Artist Talk: A.K Dolven & Niklas Zaborowski
On Memory, Material and Perception
A conversation on artistic practice, the persistence of experience and the ways in which images are formed, remembered and transformed.
What happens when an artist at the beginning of their career meets one whose practice has unfolded over decades?
In conversation, Niklas Zaborowski and AK Dolven moved between experience, process and perspective. The distance in age and artistic trajectory gradually disappeared, replaced by a genuine exchange in which both artists became listeners and students of one another.
A meeting across generations, without the distance between them.
The two artists explored storytelling as a way of processing experience, memory and perspective. Moving between photography, video, sculpture and metal, the conversation considered how different media could carry, transform and distort fragments of lived experience.
Taking Zaborowski’s debut exhibition Jeg vil ikke lenger ta på himmelen as a point of departure, Dolven reflected on his approach to process, materiality and transformation, and on the ways in which experience could leave traces in both the body and the work.
Despite being at different stages of their careers, their practices met in an interest in the image as something more than representation, a field where memory, material and perception could be continuously rewritten.
Although working from different generations and through distinct artistic languages, Dolven and Zaborowski shared an interest in the relationship between image and experience. In both practices, the image could be understood as something that exceeds the act of depicting: a form through which perception, memory and lived experience are given material presence.
Their exchange brought this common ground into focus without collapsing the differences between their approaches. It was precisely the distance between their practices that made the conversation productive, allowing questions of process, duration and material to be considered from different artistic positions.
The discussion opened up a space to consider how artistic meaning develops over time, and how the encounter between an artwork and its viewer may continue to alter what is seen, remembered and understood.
The conversation was presented in connection with Niklas Zaborowski's debut exhibition, Jeg vil ikke lenger ta på himmelen. The exhibition formed the immediate context for the talk, bringing the discussion of artistic process and image-making into relation with Zaborowski's work.
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