Øyvind Hjelmen: Being Here

Opening: September 3 
18:00-20:00

Strandgaten 205, Bergen

Midtun Dowling welcomes you to the opening of Øyvind Hjelmen - Being Here on Thursday, 3 September from 18:00 to 20:00.

The evening will include a reading of Jon Fosse's poem written for the book Being Here, followed by an artist talk with Øyvind Hjelmen, moderated by John Kaare Hoversholm.

Being Here is an intimate exploration of presence, memory and the traces we leave behind. At the centre of Øyvind Hjelmen's photographic work lies a simple, almost instinctive human impulse: the desire to leave a mark - to say I was here, even when our presence is only momentary. 

Through small-scale, hand-printed black-and-white photographs, Hjelmen turns his attention towards fragments rather than events: a body, an interior, a landscape, an object, a gesture, a trace. The images rarely explain themselves. Instead, they appear as recollections might appear - incomplete, unstable and suspended somewhere between what was experienced and what is remembered. There is a quiet melancholy running through Being Here. Time seems to have slowed, yet its passing is present everywhere. Rooms retain something of those who have inhabited them. Objects become witnesses. Bodies appear and disappear. Landscapes hold traces that may be real, remembered or imagined.

Øyvind Hjelmen is a Norwegian fine-art photographer living and working on the island of Stord on the west coast of Norway. For approximately three decades, Hjelmen has developed a distinctive photographic practice centred on hand-printed black-and-white photography, artist books, portfolios and unique photographic objects. His work is characterised by small formats, deep tonalities and an intimate, poetic visual language in which memory, time, landscape and human presence repeatedly intersect.

Hjelmen holds a BA in Modern Art and Aesthetics from the University of Bergen. His photographs have been exhibited internationally, and his work is represented in several public and private collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 

Centro Internazionale di Fotografia Scavi Scaligeri, Verona and Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), Paris

Hjelmen's photographs occupy a space between document and memory. Rather than fixing a moment, they seem to acknowledge the impossibility of doing so. What photography preserves is always accompanied by what has already disappeared.

The unusually small scale of the works is essential to this experience. Rather than confronting the viewer from a distance, the photographs demand proximity. One must move towards them, adjust one's gaze and spend time looking. The encounter becomes almost private. In this way, scale alters the conventional relationship between image and spectator. The photograph is no longer something simply observed; it becomes something approached, discovered and, perhaps, remembered.

The exhibition extends the photographic universe of Hjelmen's monograph Being Here, published by Skeleton Key Press in 2024. The book contains 69 duotone photographs and opens with a poem written for the publication by Nobel Prize laureate Jon Fosse.

Across both book and exhibition, Being Here unfolds without a fixed narrative. Images accumulate like fragments of an uncertain archive, allowing connections to emerge between home and travel, intimacy and distance, presence and absence.

A return to where it began

Being Here also marks a significant moment in the history of Midtun Dowling.

When the gallery first opened its doors three and a half years ago, Øyvind Hjelmen was the first artist we invited to exhibit. His photographs were therefore present at the very beginning of the gallery - before the exhibitions, encounters and collaborations that have since shaped what Midtun Dowling has become.

His return with Being Here creates an unexpected resonance with the exhibition itself.

Three and a half years have passed. The gallery has evolved, changed and accumulated its own history. Yet traces of its beginning remain. To welcome Hjelmen back is therefore more than a return of an artist to the gallery; it establishes a quiet dialogue between two moments in time.

Then and now.

Beginning and continuation.

Presence and memory.

These are distinctions that Being Here continually unsettles. Hjelmen's photographs remind us that being present is always temporary, while the traces of that presence may persist in images, objects, places and memory. In this sense, the exhibition becomes both a continuation and a return - an opportunity to encounter Hjelmen's work again from a place that is no longer quite the same.

Ultimately, Being Here asks a deceptively simple question:

What remains of our presence once the moment itself has passed?

Perhaps a photograph.
Perhaps a memory.
Perhaps only the feeling that someone was here.