“ember days” is a duo show by Elisa Bergmann and Viktor Lundgaard. The so-called Ember Days – ancient, now almost forgotten days of fasting and prayer in tune with the rhythm of the seasons – were once closely linked to weather, agriculture, sowing and harvesting. Cycles of growth, waiting and transition characterised these days.
These very conditions are also reflected in the artistic works of the two artists: ideas of permeability, powerlessness and intermediate states pervade the exhibition – both thematically and materially.
In this context, two artistic positions meet that are closely linked not only in the studio but also in life. The exhibition is their first joint exhibition – an opportunity to continue their personal connection artistically. Carlo Ginzburg’s book “I benandanti – Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento (1966)” (The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries) – served as a common basis, a shared space of thought in which their artistic traces intersect, converge and overlap.
The central reference is the figure of the Benandanti – women and men from Friuli who, in a time of social and religious upheaval, fought witches in a dream state with their spirit bodies to ensure the fertility of the fields. These nocturnal journeys, often during the Ember Days, were considered a spiritual duty – an act of care that took place while asleep and testified to protection, solidarity and responsibility towards the community.
This historical tension between concern and suspicion – between care as a gesture of closeness and its transformation into mistrust – pervades the exhibition like a keynote. This tension finds an artistic counterpart in the works of Elisa Bergmann and Viktor Lundgaard: both deal – in their own way – with traces, imprints and absences, with that which eludes us and yet remains tangible.
Crocheting, knotting, kneading dough, baking bread, pulling threads, resting – everyday practices often read as feminine appear here as physical actions that evoke a different idea of power: one that unfolds through intuition, transitions and transformation. The location itself also inscribes itself into the works: the Kaltern Prison Gallery – an architecture of confinement, control and silence – lends the exhibition an additional layer. Memory, disappearance and resistance have an effect here not only thematically, but also atmospherically in the space.
Within this constellation, Elisa Bergmann devotes herself to painting on transparent supports such as glass plates and works with overlays and permeability. Her works oscillate between visibility and withdrawal, between trace and surface. The body itself becomes a tool: as an imprint, as a gesture, as a fleeting presence in the pictorial space. Illustrations from Ginzburg’s book encounter pointillist, abstract structures reminiscent of plant growth. Some glass plates hang freely in the room, revealing the structure of the brushstrokes on the back – painting as a tactile trace that reconnects body and material. Others overlap to form an inseparable image that eludes any fixed gaze.
In addition to painting, Elisa Bergmann has developed a series of crocheted miniature houses with “villeins”. These soft, windowless cottages appear like miniaturised cells, soft architectures that promise protection and at the same time tell of powerlessness. This creates a silent echo between space, material and history. The title refers to the villeins, unfree agricultural labourers in the medieval feudal system. The work thus builds a bridge between the political dimension of architecture, body and control – and the question of what forms of care or resistance can nevertheless take root in these structures.
In his works, Viktor Lundgaard focuses on states of powerlessness, disembodiment and mental absence – motifs reminiscent of the somnambulistic journeys of the Benandanti. His prints are created in a transitional process: using red-pigmented linseed oil, he paints sparse spaces on glass plates – empty rooms in which bodies lingered while their spirits travelled through the night. By printing on paper, he creates diffuse, dissolving forms that appear like memories of something that has already slipped away. The skin-like materiality of the medium builds a subtle bridge to Bergmann’s painting, in which the body remains present as a trace, an imprint and a memory.
Lundgaard’s works are complemented by salt dough objects that, as sources of light, establish a connection to agricultural cults and spiritual protection. At the same time, they refer to light itself – and to its equally immaterial counterpart: shadow. Both appear here not only as visual phenomena, but as fragile, almost magical substances – carried by memory, fragility and a quiet resistance to disappearance.
Thus, “ember days” overlays not only two artistic positions, but also different forms of presence and resistance: the visible and the withdrawn, the physical and the ghostly, the haptic and the fleeting. Both positions work with traces that leave an impression and those that elude us. The Kaltern Prison Gallery reinforces this tension: not only as a place of confinement, but as a space in which care and control, closeness and distance inevitably overlap.