents the ‘best’ of Norwegian art and that it has great art historical value.¹² We know Hafsten lived with his collection for several decades before giving it to the museum towards the end of his life. There are a few photos from his home showing him surrounded by his pictures. We see him hosting parties with his siblings and other relatives, standing in white-walled rooms furnished with historical furniture
1 1Arne Ekeland and Kai Fjell did not want to write about their pictures. The other six artists submitted texts in answer to Hafsten’s request. Some are relatively concrete descriptions of what the artists painted, what they thought about or where they were when the pictures were painted. Others, such as Reidar Aulie, wrote freer and more imaginative texts.
See Hafsten’s introduction to the unpublished archive in Stavanger Art Museum.
![Hafsten fra arkivet](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/Hafsten-fra-arkivet.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=511&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Halvdan Hafsten i sitt hjem med sin bror Torbjørn Hafsten (1908-95) og søster Borghild Hafsten (1902-95). I bakgrunnen ser vi malerier av Arne Ekeland og deler av hans arkiv. Foto: fra Halvdan Hafstens arkiv. / Halvdan Hafsten at home with his brother Torbjørn Hafsten (1908-95) and sister Borghild Hafsten (1902-95). In the background we see paintings by Arne Ekeland and parts of his archive. Photo: from the Halvdan Hafsten archive.
We also see him portrayed in his home, with newspaper articles published when his gift to the museum was publicly announced. The always-impeccably dressed man, who was very concerned about his health and the importance of staying in good physical shape, has a serious and proud expression as he poses in front of Arne Ekeland’s Spring Picture (Vårbilde).
![Halfsten foto](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/halfsten-foto.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=503&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Halvdan Hafsten fotografert i sitt hjem i 1987. Foto: Håvard Bjelland / Halvdan Hafsten in his home in 1897. Photo: Håvard Bjelland.
An important premise for Siqueland in his work on the exhibition was to instigate a dialogue between the collector Halvdan Hafsten and his pictures. How is it possible to start a conversation with someone who can no longer reply?
A Scenograpgy for Halvdan Hafsten - Ghosts and Sleepwalkers
Hanging above the door leading into the exhibition is a painting of a human figure with outstretched arms. The head is not included in the picture; it seems to exist somewhere above the canvas. The figure is painted lightly, with sensitive brush strokes on raw canvas. Considering the position of the feet, it seems like the body is moving to the left in the pictorial plane, and the outstretched arms can recall stereotypical depictions of sleepwalkers.
![2024 03 08 Den forbudte skogen FOAJE LO 03 B](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2024-03-08-Den-forbudte-skogen-FOAJE-LO-03B.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=938&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (night time), 2023
Somnambul (into the void), 2023
Centrally placed in the exhibition is a bed with the coverlet pulled to the side. Pages torn from a book are scattered across it. Whoever slept in the bed is no longer there. In the field of vision of the person who has gotten out of bed, we look down at a beautiful old desk with a chair ready for use. On the desktop is the book bound in red leather from Halvdan Hafsten’s archive. Through these objects, the person who assembled an art collection and carefully organised information in an extensive archive gains a presence in the exhibition.
![2023 12 05 Den forbudte skogen PLATEAU LO V3 10](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2023-12-05-Den-forbudte-skogen-PLATEAU-LO-V3-10_2024-05-07-165544_bdqc.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=500&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
Bed for a sleepwalker, 2023
In one work in the exhibition, Siqueland goes far to give Hafsten a voice. In the film Forest Karaoke (2023), shown at the end of the entrance area, a camera moves out into a winter landscape. The soundtrack includes birdsong and the voice of someone who views and comments on the landscape. The voice’s identity is ambiguous. Is it a bird flying through the forest? A ghost? Or just a voice in someone’s head? At one point it seems like Hafsten himself is allowed to speak. The voice reflects on how important the pictures became for him after his mother died. Did the pictures become his conversation partners, extensions of the artists who became his social network?
This theatrical strategy – to invite Hafsten to meet his own collection so many years after he passed away – is an imaginative way to open up the exhibition format. When life and death and sleep and wakefulness are in limbo, everything is possible. Rational rules no longer apply in this fluid exhibition space, and Siqueland can inspire new impressions and connections.
The Room as a Construction
Siqueland has spent a lot of time getting to know the works by the eight artists represented in the Hafsten Collection. Inspired by the collector’s home, he has chosen to organise the exhibition in rooms or sections, each one devoted to a single artist. It starts with Harald Dal. Of the eight artists, it is perhaps Dal’s abstract mode of landscape painting that is closest to Siqueland’s own idiom. Dal painted the nature around his home at Nesodden near Oslo. In one gouache in the exhibition, Dal includes the open window through which he looks. This detail has been important for Siqueland, and it is closely connected to a premiss for the exhibition: the idea of shifting the relation between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ in both a direct and a metaphorical sense. Nature is drawn into the exhibition room in order to say something about how our relation to the architecture affects our experience of the artworks. The large landscape formats cause the nature to become almost intrusive – a reminder of our unresolved and complicated relationship with nature. Siqueland tries to give us the opportunity to experience the historical artworks anew by disrupting our experience of the art institution’s space. By changing the premises in the exhibition space, he wants to make the artworks more accessible, or accessible in a different way. The exhibition rooms in Stavanger Art Museum have shaped our experience of the pictures in the Halvdan Hafsten Collection for 40 years. What does it mean to hang a painting on a white wall in a museum, versus hanging it over a sofa at home, as Hafsten did?
This strategy also underscores that the museum’s white, ‘neutral’ walls are a historical construction dating back to Alfred H. Barr Jr. (1902–1981), first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To present modern art in the best possible way and to focus attention on the artworks, Barr modernised the museum’s interior.¹³ In contrast to the historical interiors in older museums, the new modern museum was furnished with light grey walls devoid of décor. This revolutionary choice made a tremendous impact on all the world’s art museums, and it has long been the standard for how art should be presented. It is still a common assumption that artworks need calm and space around them in order to be seen to full advantage.¹⁴ In the French salons in Paris in the 1800s, paintings were hung at several levels on the walls. Artists strove to have their works hung at eye level in order to be noticed. Pictures mounted near the floor or high up on the wall gained far less attention from the public. When the artist and curator Mieke Bal exhibited her filmic works in combination with selected works by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum in 2017, she chose to hang some of Munch’s paintings near the floor.¹⁵ The simple strategy had a striking effect. These two examples illustrate just how little is needed to break the norm and disrupt our expectations for how pictures should be hung and presented in a museum. When Siqueland exhibits paintings layer-on-layer by hanging works from the Halvdan Hafsten Collection on top of his own works, the effect is almost overwhelmingly radical. Another important point in the exhibition is that the relation between the mural-like works and the easel paintings mounted on top of them are emphasised in different ways; this instigates painterly dialogues between the pictures from Hafsten’s collection and those made by Siqueland.
For a thorough presentation of the art historian and museum director Alfred H. Barr Jr., see Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H Barr Jr & the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).
See, e.g., Mona Pahle Bjerke’s critique of the exhibition The Forbidden Forest at nrk.no
The art critic Kjetil Røed describes the exhibition in his review for the newspaper Aftenposten, 27 January 2017
Painterly Dialogues
Reidar Aulie is known for his political images of life in Norway during the interwar period. His pictures reflect an interest in the individual, and he highlights human challenges with empathy and personal involvement. His subjects are usually painted naively, with relatively unrefined brushstrokes in a restricted palette of earthy tones and a few bright colours. In the exhibition, Siqueland mounts Aulie’s pictures atop two large wall paintings executed in light pastel colours. The motifs put one in mind of branches, trees and plants depicted in separated fields, somewhat like a patterned drapery. The light, bright colours can be experienced as competing with the earthy colours in Aulie’s pictures. We must actively shift our gaze from the large background paintings to Aulie’s narrative images. The large paintings have a certain naïveté, just as do Aulie’s. They can draw a connection to illustrations in a children’s book. Aulie’s paintings inspired Siqueland to think of the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844–1910). Rousseau, who was mostly self-taught and never travelled outside of France, is known for painting jungle scenes with lush green vegetation and exotic animals. Siqueland suggests a dialogue between Aulie and Rousseau with his large Rousseauesque paintings. The intense, painterly encounter can be read as a proposal to think anew about Aulie’s pictures in a European context.¹⁶ The drapery-like paintings can also draw a connection to stage curtains, a jubilantly painted overture to all the tristesse and seriousness, but also to the humour that can be found in Aulie’s paintings.
1Aulie could of course have known of Rousseau’s paintings. Among other ways, it could have been through contact with the older Norwegian painter Torstein Torsteinson (1876–1966), who came to know Henri Rousseau in Paris in the 1920s. Read more here
![2023 12 11 Den forbudte skogen HOVEDSAL LO V4 33 BRIGHTER](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2023-12-11-Den-forbudte-skogen-HOVEDSAL-LO-V4-33BRIGHTER_2024-05-07-162110_kvhy.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=500&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (late summer), 2023
Reidar Aulie
Like før det begynner, 1948
Berg og dalbane, 1959
Ferjestedet, 1963
Gustav, 1943
![2023 12 11 Den forbudte skogen HOVEDSAL LO V4 34 BRIGHTER](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2023-12-11-Den-forbudte-skogen-HOVEDSAL-LO-V4-34BRIGHTER_2024-05-07-162137_xjmy.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=500&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (late summer), 2023
Reidar Aulie
Rassted, 1970
Grahesten, 1937
Nature Morte, 1951
Et folkets hus bygges, 1935
In working with Alexander Schultz’s pictures, Siqueland has drawn inspiration from Schultz’s strong colour palette in paintings such as The Tree (Treet) and Else with the Shawl (Else med sjalet). The outcome is a large, abstract forest scene with dense branching structures in green, violet and brown tones. The colours and rapid brushwork converse with Schultz’s paintings: the green creates a contrast to the orange in The Tree, and a painterly conversation ensues. The branches in Siqueland’s painting relate to the branches in The Tree, which fold together and become a wall between the viewer and the landscape in the background. In Schultz’s portrait Else with the Shawl, a closeness is established between the work and the viewer – a proximity that interests Siqueland in his desire to initiate new relationships between artworks and viewers. The women in Else with the Shawl therefore becomes an important actor in The Forbidden Forest. When we meet her gaze, the conventional notion of who is doing the looking and who is being looked at is reversed. Else returns our gaze and challenges the understanding of our role as viewers in the exhibition.
![2023 12 11 Den forbudte skogen HOVEDSAL LO V4 25](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2023-12-11-Den-forbudte-skogen-HOVEDSAL-LO-V4-25.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=500&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (early spring), 2023
Alexander Schultz
Else med sjalet, 1967
Treet, 1958
In order to converse with Arne Ekeland’s paintings, Siqueland paints a colourful and dramatic landscape. Ekeland’s Spring Picture shows bright and strong young people at work, with factories in the background. Naked bodies appear to be in complete harmony with nature and the environment. Ekeland has presented an ideal situation, an optimism about the future, painted in the midst of the Second World War. Siqueland then brings beautiful and intense colours into the room, painting a forest scene in nuances that partly capture Ekeland’s colour tones: violets, whites and some of the blues. Juxtaposing with the bluish colours in Ekeland’s work, Siqueland uses pink, red, brown and yellow nuances. Between the trees we glimpse flames. But in opposition to Ekeland’s optimism about the future, Siqueland paints a forest on fire. In stark contrast to the beautiful colours that dominate the room, we see flames licking up towards the ceiling. Siqueland shows us some of the challenges nature faces, and it is as if they result directly from the industrial optimism expressed in Ekeland’s painting. On the opposite side of the room are bare and burnt tree trunks standing in water. Floods and forest fires are consequences of our exploitation of natural resources. Siqueland paints the beauty of nature together with the terrifying consequences of how humans have managed the world’s natural resources. Directly inspired by Ekeland’s aesthetic strategies, Siqueland paints forth an enveloping space that gives both himself and Ekeland room in which to air their political ideas.
![Croppet](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/croppet_2024-05-07-164014_kcnd.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=453&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (floods and fires), 2023
Arne Ekeland
Vårbilde, 1941
![2023 12 04 Den forbudte skogen ANDRE SAL V3 LO 01 B](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2023-12-04-Den-forbudte-skogen-ANDRE-SAL-V3-LO-01B_2024-05-07-162601_qvkf.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=500&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (floods and fires), 2023
Arne Ekeland
Mor med barn, 1937
Den røde rose, 1939
Half a floor up and clearly visible from the largest room in the exhibition, Kai Fjell’s paintings hang against colourful floor-to-ceiling landscapes. With brushwork and colours, Fjell evokes several pictorial rooms that appear simultaneously in the paintings. They can be entered in different ways. These multiple landscapes have inspired Siqueland to think about the nature outside the museum, where dense vegetation along the lake Mosvannet only allows occasional glimpses of the water. In this way, Siqueland brings the nature just outside into the exhibition to create his painterly dialogue with Fjell’s pictures. Fjell’s central subjects – women who are often depicted undressed and with a downward gaze – are now followed by a naked male figure in Siqueland’s painting Shame. Historically, a woman’s downcast gaze and asexual pose are signs of virtue. This is reflected in Fjell’s portrayal of the nude woman in the painting The Widow (Enken). Why is an unclothed male body perceived as shameful, while a female body without clothes is read as a beautiful object? The seated women in Fjell’s pictures can also be read in a Madonna tradition, one example being the painting Mother and Child (Mor og barn). The tension between the pure, virginal female figures and the naked male figure is reinforced by the bed placed centrally in the room. We have talked about how the bed can be linked to thoughts about the collector Halvdan Hafsten and the life he lived with his artworks. But the bed can also be associated with death and can be read as commenting on the obvious themes of life and death in Fjell’s pictures. One example is the afore-mentioned painting The Widow. Siqueland has thus created a complex symbolism with paintings, carpets and furniture, in a room that communicates in an interesting way with the ambiguity in Fjell’s paintings and with our experience of seeing several pictorial rooms simultaneously.
![2023 12 04 Den forbudte skogen PLATEAU LO V3 01](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/2023-12-04-Den-forbudte-skogen-PLATEAU-LO-V3-01_2024-05-07-162723_sseh.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=500&transformer=imgix&w=750)
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (spring lake), 2023
Kai Fjell
Bak kulissene, 1940
Andreas Siqueland
Shame, 2023
![Croppet med seng](https://den-forbudte-skogen.imgix.net/croppet-med-seng_2024-05-07-162803_rgbg.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&crop=focalpoint&fit=crop&fm=webp&fp-x=0.5&fp-y=0.5&h=506&transformer=imgix&w=750)
I bakgrunnen:
Andreas Siqueland
The forbidden forest (spring lake), 2023
Sleepers' hands, 2023
Kai Fjell
Enken, 1942
I forgrunnen:
Andreas Siqueland
Bed for a sleepwalker, 2023
Andreas Siqueland i samarbeid med / in collaboration with Sølvi Erle Owesen
Window at Night, 2023 (quiltet teppe / patchwork)
Winter storm, 2021 (gulvteppe i ull / wool carpet)
Dissolved Time
The Forbidden Forest is a visually explorable exhibition that invites us to study colours, shapes and painterly passages and to see connections between Siqueland’s works and historical works of art. This visual experience is also attended by a significant soundtrack. The chirping of birds from the film Forest Karaoke emphasises the fluid relationship between outside and inside. Another sound, however, is more subtly present in the exhibition rooms and requires even greater attentiveness to be heard. In the exhibition there are three clocks with mechanisms from different historical epochs. They allow us to listen to the march of time. Siqueland has painted landscape fragments on the clocks, as if to make them blend with the exhibition’s scenography. As artworks, they recall Edvard Munch’s depiction of a large floor clock in the painting Between the Clock and the Bed (Mellom klokken og sengen). When the clocks chime – at different times because they are set differently – the musical sounds from the historical timepieces will perhaps remind us that different time periods are activated in the exhibition.¹⁷
Several works in Hafsten’s collection were made before and during the Second World War. Harald Dal’s forest interiors from Nesodden, which we see at the start of the exhibition, were painted while Norway was caught up in war in the 1940s. The local forest scenes acquire a different emphasis when we think of how the world looked just a short distance from the peaceful play of shadows outside Dal’s windowpane. At the same time, the painterly dialogues between Siqueland’s artworks and the older paintings seem able to erase the distance in time. When the artist foregrounds painterly connections between his own works and the historical paintings, the dialogues and interaction become more important than diachronic time. This sense of timelessness, which is emphasised by the presence of the unsynchronised historical clocks, supports Siqueland’s desire to break with art-historical categorisations and open up for individual experiences of the works in Hafsten’s collection.
The exhibition includes three historical clocks: one from the 1860s, one from the 1920s, and one from the 1930s. Siqueland has been aware that clocks from different periods sound different.
The Forbidden
The idea of the deceased collector’s presence is yet another strategy that contributes to a sense of timelessness. The scenographic strategies used in the exhibition compel us to accept being transported back in time, much like when watching a film, in order to better understand Halvdan Hafsten’s relationship with his artworks. This is how the images come alive for us on different levels, through the painterly dialogues that arise, but also because we see them anew, as if through the collector’s eyes.
Using theatrical means, the exhibition emphasises how little we know about Halvdan Hafsten and his relationship to his paintings. The purely fictive staging accentuates our absence of knowledge about what actually motivated his collecting activities. Who was the person behind the chancellor title and the spotless façade he presented to the public? What did he seek in the artworks he collected? What did he get out of the relationships with the eight male artists? The forest metaphor is apt for emphasising the potential scope of these secrets. The dense branches in the large green painting covering the wall behind Alexander Schultz’s paintings can hide even the darkest secret.
With great generosity, Andreas Siqueland starts conversations with the collector and the eight artists represented in the Halvdan Hafsten Collection. He uses pictorial means to paint forth conversations that highlight the painterly qualities of the individual works and help us see new connections between and within them. By painting nature into the exhibition architecture, Siqueland creates an enveloping situation that enables us as viewers to become part of an extended story which liberates us in our encounter with the artworks. The exhibition The Forbidden Forest emphasises the opportunities and responsibilities the museum has to create engagement with Halvdan Hafsten’s art collection.
Hanne Beate Ueland
Hanne Beate Ueland has been the department director at Stavanger Art Museum/Museum Stavanger since 2014. Ueland holds a cand. philol. in art history from the University of Bergen (2000) and has previously worked as a communication consultant at Bergen Art Museum (2001-2003) and curator at the Astrup Fearnley Museum (2003-2014).