Utstilling

Avgang 2025: David Noro / Record of a Sneeze

Record of a Sneeze lingers in a space that holds both presence and absence. Materializing through large and small scale paintings; a site-specific installation across two rooms that interacts with the windows of BO, the work inhabits a necessary uncertainty, doubt and reflections on personal experiences with social-phobia, and it invites a hallucinatory crowd into the space as permanent guests.Record of a Sneeze lingers in a space that holds both presence and absence. Materializing through large scale painting and collage; a site-specific installation across two rooms that interacts with the windows of BO, the work inhabits a necessary uncertainty, doubt and reflections on personal experiences with social-phobia, and it invites a hallucinatory crowd into the space as permanent guests.

For the exhibition, two process-based collages have been assembled from smaller works created between 2023 and 2025. Emerging from limited materials and on-site experiences, they gradually expanded in scale. Through "whitewashing" and erasing original content, the process became one of a series of transformations, building up only to break down again. This ongoing cycle, where images are reworked and pushed into new contexts, highlights the influence of external forces, emphasizing process over a fixed outcome and allowing the work to remain in flux, continuously shaped by time, the audience, and its surroundings.

The exhibition takes its title from the 1894 black-and-white film by William Dickinson, considered the first copyrighted motion picture. Capturing Fred Ott sneezing after a bump of snuff, it unintentionally became a historical document. In that unguarded moment, like all sneezes, he is caught in an almost reluctant bliss, an image still available for scrutiny 131 years later.

Record of a Sneeze interacts with both the idea of the accidental glory of this film and the uncontrollable force of a sneeze, violent, momentary, and nearly impossible to suppress. An impulse vanishing before it fully manifests. Imagine a sneeze punctuating the timeline.
The exhibition is kindly and generously supported by Den Hielmstierne-Rosencroneske Stiftelse and Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond.
David Noro (b. 1993, DK/ITA) is a visual artist based in Oslo, Norway and Copenhagen, Denmark. He has studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam(2014-2018), and is currently attending the MFA-programme in Fine Arts at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2023-2025).

Noro is a painter who also works with collage, drawing, textile and sculpture. Based on a personal archive of words, texts, songs, and conversations, Noro relays fragments from the everyday, translating them into compositions where traces of narrative emerge and dissolve through mark-making, collage, and material explorations.