When the horizon line disappears

On this occasion, we made an online interview with the artist in New York. Youmna Chlala is both a visual artist and a poet with a strong sense of material, body and language. In her work the tangible and intangible are closely connected, and even if her work is deeply personal and rooted in real-life events, they are poetic and open for the visitor to experience and unpack.

“The project began when the curator Milena Høgsberg (former director and chief curator of Wanås Konst, ed.) and I spoke about images connoted by the ocean in the forest. When I walk in a forest, I have always felt as if I was at the bottom of the sea floor and that the plants, trees and flowers had stayed long after the water evaporated. I had also recently been an artist in residence at IASPIS in Stockholm where I researched labyrinths that resembled each other on the southern shores of Sweden and the Mediterranean. The labyrinthic forms, demarcated through drawing in landscape and activated by human movement, had the ability to affect change. This Feeling, Oceanic brings these ideas together through form, concept and personal narrative.” 

“For the last few years, through the conceptual frame of The Museum of Future Memories, I have been making work based on the question of what happens when the horizon line disappears. How do we know where we are? This originated from a speculative artwork and a short-story that I wrote in Norway about a future city where the sea and sky are no longer separate. The project grew into multiple site-specific iterations. The questions expanded into how we locate ourselves when the point of reference is unstable. What shifts internally, physically and collectively if the horizon line is an apparition (alluding to both past and future time) rather than a solid line that bifurcates sea and sky? My personal interrogation is also about how I encounter the line as an artist. I have long been obsessed with the modernist line as it appears spatially and architecturally.”

“I was initially thinking about how the sea is a body of water that holds memory. When I learned about the psychoanalytical reasoning of the ocean feeling, I was struck by the idea that the limitless bond between mother and child is both encompassing and temporary. This feeling that is so physical is also time-based. If memory is suspended time, how can it exist in a space like the sea that is always in motion? The only way to access the memories is to dissolve the boundaries between body and space.” 

“So much of my understanding of the world is based on adjacencies. I learn through intimate encounters, so I create them through my art works. The beach chairs are a marker of a relaxed body and although painted cobalt blue, they connote the warm orange and yellow tones of sun and sand. As objects, they represent how being near the sea encourages specific behaviours from play to contemplation. As a spatial drawing, the chairs represent a line in the landscape and ask the participant to activate it into meaning. Your body is shaping a collective image. Sitting there also changes your perception of where your body ends and begins. And I think it teaches you something about how to sit, how to listen, how to look, how to imagine. It shifts your level of being comfortable or uncomfortable, perhaps reveals your untold desires… maybe you have always wanted to sit next to a stranger but never felt like you could.”

“I am so excited by this location because it is a site of happenstance and the movement of a multitude of stories. Migrants are used to existing in simultaneous places. What can this knowing bring to the project? How will it affect the way they engage the work? I hope the work is an invitation to pause and search together for the horizon line and that new perspectives come about from the encounters.”

“I hope that the work will leave the trace of possibility, that the Malmö Konstmuseum will be a site where artworks can bring together personal and collective narratives. I would love for this work to be like a fossil, a small gesture connoting a specific time and place.” 

“Fossils are like a trace and a drawing. They have the metaphoric quality of being outside of time or imbedded in deep time. When we think of a traces, we think of them like a ghost, but fossils are so material, an imprint on a stone or on a shell, that also holds volume and presence. Will there be an indentation in the earth that will stay physically past this project? Will there be a tree that someone remembers looking at differently?”

“My point of departure is often drawing as an extension of the hand and a way to explore the unexpected, peripheral and ecstatic. Each work, no matter the material, or scale is preoccupied with presence and absence and how that allows for connections to be made that did not seem possible. My artworks and writings begin with a question considered through a particular form as a lens or a manifestation.”

“With each work, the questions are the source of new research and meetings with people whose work and ideas expand my own. Much of my inspiration comes from encounters with a range of people from a palaeontologist with drawers full of plant fossils, to the historians of witch trials.”  

“I am working on a series of paintings and assemblages preoccupied with flora that moves and meanders as it adapts to expansive ecosystems.”