Mette Tronvoll, Mongolia, 08.11.2007- 09.02.2008

At first glance, Mette Tronvoll’s images of contemporary Mongolians show us people in their traditional circumstances. Exquisite details, of clothing and surroundings, the animated facial expressions of the figures, all attest to the foreignness of the lifestyles portrayed. Yet, upon closer observation, our first impressions shift. For here, too, are traces of our own global consumer culture: a mass-produced pullover here, a Nike sneaker there. Even in paradise. One almost yearns to be caught up in the old clichés, the ideal notions of purity and primordiality that early-twentieth-century modern thinkers posited upon so-called aboriginal peoples. But the reality recorded here disrupts that dream.

Stylistically, these are static compositions with nothing of the snapshot about them. They are situational and avoid narrative. Tronvoll’s subjects face the camera deliberately, without emotional expression, as in a studio portrait. Like August Sander, Tronvoll creates an apparently objective form of visual presentation that records the facts of those portrayed; this is no mere typological system of horsemen or housewives. And the work resolves itself not in narration but in observation. The only thing subjective is Tronvoll’s attitude in pursuing particular topics over the course of various series of works. Her theme always revolves around the temporal, whether she contrasts individual portraits of older and younger women as in the series Age (1994) or, as in Double Portraits (1998), presents side-by-side two almost identical photos of the same person, taken in quick succession. In her individual and group portraits of bathers on the island of Unartoq, Greenland, of 1999, she subtly evokes the same theme. And here, too, in the new series of images from Mongolia, she understands how to dissolve space into the mythological, allowing the figures to seem like busts carved from stone. The temporal vanishes into the eternal, only to be brought back to itself through those manifest traces of global civilization.