Weekly Planner I & II by Silje Iversen Kristiansen is two individual pocket-books filled with drawings. The drawings records in a fragmented way her subjective experience of life in time and space. Each book covers the span of a year, always starting in May and ending in April. In addition to the drawings, the books contain a text by
Jan Verwoert that reflects upon the subject at hand.
"There never is enough time. There always is much too much of it. A contradiction? Not when you experience time for what it is. Real time has no clear shape or tempo. It comes and goes, fast and slow, disappearing before your eyes, like the train you just missed. Or it reappears in unbearably large amounts when you least expect it, like when the train breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and no one can say if and when the trip continues. A primary purpose of clocks and calendars therefore is to stop you from thinking too much about time, and how strangely it behaves. They give you something to hold on to, and protect yourself from standing naked before time. Modern people rely as heavily on such protection as they do on trains and planes. But they didn't fully forget how time actually comes and goes in long cycles, or sudden events. In Latin languages tempo, tiempo, temps still means both time and weather. As climate is changing, seasons are shifting, it's no use denying: time is an atmospheric condition. Tracing new cloud movement (or lack thereof) today, different calendars might soon need be drawn. Silje Iversen Kristiansen is already working on it."
Jan Verwoert
Jan Verwoert is a writer and musician, born in Geilenkirchen in 1972. He lives in Berlin and teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute MFA in Rotterdam and Oslo academy of the arts, where him and Silje Iversen Kristiansen first met in 2015. Since then they've had countless studio conversations about art and life. Jan Verwoert always seemed to have the words for the things that Silje Iversen Kristiansen only could say though art.
Silje Iversen Kristiansen (born 1994 in Sandvika) is a Norvegian artist. She holds a BFA and a MFA from the Oslo academy of the arts. In her practice she draws, sings and sculpt primarily using readily available materials recycled from her immediate surroundings. The works typically take shape as publications, installations, videos, performance and songs. The approach is inherently sculptural. Above all, her work is concerned with human experiences and time.
