VIA - A space to be who you are

by hilde fauskerud

In 2019, the video artist Tone Myskja (b. 1961) and musician, composer and arranger Jon Balke (b. 1955) were commissioned to animate three stairwells in Lillehammer Art Museum. Under the title Via, their installations were envisaged as transit zones that connect different parts of the museum’s exhibition “Have we met before? Art from the collection through 200 years”. Myskja developed video presentations that were projected directly onto the walls, floors and stairs, while Balke contributed sound compositions for the same spaces. Via became a symbiotic relationship between these two elements.

Tone Myskja works with sculptural video installations, music and performing arts, often in combination with each other. Her installations invite the viewer to take part in an aesthetic and sometimes physical experience. Her visual idiom is characterised by the interplay between the concrete and the abstract, although it is generally the abstract aspect that dominates. Some of her works occupy the entire physical space, while others focus on the tension between the inner and the outer. The body often takes the leading role, as it does in the performing arts. Several senses are stimulated simultaneously, with Balke’s sound compositions enhancing the visual experience. Balke’s musical idiom also explores the interplay between the concrete and the abstract. Both elements are non-verbal and open to interpretation.

Via contains clear references to the modernist art of the 1920s and 30s. At the same time, the work stands out from modernism in its combining of genres. Via could almost be considered a three-dimensional painting in motion, in which the main role is taken by the viewer and her sensory, physical, and meditative experience. This text sheds light on how in this work Myskja processes the legacy of modernism to achieve a total installation that appeals to corporeal perception. The starting point is the part of the installation that was purchased by Lillehammer Art Museum.

Ephemeral Movements

By Camilla Eeg - Tverbakk

Hands sensually moving across white sheets, shapes and colours in ever shifting jumps, flickering patterns of paper or facades nervously run across the screen. A sudden stop, an installation of miniature sheep on a green pasture and that same image broken into abstract digital imagery upon the walls – moving between micro and macro. Movements of a handkerchief climbing up a dancer’s body and into his pocket, meanwhile a young woman gradually disappears in a distant cornfield. An ashtray moves by itself along a solitary sofa, while the dancer repeatedly follows his own steps. An angel figure running through nature, mysteriously swallowed up into a stony hillside or a woman hanging from a tree – an image contrasted by floating staircases in the sky dancing to the sounds of the musicians on stage.

Tone Myskja’s video images are seductive in their sensual treatment of the body. They are stringent carrying a precise sense of rhythm. I ask myself what it is in her art that draws me to it, what was that echo I heard inside myself as I was watching? Perhaps it was my own body responding to her(s) calling?

The Flux of Moments

Reading the Photographs and Installations of Tone Myskja

by Anne Karin Jortveit

You may have experienced a sudden sadness in front of a photograph - the sadness of not knowing what happened before or after. Instantaneous still images keep you at  a distance in time and space, and you may feel alienated if there is nothing that happens to connect you to the scene depicted. You might expect to experience these same feelings in front of  the digitised photographs and repetitive video sequences in the art of Tone Myskja, but to enter one of her installations is to experience a difference.
For her 10x98 European Commision, Myskja has chosen to work with a vast historical span, juxtaposing photographic images of stone and water, linking a Yorkshire Landscape and a Norwegian landscape to a history of the Viking settlers of the Norwegian past.

She lets images of natural objects and light transform themselves into a digital reality, representing an imaginary site where past and present come into contact. In this realm, differences and similarities among time, space and language come into question.