Gardar Eide Einarsson: Total Control Zone

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The exhibition title Total Control Zone comes from the term for the strictest security level within the notorious North Korean concentration camps. The term can also draw the mind to a more general dystopic endpoint of state mass surveillance of the individual – a reality that draws closer with the advent of advanced technologies and artificial intelligence. In his current exhibition, Einarsson presents a series of new works which raise questions about how individuals relate to state control, sometimes desiring it, sometimes resisting it, sometimes falling victim to it.

Gardar Eide Einarssons works are direct and uncompromising in their interpretation of the social dichotomies of society. These are brought into play through two kinds of images: associative images and images that are being decontextualized and converted into paintings and installations.

The human body is a continuous motif in the exhibition as the site where repression becomes a lived reality and is represented in a series of five new paintings with the collective title Common Errors. These paintings, based on illustrations of common errors when firing handguns from a police and military training manual in the 1960’s, have been penetrated where the bullets would have entered the target, recalling the real physical violence of the bullet as well as the pierced paintings of postwar artist Lucio Fontana.

The anthropomorphic theme is continued in two other paintings: one based on a cartoon set in the Vietnam war depicting a caricatured fist of an officer with an outstretched index finger summoning the audience to join him in war. The second is based on a book cover of an inflammatory 1960’s tome titled The Riotmakers where red splotches of paint merge with a white background cleared from information, which next to the pierced silhouettes, brings memories of abandoned human traces.

Kilde: Nils Stærk