The exhibition presents a selection of Nina Sten-Knudsen’s earliest and most recent works, all of which engage with time—not as a linear progression, but as openings, intervals, and pauses that arise in the encounter with each individual work, and in the spaces between them.

Central to the exhibition is the work Bowls with Food (1979). The installation consists of a series of handmade clay vessels filled with dried crops—beans, grains, and seeds—arranged like an offering or emergency provisions on a grey military blanket. As with the encounter with an archaeological find, the meeting with the work feels simultaneously familiar and alien, ancient and insistently present. While the work, already at the time of its creation, made visible an accelerating overconsumption and an estrangement from a circular awareness of nature’s resources, today it sharpens our attention toward what continues to disappear. The diversity of animals, plants, and ecosystems are diminishing as we take more from nature than it can replenish. Drought and food insecurity are global concerns, even as consumption continues to rise. Like hourglasses, the vessels address the urgent need for preservation, transmission, and survival; like scales, they weigh scarcity against abundance in our time.

For Nina Sten-Knudsen, the hand’s repetition of the labor of the past is not about exact reproduction, but about seeing things—and the world—through the lens of something else. In the work Gallows (1979), a leather cord of loops is stretched out like gallows or hunting snares. The snare is not concealed on the forest floor, but exposed against the white wall. The gallows are at once empty and light, yet burdened by the weight of the material itself. This ambiguity is intensified in the empty net, resembling a stretched dreamcatcher. The dream is both fleeting and caught. The gaze is both free and confined.

Where the vessels and gallows express transmission, survival, and the transformation of images and patterns of thought across time and place, the gaze is encapsulated in the work Eye, Lip, Smile (1978) through the immediacy of the video medium. A flickering eye and a silently smiling mouth loop in constant motion. Sound is absent, and Nina Sten-Knudsen does not show us the entire face, instead inviting reflection on our own gaze upon what is seen—where the most recognizable elements, the eye and the mouth, suddenly become difficult to read.

To look at Nina Sten-Knudsen’s images is to enter a movement in time. Not chronological time from “then” to “now,” but a continuous motion between past and present, appearance and disappearance. In her paintings, Nina Sten-Knudsen dissolves perspective and interrupts her detailed drawings with fields of color in thin, transparent layers. These unfathomable zones of paint create sudden openings within the works, allowing imagination and associations to flow freely. The eye is set free to wander across the pictorial surface and across the many references to art historical periods and motifs such as the landscape and the sea.

Across her practice, Nina Sten-Knudsen has constructed worlds that challenge our immediate perception through the image’s power to reshape the present and reality itself. In her works, she captures both the specific qualities of her materials (clay, video, painting) in the “here and now,” while simultaneously pointing toward timeless, anthropological paradigms that extend beyond matter. In between, glimpses emerge of the greater narrative of which we are all a part: the world and history itself.