The exhibition On Forgetting (Om å glemme) by Torgeir Husevaag explores memory, forgetting, and how memories are shaped and changed over time. The exhibition brings together works that, from different perspectives, examine what it means to remember, to forget, and to process what is lost.
The exhibition’s title stems from Husevaag’s 22-minute film Om å glemme, which is in dialogue with the documentary Glemte minner (2003), directed by Yvonne Thomassen. Glemte minner was a student project in which Thomassen worked around the theme of Alzheimer’s and ended up portraying Husevaag’s father. The film did not particularly excite Husevaag when he first saw it, but when he watched the documentary again after 15 years, he experienced the material differently. This distance between the original experience and the second viewing forms the starting point for Om å glemme, a film that depicts the artist’s parents, with particular emphasis on how his father’s dementia affected the relationship between them. The film is a montage film in which text and images are woven together in a flowing essay on selective memory, changing family relationships, and the experiences of being a next of kin. The film also examines how the same story can appear different, depending on who sees it and when it is seen. The visual language is marked by an ambivalence toward the material that is shown, but also partly concealed. The ink drawings that appear in the film are also presented in the exhibition as original works.
While Om å glemme takes personal experience and family history as its starting point, Fremglemmelses-portefølje (Portfolio of Forth-forgettings) approaches memory with a more satirical undertone. With references to self-monitoring and optimization, the work examines how even seemingly unproductive experiences can be turned into resources. Here, forgetting itself becomes the object of systematic registration and processing. Over eleven months, Husevaag noted down every personal name he forgot, whether it happened in conversations, in his own trains of thought, while working, or on visits to exhibitions. The result is a collection of 499 names, a peculiar community of the forgotten that ranges from the well-known to the obscure. Some lapses seem self-evident, others more unexpected or disturbing. Almost all of the names were tracked down afterwards and are presented in calendar-order in self-made light boxes. Through this registration, each individual lapse is given a concrete form and a place in a system that both attempts to order and to make forgetting visible.
The work in progress Glemselsmedianen (The Forgetting Median) continues this investigation by analyzing the material. Husevaag searches for patterns and connections among the nearly 500 lapses, even though such connections may not exist. Central to it is the pursuit of “the forgetting median” – a personification of the collective forgetting, as if the registered names could say something about a typical lapse or about the nature of forgetting.
Through personal narratives, systematic registration, and an investigative approach, Om å glemme moves between the individual and the universal. The exhibition directs attention to the limitations of memory and to our urge to understand, order, and preserve what otherwise risks disappearing.
Torgeir Husevaag (b. 1967, Norway) is educated at Winchester School of Art and the Art Academy at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Over 25 years he has worked in an exploratory and systematic manner, often with formal series of generative drawings in a pictorial language that lies close to maps and infographics. From around 2020, his most important works have been a series of montage films, of which “Om å glemme” is the concluding one. In these works, his artistic practice takes a more personal and biographical turn. Husevaag has had solo exhibitions at, among others, Kunstnerforbundet (NO), Kunstplass Oslo (NO), Østfold Kunstsenter (NO), and Konstepidemin (SE). He has made several public works, ranging from Verdensplassen at Furuset to the official 20-krone coin from 2023. Husevaag’s works have been acquired by the National Museum of Norway, the Oslo Municipality’s art collection, and a number of other institutions.