Talleiv Taro Manum

Talleiv Taro Manum’s photography, film, and installations provide a narrative on people and places based on the artist’s life—fishing trips, old houses, vintage cars, friends, and dogs. His installations have often questioned the hierarchies of value within “High Art,” appropriating elements from old-time souvenirs and other mementos and scrap he collects in his artworks.

In the project Paradise: Does it Exist? at Fotogalleriet, Oslo, Manum combined large-format photography with a broken 1932 model Chevrolet positioned in the gallery, giving himself the task of repairing it during the exhibition period. “By placing the car in the gallery,” he explains, “I simply want to make one of the most important props of the photos generally available and so make my story true. I don’t work with staging. I work with my mental and physical relationship to individuals, objects, form, light, motion, and space.” In his photography, Manum experiments with old film formats, such as Instamatic, and their inherently nostalgic look. His pictures are filled with visual details and allegory and relate to Symbolist paintings.

Since 2001, Manum has arranged an art and music festival as a site-specific installation on his small farm Ringnes, in Skotbu, south of Oslo. A traditional old kiosk, an outdated but reconnected telephone booth, and a billboard are elements of the installation. The billboard announces the bands with posters, and the ones from previous years are carefully kept visible, offering a visual diary. The festival, which lasts for a weekend in August, is a public event and has several hundred visitors, including Manum’s helpers and friends camping in tents and caravans on the former farmland. The stage is the porch of the farmhouse and, with the festival growing in size each year, the porch has been rebuilt to make place for a larger sound system. For his festival project Manum also makes silkscreen posters, T-shirts, books, and record releases. The increasing popularity of the festival has eventually become a logistical problem. After the 2006 season, Manum decided the festival project had reached its limits in size and had to come to an end. From now on the Greetings from Ringnes, Skotbu is merely a reconstruction of public space.

Manum has developed his artistic practice into a Gesamtkunstwerk, involving his persona and his habitat. Ringnes is home, studio, and stage, blurring the line between public and private. The micro-utopia Manum creates is a world in which the worn qualities of well-used items are valued. Scenes of everyday life become exceptional in his work. They reflect on the loss of function in the passage of time and examine the powers of sentimentality. His snapshots from the festivals evoke a strong sense of “us,” echoing the inclusive manner of a hippie family. While showing a series of these at Momentum, the Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art (2006), Manum arranged a party with two of his favorite bands, Hawaii Go Go’s and Girl from Saskatoon, transforming the gallery into a typical rural party, bringing to front the experience of “here-and-now” togetherness that is so essential to Manum’s work.

Annette Kierulf