In everyday life people encounter other people, objects and situations that inspire fascination. One aspect of fascination, Lotte Konow Lund claims, is the uncertainty displayed in one's relation to the object of attraction. She utilizes this space as a sie for an analysis of images that, characteristically vacillitates between a communal visual grammar and a personal iconography. In her suite of drawings  Self-Portrait as Five Dictators and a Victim 2007, she explores her fascination with faces commonly identified with evil, like Hitler's and innocence like Anne Frank's, by merging them with her own. The uncanny mash-up question the habit of identifying nonphysical qualities with material ones. In  several other drawings Konow Lund depics the iconic and ever-smiling visage of John F. Kennedy; as in Francis Bacon's dark reworkings of Diego Velázquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X, however, it's unclear whether we see a smile or a scream. The exhibition's centerpiece is Why
do I draw? II/ Images from the inside, 2007, which consists of depictions of objects inmates associate with themselves: a teddy bear, Mary J Blige, a bottle of vodka. But drawn by Konow Lund and severed from the context that made them unique, the objects end up being portrayed as mere things. Here, fascination becomes a perceptual space in which one's relation to images can play out. whereas seventeenth-century artists painted skulls on canvas as memento mori, or reminders of death, these drawings serve as reminders of something more vital: our relationship with images themselves. Living among an increasingly prefabricated set of images, people can develop, as Konow Lund shows, personal meanings by creating their own combinations.

Lotte Konow Lund / What has been said, cannot be shown
The Stenersen Museum,  Oslo, August 2007
Author Kjetil Røed - Artforum 10.16.07