Marianne Bjørnmyr is an Norwegian artist, living and working between Bodø, Norway and London where she received her MA in Photography from London College of Communication in 2012. In her practice she works with research based photography, concerned around the presentation of the photograph set up against our understanding, interpretation and generated perception of imagery.
Marianne’s work has been exhibited internationally including Daniel Blau’s 5 under 30, The Norwegian State Exhibition "Høstutstillingen" and The North Norwegian Art Exhibition. She has earlier been awarded the Juvenarte and Jansons Scholarship amongst others art grants. Marianne was in 2015 one of the FATHOM Residents at Fours Corners film in London, and was the same year mentioned as one of 10 "up and coming" London based contemporary artists by CultureTrip. In 2016 she received the Norwegian State Artist Grant for 2 years.
The work ‘An Authentic Relation’ is based on a diary found on the barren and desolate South-Atlantic island of Ascension in 1726. The diary was found to belong to the dutch solider Leenert Hasenbosch, who one year earlier was left as a prisoner on the island as a punishment for sodomy. The diary contained detailed descriptions from the first day of his arrival until the last day of his life, six months later. The book was brought to England and has since been published in multiple versions; the story has through time been fabricated and twisted several times.
The work presents photographs from a trip the artist made to Ascension Island, accompanied with the original diary; a constellation of documentation, culminating in an overall feeling of distance and displacement, questioning our idea about history, not as fortified facts, but as possible fiction. Through the work, one navigates between text and images, forming an incomplete experience of the story; the immediate apparent gets obliterated and one receives access to a incomparable world – composed by the connections between photography, text and object but separated by history and time.
We see a reference between the different fragments of a story, and the work presents an abstraction where the viewers independently create their own cartography of a vague narrative and story. The images are being repeated throughout the work in obvious and less obvious ways; existing on their own and in an intertwining web of echoes and references, without being more then a reference to something that once was.
