The exhibition A Pulsating Disequilibrium contemplates the relationship between humans and the Earth, by focusing specifically on the topics of air, atmosphere, and breath, as ineluctable essences of life. In this project, two photographs from WW1, distorted by the artist, are the starting points for a process of transformation and dissolution.
By revealing invisible energy, such as the transmission and detection of signals from the Universe, or passages from one medium to another with a progressive estrangement from nature, Samoa Remy aims to highlight the processes on which life depends, and the invertibility of energetic processes. By playing with the encounter between materials and oscillations between the static and dynamic, flatness and volume, she aims to create a movement similar to a respiratory process.
Perception of time and distortion of time are also at the core of this project, as a response to the fact that the mystery of time –and consequently of history– is ultimately more about the human being than about the cosmos and the Universe.
History is always only fragments of events which have taken place in time. –Or better said: fragments of all the times and events in each specific point in space. Samoa Remy’s artworks can also be seen / read as fragments. In them, something is always missing. There’s always only a partial story.
Description of the artworks:
Projecting Projectiles into the Void (2026)
The series titled Projecting Projectiles into the Void consists of two image pairs, where each pair has one image mounted above the other. The bottom image is a black silkscreen print on white paper. The top image is a dark blue silkscreen print, which shows a very faint “echo” of the image below, with a composition of bronze fragments mounted on top of it.
This project has its starting point in a series of pictures Samoa Remy started making back in 2015, where she began distorting / manipulating old black and white photographs from the First World War (among other collected from the La Somme archive), by moving and turning them on a photocopying machine in motion. Hereby, the horizontal plane and the figures are twisted and bent, provoking a sense of disorientation, “dizziness”, and “void” within the viewer and accentuating the altered state of humans frozen in the cruel instant of passing away, at the crossroads between life and death, where body and soul silently separate.
The artist has among other focused on the aspect of suffocation due to gas / chemical attacks as a counterpoint to the fact that our atmosphere is a vital and crucial prerequisite for life on Earth.
It’s interesting on a conceptual level that the bronze fragments that the artist has sewn onto the blue prints derive from explosions of molten metal, occurring during the casting of a series of sculptures for her artwork Ametriton (shown at her solo show Nearing Towards the Edge of the World at Oslo Kunstforening in 2023). These fragments are both a product and a cause of energetic transfers between materials. Fixed in the liminal space between formation and destruction, these remnants of explosions express the invertibility of energetic processes.
The other two silkscreen prints in the exhibition are large images that, among other, touch upon processes of transformation. On one side, transformation is present as transmission and detection of signals. On the other side, transformation is embodied both in several passages from one medium to another, and as a progressive estrangement from nature.
Floating Over a Distant Echo (2026)
This artwork depicts waves created by signals received from the Cosmos: Very faint light from extremely distant objects in the Universe. It narrates the incredibly long journey of single photons, which, after travelling billions of years, entered an optical telescope and hit its electronic sensor / detector, finally ending up on a TV screen in an early 1980s research centre.
Photons are fundamental particles of light, acting as quantum messengers and moving at the speed of light. As massless quantum particles with no electric charge, they show wave-particle duality. Photons exist and don’t exist at the same time, as they have no mass.
This large image, with its irregular wave pattern on dark blue background, echoes the top images of the two distorted war-picture-pairs in the exhibition. Their dark blue colours have connotations with f. ex. water, ocean and sky. Words which can all be associated with something that is both near and distant, as a barrier or as a means of transportation. And, importantly, as something related to a shore, a haven –or heaven– at the other side.
In creating this exhibition project, the artist has kept a connection to the idea of invisible energies by working with processes of revealing: The revelation of invisible forces.
Contraction and Expansion (2026)
This picture shows an enlarged and magnified image of a human organ. The image touches upon the boundary between natural and artificial or “faux”. The artist plays on the idea of art as “artificium” (= Latin word for “artistry, craft”, rooted also in the English “artificial”), by starting from a photo depicting a plant-like human organ, precisely the cast of the inner pulmonary bronchus: A remnant of the breath of life, a cast of the void, of the air which passed this outbranched shape. She unfolds the passages of a progressive estrangement from nature: From a photograph of the cast of the inside of the lungs, to a wrinkled, upside-down photocopy, which has then been rephotographed, and silkscreen printed, finally giving the viewer the illusion of seeing a tree with branches. Furthermore, the original image gets animated and transformed from its static two-dimensional state, by losing flatness and gaining volume, like in a respiratory process.By emphasising the discrepancy between what nature is and what it is not, Samoa Remy paradoxically aims to highlight the processes on which life depends.
Samoa Remy is a visual artist working with various medias, approaching themes like science, spirituality, alchemy, ecology and sound / music in a transdisciplinary way. At the core of her artistic practice, she holds the idea that everything which exists has a common origin. With this as a point of departure, she aims to create artworks / installations where seemingly disparate elements and entities all interrelate and form part of an energetic whole.
Her projects recurrently draw inspiration from the scientific field. Since 2013, she has had several research stays at CERN, and in 2019, she won an artist residency for Collide at CERN, and a collaboration with Arts at CERN. Since 2018, she has been exploring topics at the intersection of science, astrophysical phenomena, and ethnomusicology in relation to her overarching PhD research in artistic practice, entitled “Layers of darkness and light” (at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts – KHiO). In her PhD project, she is among other pairing research on subatomic particles with another area of interest: the fact that in most archaic cosmogonies, sound was perceived to be the basic matter.
Some of Remy’s recent exhibitions include the solo show Nearing Towards the Edge of the World at Oslo Kunstforening in Oslo (2023); the projection of her video Runde at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo (2022); her solo show (with a publication) Substratum at Jugendstilsenteret, Kunstmuseet KUBE, in Ålesund, Norway (2015); In 2014, her work was the subject of a large exhibition and a publication, Division Leads to Multiplication, at Museo Arte in Lugano, Switzerland. On the same occasion, the artist was awarded the Manor Art Prize.
Her work is included in several public collections such as the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo (2024 and 2007); The Art Collection of Canton Zürich (Switzerland); and the Art Collection of Manor, Basel (Switzerland). Remy has conceived artworks for public commissions as f.ex. Oslo Municipality’s new Emergency Ward; Credit Suisse’s office in Europaallée in Zürich, Switzerland; The new building of the secondary school in Balerna, Switzerland.
Acknowledgement
The exhibition has been supported by: BKV (Billedkunstneres Vederlagsfond) / Arts Council Norway. The artist is conducting a PhD in artistic practice at KHiO, Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Many thanks to Kjetil Smedal for the frames and Jan Inge Janbu for photographing the artwork Contraction and Expansion.
