If you wanna be my lover
Marin Håskjold
During the pandemic, I was frightened of losing the comfort and belonging I had finally found. With a chaotic mind in a chaotic world, the camera helps me hold on to what is the most important to me. I started to take pictures to hold on to the people that meant the most to me. As the world closed down, my relationship with my friends got even closer.
This project documents a small queer community starting in 2020 when the world closed down, and we lost our meeting places and community. It began with Herman, Bendik, and I locked down in a small apartment making dinner, trying to work, throwing small parties, always playing with gender roles, and finding new ways to exist. As the world opened up, the people around us became even more important.
Marin Håskjold is an artist and filmmaker based in Oslo, Norway. She studied moving images at Nordland School of Art and Film in Kabelvåg on the Lofoten islands. Identity is a central theme in Håskjolds work, where she philosophically explores different notions of gender and sex in a queer and feminist perspective. Håskjolds work has been exhibited and screened at a number of art institutions and film festivals, such as Tate Modern, London, Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal, Coast Contemporary, Oslo, Kyiv International Short Film Festival, Helsinki International Film Festival, the Norwegian Short Film Festival in Grimstad, Trøndelag Center of Contemporary Art, and Vega Scene, Oslo, as a part of Fotogalleriet’s programme. Her short film «What is a Woman?» (2020) has also been awarded with a Norwegian Academy Award in 2021, the Amanda, for Best Short, and Best Script at Beirut International Women Film Festival.
What is a woman
Marin Håskjold’s work makes people talk. Håskjold asks the viewer to take an active positioning towards the characters impersonating roles within society. How do we structure our reasoning toward who we want to be? How do we create discriminatory categories creating uncomfortable positions for others? How do we structure communities and grouping? Gender and identity are fundamental to Håskjold’s research. The performativity of our identity is motivated by the structures surrounding us. Gender definition and normativity bring to light philosophical questions inscribed in societal structures dictating our everyday life and behavior regarding the perception of our bodies. Through filmic and photographic work, Håskjold often asks if gender is biologically or socially conditioned and brings it again to reperform these definitions endlessly for the self and others, to look into the machine producing given frameworks of desires, inclusion, and norms of acceptance.
Cool to Cry
Cool to Cry documents a small queer community starting in 2020 when the world closed down and they lost the usual meeting places and community. Project began with Marin, Herman and Bendik being locked down in a small apartment making dinner, trying to work, throwing small parties, playing with gender roles, and finding new ways to exist. As the world opened up, the lockdown relationships and bonds became even more important. The project continues in 2022 with new portraits of close friends shot in Marin’s bed where she created a space for sharing intimacies and vulnerabilities among close circle of friends. Enlarged images are printed on textiles and installed in a row to recreate an intimate connection point with the audience that is positioned in direct bodily and tactile proximity with the photographed protagonists.