Lotte Konow Lund’s exhibition What Has Been Shown Cannot Be Said is an extensive presentation of her drawings, photography and video. The exhibition provides a comprehensive overview of the development of Lotte Konow Lund’s career as an artist, from completion at the Fine Arts Academy in 1997, up until today. Ironically enough, while she protested against the museum as institution in 1997, by breaking away from the Academy thesis exhibition at The Stenersen Museum to show her work at The National Theatre in Oslo, she is now the first within her graduating class to have a solo exhibition at the same museum.

Lotte Konow Lund can discuss almost anything with authority; religion, politics, art theory, popular culture, media, feminism and capitalism are but a few of the issues she converses about with ease. From the hideousness of the colour pink, to the strange perspectives of Early Renaissance painting, it seems she can add insight to any topic. She isn’t afraid to say what is on her mind, and always gets straight to the point. Her outspokenness and propensity for engaged discussions translates beautifully into her art. She expresses herself with precision and clarity throughout her work, ranging from drawing and painting to video, photography and performance.

Within her many forms of expression and wide range of references, several aspects tie Lotte Konow Lund’s works together as a whole. In particular, her interest in both the conceptual and the formal, and her ability to unite personal experience with collective iconography, results in a powerful form of expression that raises socio-critical issues while it also questions the very function of contemporary art. Her videos and drawings blow the dust off of conservative portraiture. In addition, her drawings seem to erase and redefine the function of drawing today. As she pays as much attention to content as to form, she plays these aspects against each other in subtle yet significant ways that get to the core of what contemporary art is and has the power to be.

Among the many issues Konow Lund addresses in her work, certain factors are particularly relevant to an overall understanding of her art. For instance, her unique approach to portraits extends far beyond traditional portraiture, thereby pushing the boundaries of what portraiture can be. Her portraits tend to depict various perceptions of an individual – psychological and otherwise – more than the shape of a nose or the colour of one’s eyes. Self Portrait as Five Dictators and a Victim is an ideal example of her ability to convey ideas that lie far beyond what initially meets the eye. What first appears to be a straightforward series of portraits of the same woman, perhaps in different moods or at different stages of life, turns out to be a self-portrait of the artist, in the guise of Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Francisco Franco, Idi Amin, Adolph Hitler and Anne Frank.

As in so much of her work, this series functions on multiple levels, both formal and conceptual. While the detail and draftsmanship are visually fascinating, the real power of these drawings (and others that are similar in approach) lays in the surprise of a self-portrait that features the character traits of other people. Obviously, she doesn’t see herself as Saddam Hussein or Hitler but has chosen to incorporate the collective into the personal, thereby digging at the roots of representation. She typically includes iconography from our collective consciousness in her drawings, thereby making the personal easily accessible and universally relevant.  In positing the hypothetical question of how she might look if her features were combined with those of five historical monsters and the quintessential victim, she turns portraiture into an intriguing set of observations rather than a reasonable facsimile of any single person. Incontestably, the best portraiture always captures what lies beneath the surface, and in Lotte Konow Lund’s case, it also conveys her thoughts and questions of what if, and why not.

Equally engaging are the portraits of Lotte Konow Lund’s sister, a series that embraces the most significant aspects of her approach to drawing and portraiture. Once again, she brings together personal and collective symbols that result in art that conveys both the pain of personal tragedy and the continuing influence of artists such as Picasso, Velasquez, and Henry Moore.  Throughout her work, she is consistently interested in how the iconography we are surrounded with as children ultimately contributes to shaping who we become as adults. Although as a child she found Henry Moore boring and stale (as many of us did), he ultimately managed to seep into her consciousness and stay there, suddenly having a huge impact on how she draws.

As is often the case with Konow Lund’s work, she manages to point her finger – with the precision of a perfectly sharpened pencil – at issues that are both highly personal and collectively relevant. I was astounded to discover how her appropriation of Henry Moore actually had the effect of changing how I feel about Henry Moore – an artist whom I have long considered to be just another overrated Western male artist. There is brilliance in her appropriation of Moore – right before my eyes those heavy sculptural blobs transformed into incredibly interesting organic forms. Taken out of the typically unsuitable surroundings where we are so used to seeing Henry Moore, she redraws the sculptural forms and refigures them within more interesting contexts, thereby managing to re-create an icon. She levels the typically male-dominated playing field of art in her favour, by consistently beating male artists at their own game.

In Lotte Konow Lund’s work every little detail has multiple meanings, and these details are intricately interconnected, just as everything about our lives is interconnected in a complicated web of consciousness. It is helpful to understand the specific sources of inspiration to better understand all the details. Again, the connection between the personal and the collective is evident throughout her work, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in The Kennedy Project. Her particular interest in President Kennedy, and her fascination in the television debate between Kennedy and Nixon in particular, is the sort of highly specific topic of interest typical of Konow Lund’s work.

This historical television debate is familiar to anyone with the slightest interest in history and the political significance of this debate needs no further explanation. Even more compelling is the underlying personal relevance of this public event and how she appropriates it to express ideas that relate to the residual memories of her childhood.  The work speaks of the influence of American culture on her upbringing, something which has made an indelible mark on the way she makes art. More importantly, the work is actually a self-portrait. Throughout her work, we discover the inherent significance of various objects as signifiers of much more than meets the eye. As she unveils the visual and formal qualities of objects, forms, shapes and colours, she makes it quite clear how the visual relates to the psychological and how visual symbols are necessarily bound to personal experience.

All of these aspects come to the fore in a tiny drawing that resembles a UFO floating in space.  In many ways, this drawing is formalism at its best. Upon close inspection, the lines of the drawing are so detailed that the form itself almost disintegrates in the process. Hidden in the detail, we see how her obsessive working of the pen echoes her approach to and appropriation of Henry Moore’s work. Nonetheless, Henry Moore’s influence here is subconscious at most, for this is actually a drawing of a surveillance camera in the courtroom. All of this brings us back to the idea that objects can and do contain meanings that we don’t always know about or immediately understand the significance of.

Lotte Konow Lund is as talented at evoking subtle nuances of identity in her drawings as she is at addressing psychological issues in videos that convey her decidedly feminist stance. The first time I saw a significant presentation of her video work was in 1999 at Galleri Wang. The power of her short, pithy videos stays with me to this day. She has a singular ability to say just what needs to be said in order to get her point across – no more, no less. In general, her spare visual language speaks volumes about personal experience and various emotional states, while also commenting the female artist’s experience in particular.

The exhibition What Has Been Shown Cannot Be Said includes a selection of Lotte Konow Lund's videos from the past ten years. In these videos, she addresses very serious topics, from domestic violence to psychosis. However, there is always a tinge of humour lying right beneath the surface. Konow Lund refers to her older videos as Talking Heads, a description that captures the underlying humour in these psychological portraits. She often plays the lead role in her videos, filming herself in private conversational settings. As such, the videos can be interpreted as fictive conversations between herself and the viewer.  Thus, viewers come face to face with the artist as performer. She typically poses as a victim, or some otherwise tormented individual, while viewers take on the role of voyeur or imaginary psychiatrist.

What makes Lotte Konow Lund's videos so engaging is her ability to say so many different things at the same time, while she relies on minimal means. There are no props, elaborate settings, or anything else to distract our attention from the protagonist, who also happens to be the artist. From mundane reflections on the everyday, to biting socio-political commentary, she consistently expresses herself with deadpan humour.

Baby Face Assassin is among her most well-known works that features the artist in a state of desperation and tears after having lost a small plastic object with a picture of the famous Norwegian soccer player Ole Gunnar Solskjær. The video is imbued with sharp social criticism; it questions our dependency on material things and how idol worshipping, in general, takes advantage of and plays on our insecurities. Obviously, it is unsettling to see a person so upset at having lost a tiny, seemingly worthless, plastic charm. Once again, Lotte Konow Lund highlights the hidden meaning of objects. Clearly, the object itself had much more than face value; it represents an extension of identity.

The notion of objects as signifiers also comes to the fore in her pivotal new work, The Bredtvet Prison Project. For this work, Konow Lund asked a group of women inmates at the Bredtvet Prison, to select three items that they identified with. She would then draw a portrait based on these three items, thereby emphasizing that physical objects can bear inherent meaning far beyond what meets the eye, and also proving that one can draw a portrait of a person without including their physical features.

Lotte Konow Lund consistently works along the razor-thin border between sanity and emotional imbalance as she captures the mundane and the tragic along the way. In the video The Total Cycle of Psychoanalysis in 7 Minutes she makes her distrust of psychoanalysis quite clear. Her acting is so convincing that we might even feel trapped into the role of imaginary psychiatrist. Suddenly, we are left wondering about the root of this woman’s anxieties, insecurities and frustrations with herself and perhaps ultimately, the realization that there really is no help to be found in the line of psychoanalysis. Particularly interesting is the idea that the hypothetical injustices imposed upon this woman are, in fact, a true reflection of reality for many, making the boundary between fiction and reality disappear right before our eyes.

Whether Lotte Konow Lund pinpoints everyday boredom and the attempt to find meaning in life in the video Solitude for Many, highlights the plight of the female artist in You Ignore Me or creates an absurd suicide help-guide in Domestic Violence, she consistently blurs the fine line between fiction and reality, the quotidian and the surreal. As she deftly shifts back and forth between seriousness and irony, we are sometimes left wondering if she’s putting us on. To be sure, this is part of the lasting power of her work. Within the multiple layers of expression, and infinite trajectories of hidden meaning, Lotte Konow Lund packs a punch with humour and the inner confidence of victory, because she somehow always comes out winning.