Byens pust / The City’s Breath at RAM Gallery
6. November – 6. Desember 2025
Siren Dahle
Catalouge text, written by Ella Jahr Nygaard
Every place has its history. It somehow lurks in the background, hidden, quiet, and ready to emerge before an observant contemporary gaze. We are always situated somewhere – in time and in space. From our limited historical position, we have a particular perspective on the world. The boundaries of a place form the framework for our collective and historical self-understanding. We can, for example, see this in our encounter with material surroundings such as buildings, streets, parks, and avenues, or in the words we use and the language we share. The fact that we are always already placed in a location can be illustrated by the image of a palimpsest—a sort of manuscript where new layers are written over the old without entirely erasing what once was. In this way, new layers of meaning are continually created in the meeting between the old and the new. Encountering a city, too, we can recognize the traces of history—history that is constantly recreated as new layers are built into the urban landscape.
When Siren Dahle prepares an exhibition, she spends a great deal of time wandering the streets around the venue, making thorough observations by connecting her body to the place through physical movement and deep presence. In doing so, her attention sharpens toward veiled and unseen details in the surroundings that may reveal the site-specific particularities of the city. Patterns of movement are also historically conditioned. The city’s layout determines tempo, rhythm, and direction. In the Kvadraturen neighborhood, this means walking along straight streets, rounding sharply angled corners, and gazing toward monumental buildings of brick and stone—a city structure and architectural expression that contains the classical urban ideals of the 1600s.
Layer upon layer beneath the urban surface, historical processes are boiling—uses and needs, temporal demands, and underlying ideals that shape the place at any given moment. For example, we still live with the spatial consequences of King Christian IV’s decree that all new buildings be constructed of brick when he founded Christiania (the district we now know as Kvadraturen) in 1624. The material awareness of that time was mandated for reasons of safety and was meant to protect against the consuming flames that had ravaged the city in 1624. A little over a hundred years later, the need for green pockets in the densely built Kvadraturen emerged, and Paléhaven was established on the edge of Christiania’s core as the city’s first public park. The avenue of (most likely) linden trees still stand today as green witnesses from the park completed in the mid-18th century.
Now Paléhaven is once again undergoing a local renaissance, and the original name has been recycled under the pretext of hyperactive construction activity. Old ideals are replaced with lofty visions of the ever-new city. Facades are smoothed out. Less brick and more steel, glass, and concrete form the mantra of our own era’s material consciousness. Buildings are demolished; new ones are built. In the meantime, and in our midst, ruins of tall buildings stand wavering in an existential limbo. The stripped building bodies appear as allegorical figures caught in a frozen moment in time. In encountering the ruin, a moment of doubt arises—are we witnessing decay or emergence, destruction or growth?
On her many walks in Kvadraturen, Dahle captures moments of the processes in which new historical layers are continually inscribed into the city’s landscape in real time. The motifs bear traces of transience, and the works appear as visual anchors between marked historicity and definitive impermanence—fading facades dressed in protective coverings, an old building body encircled by stiff scaffolding, and torn-open structures mid-demolition. She might pick up a discarded brick to take back to the studio, heavy in her hand, once supported by the city floor as part of its historical mass. The photographs are transferred to the loom. The city’s remnants take sculptural form. In this way, Dahle works with material transference, both in the creation of the concrete artwork and in a conceptual sense—the site-dialogical process is investigative, confrontational, and documentary. By retrieving and reworking fragments from the urban space, the works appear as individual pieces in a complex preservation discourse and an ongoing historical narrative. The intention is not to arrive at a kind of narrative destination, but rather to approach contemporary historical consciousness with curiosity, from an alert sense of place positioned at the intersection between past and future. Behind the large windows of RAM Gallery, facing the same street from which the motifs are drawn, the boundary between inside and outside becomes particularly pronounced—what do we choose to let stand, what do we preserve, and what is discarded onto the scrap heap of forgetfulness? What will be our contemporary inscription in the place’s palimpsest, and what do we erase? Which ruins will remain after us?
Silent Drift at SOFT gallery
27. februar – 31. mai 2020
Siren Dahle: Constructions and Sideways Drift
Catalouge text, written by Line Ulekleiv
The flow is primary, the result is temporary. Siren Elise Dversnes Dahle does not content herself with smooth surfaces, but causes elements and materials to become curled up, tilted and densified. She builds exhibitions as if on a construction site where all the parts act as points around which viewers orient themselves, both physically and metaphorically. Her works become images of constantly ongoing processes.
Dahle digs around the exhibition as a given format. In advance of it, she takes walks and observes, in open contact with the physical framework for the exhibition. How this flow-zone will materialise is unclear until the exhibition is mounted – and in this way she introduces vulnerability, a risk of breakdown and inadequacy. The exhibition room’s architecture and the surrounding city space as a given geographical area become important premises for the exhibition. Dahle incorporates random finds, materials and knowledge from the gallery and the city space into her own unkempt and dishevelled weaving. She gleans and gathers and drifts towards explorations of a physical nature.
The preparations for Silent Drift at SOFT galleri involve, for example, an impressionistic mapping of the street grid of Kvadraturen, the part of downtown Oslo where the gallery is located. The patina of this strictly defined area, built after a city fire in 1624, has eventually come to stand in stark contrast to Oslo’s new contours – heavily polished and generically angular. The dilapidated and lugubrious qualities still exist, even if less obvious and upgraded. Dahle has roamed through Kvadraturen at different times of the day, in sleet and sun, and registered details, garbage, worn-down insignificancies and small absurdities. What captured her attention on her walks appears in the exhibition as something glimpsed – here, among other things, the rust-red façade of Oslo’s second city hall has rubbed off, as a memory of something old and burned. The city’s history and visual character leave their imprint in the gallery room, which at SOFT can be captured through the window, with a sweeping glance from the sidewalk.
To search through low-lying materials leads to several expressions that Dahle often combines in installations and abstract formal compositions. She uses modules that are stacked and built out, oftentimes meeting us at eye-level. Our sense of physical presence and the material’s flexible force are central. Textiles are recurring elements, and their fragile surfaces are subjected to constant pressure. They are stressed by the threat of being unravelled by the other materials they may be cast in or surrounded by – among other things, heavy and rough concrete, cement blocks and rebar. These hard materials signal building activity, and the new construction can be manically monumental just as easily as it can be a failure. The textiles look as though they want to break out from the heavy framework, into a freer state of being.
The woven works reflect a slow and concentrated process in contrast to the exhibition’s own spontaneous scenography. Dahle’s work with a digital loom involves rhythmic elements and tramping on pedals, but also precision. The weaving combines diverse source materials and images and treats the front and the back as equal. The loom’s non-hierarchical potential would normally result in a smooth woven surface, but Dahle complicates this by deliberately including ‘mistakes’ in the weft. The threads do not cross each other but avoid creating unified form. The ends of weft threads hang down the front in clusters and counteract any conventional subordination to a larger structure.
The weaving as a basic construction, a finely-tuned structure of horizontal and vertical threads, finds its parallel in the imagery Dahle uses as her photographic starting points – often collapsed or bombed buildings. These images of ruins are woven, and a fine-meshed interaction emerges between construction and the destructive collapse associated with warfare and crisis. The architecture is grim, apparently destroyed. At the same time, Dahle’s work draws a picture of a more existential decay – distorted thoughts and feelings of discouragement. She places herself at an intersection of contrasts: between imperfect beauty, an aesthetics of decay, and the possibility of building something up. We are all part of the material and its cyclical changes, but the sideways drift towards chance occurrences is hopeful.
https://kunstavisen.no/et-tilfeldig-mote-i-dobbel-forstand
https://subjekt.no/2020/04/16/en-subtil-men-sterk-fremstilling-av-byrommets-kompleksitet/