Hanne Tyrmi

The Lost Thing uses the house as a metaphor in which the various rooms are images of mental states, memories and displacements. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition is structured as a labyrinthine wandering from room to room showing an experimental exploration of installation art’s ability to articulate existential issues through a poetic architectural adaptation. Hanne Tyrmi (1954) is a Norwegian artist who has been active in the art scene since the 1980s. As an artist, she is totally unafraid of using a variety of visual languages to make her point: she is a sort of “polyglot” with a reputation for creating sculptures, installations, videos and photographic works that invade our emotions like a benign virus. Her work is infectious and any contact with it sets in motion a metamorphosis that brings about a healthy resistance to the emotional malaise of our time. A strong sense of adventure can be felt in her works, something she learnt from her travels around the world, without fear and with an open mind. She lived and worked in Brazil, South Africa and India for years; more recently she moved her studio from Oslo to Xiamen in order to work in Chinese workshops. Hanne has ventured into the world of art fearless of its conventional canons and she is willing to address issues and subjects many artists would shy away from. Her curiosity is focused on how one’s mind and body behave when confronted by certain images and environments, i.e. on the emotional reactions of the viewers.