Tidslommer (Time Pockets) is a new solo exhibition by Bergen-based artist Maia Urstad that draws lines across, into, and beyond her own archive, reincorporating audio and visual elements from a lifelong career in sound art.
Over four decades, Urstad has explored how technology stores memories, shapes landscapes, and leaves traces. Radio, broadcasting, and other communication technologies recur as both material and motif – not out of nostalgia, but as a way to examine how we listen to the world, and how the world listens back.
Urstad’s work moves between sound installation, sculpture, and spatial compositions. Old radios, transmitters, and technologies long phased out of everyday life are given new life as instruments, archives, and storytellers. Her works are often subtle and quiet, yet they open up spaces where time, technology, and memory flow into one another.
In working on Tidslommer (Time Pockets), Urstad invited artist and musician Luke Drozd to explore parts of her archival material – consisting of scores, sound sketches, and process drawings – as part of the exhibition's visual language. Drawing on decades of sketch and process material that also forms the basis for the sound heard in the exhibition, he selected specific works from this archive. These are presented both as physical material in the exhibition and as the backdrop for large-scale drawings painted directly onto the gallery walls.
Curatorial text
"There is a kind of alchemy that emerges in the process of Maia Urstad's work. Archival elements, sounds from long-ago cassettes, snatches of place and time reassembled, woven into a space. And it is this weaving, this acute sensitivity to listening to the resonances of a room, that makes this work come alive.
Across over four decades of work, Maia has assembled, received and taken care of these traces of our sounding world. These fragments from trains, from friends, from machines observations of how we communicate. Some-times it's grand – bouncing up and off the ionosphere – sometimes it's mundane – the peep of a Bunnpris checkout machine.
Over a career that spans so many years, technology has changed at an astonishing rate. Things that seemed cutting-edge in the 1980s have become obsolete and are now bouncing back for a retro revival; others institution-al structures like FM radio, have now been switched off. But even in our current flurry of technological innovation/collapse I have come to understand that this work is less concerned with the technologies involved, and more obsessed with our innate desire, indeed need, to communicate.
The work unfolds through expressions of this desire, resonating in the voices overheard or intoned, snippets of broadcasts, bleeps of Morse, swells of ionic radiation. And it asks the question, who are we, existing within this swirl of signals? Who are we stretching out a hand to, as the world moves around us?
This work is site specific, for this room at this time, but it spans many time-pockets, seeking out the innately human amongst the technologies. And it is this innately human centering of Maia's work that reappears again and again through her practice, making it sound fresh and urgent, however the tectonic plates of technology shift."
Peter Meanwell