By Simon Tykjaer
2024
The exhibition Mare Incognitum by HC Gilje is a journey into the unknown sea. Using mechanical light installations, video, and heat-sensitive materials, the Regelbau 411 bunker is transformed into a place of shifting shadows, instability and discovery.
The bunker, seemingly grounded in the landscape, is not truly founded; it floats on unstable ground, a moving expanse that mirrors the ocean’s restless depths. Its autonomy, paradoxically, provides a kind of balance in the face of inevitable shifts in the surrounding terrain. Like the sea it parallels, the bunker floats, decentered, in a space where natural forces and human interventions intersect.
Through six interconnected works, the exhibition delves into the paradox of human intervention in nature. The rotating camera in Barents (mare incognitum) captures a restless sea, its lens fixed toward the North Pole, at a site threatened by oil extraction and climate upheaval. This rotating horizon echoes the exhibition’s central theme: the circular, rhythmic flow of time, in contrast to the linear march of progress.
In the bunker, horizons shift like waves, tides rise and fall as shadows are drawn from the depths, revealing movements where natural forces and technological interventions blur. Here, technology serves not as a tool of domination but as a means to reveal what often remains hidden—layers of time, depth and history.
Mare Incognitum challenges us to navigate the troubled waters of our current ecological reality. In these waters, the bunker floats unmoored, drifting into the uncertain future of an uncharted sea.
Free impro symbiosis
an introduction to my Lichen films by HC Gilje
2024
mare incognitum
exhibition text by Simon Thykjaer
2024
HC Gilje on exploring unknown landscapes
Interview by James Lee for Hakapik
2022
lysfanger nr.1
by Hanan Benammar
2018
Pings: Matter, Environment and Technology in the work of HC Gilje
by Mitchell Whitelaw
2017
Conversations over time
by Anne Szefer Karlsen
2017
Siding with the light
by Joost Rekveld
2017
Conversations with Spaces
by HC Gilje
2017
7x7 cirkler: Else Marie Pade + HC Gilje
exhibition text for Klangrum Møn by Morten Søndergaard
2014
TIME, SPACE, CHANGE, SPEED, MOTION - Interview with HC Gilje
by Nicky Assmann
2013
Right Here, Right now - HC Gilje´s Networks of Specificity
by Mitchell Whitelaw
2009
Within the space of an instant
by HC Gilje
2005
HC Gilje – Cityscapes and the
cinematic avantgarde
by Per Kvist
2005
preface to Shadowgrounds catalog
by Jeremy Welsh
2001
interview with HC Gilje
by Andreas Broeckmann
2001