Aurora

07.05.2009 @ Landmark 21:00

Fatal Nordic Attractions – Faded Love Songs

Aurora Sandlilje (NO)

Life is always patethic, in many ways like the search for love.
But yet, trivial choices in life may stand insistent, crucial, and irrevocable in the end.

In the video works of Aurora Sandlilje a fine line balanced between the patethic and the stoic.

Dealing with the humiliation and unforgivingness of failing to succeed in Life, Sandlilje is mirroring our inner fears through familiarly strange characters.

Sandlilje rubs it in your face; the pain, the humiliation,
until you get it.

FAILURE. Yes. Bring it on.

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Works presented at Landmark

“Lovesongs”
Two videos from the installation work “Lovesongs”; “Unfaithfullness” (6.22 min) and “Abandoned because she is a mother” (6.12 min) is shown at monitors.
The stories of two women that experience defeat in love and how they are going to go on with their lives and hopes…

“Song for Raped Women”, performance.
I perform a song dedicated to raped women. A video is projected on the wall and tells the story of a young woman that experiences rape.

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Aurora Sandlilje lives and works in Oslo. She graduated from the Bergen Art Academy in 2004 and it is with great pleasure that Flaggfabrikken reintroduces Sandlilje to Bergen.

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STATEMENT

I work within video, performance, sound and music, text and installations.

I wish to express the dignity of stigmatised human beings, often women, but also men.
The stigmatised Woman/Man with their less successful choices in life are forced to stand outside Society and feel loneliness and pain. I also want to criticise structures in media and the ideals of human behaviour presented in media (including advertising, cinematography, news channels etc.)
How able are we as human beings to take independent choices in our lives? The role of the victim is awkward and difficult to handle, and often associated with guilt and shame.

I also wish to express our unconscious wish to condemn other human beings. I use typical “cliché aesthetics” with glamorous styles in staged scenarios as a method to visualise and criticise the ideals projected in movies and advertising, in gender, but also in more personal patterns in human life.

Movies and advertising appeals to our feelings, and wishes to manipulate to experience, but also to trick us to believe that we need “something” to fulfil ourselves, and then pursue us to “buy” the ideals presented to us.
Society depends on this manipulation, and makes “the human project “ difficult to maintain.
By producing everything myself, both music/singing, lyrics, stage design, costumes, casting, directing etc. I have the possibility to work low budget, and differ from mainstream- aesthetics presented in movies and advertising, create my own personal voice and presence as a critical voice in the society.

Aurora Emilie Sandlilje