For her upcoming solo exhibition at MELK in Oslo, Norwegian artist Hilde Honerud continues her ongoing project Regarding the Pain of the Future, asking: How can we still use photography to engage with real and important matters?
K.Z: Hi Hilde, how is everything coming along with the new exhibition?
H.H: It is certainly getting there. I just finished all the prints, and yesterday I shipped the last ones off for framing, so the major decisions and adjustments are mostly done. So now things are quite laid-back. If you would have asked me a month ago, my answer would have been very different, all pieces in flux. This is in many ways the most ambitious and multilayered project I have ever done, so making it all fit together, it was really … well.
K.Z: When we last spoke, we were running through some titles. Have you finally decided on one?
H.H: Yes. Aletheia. You know, sometimes I work with a title that defines the project and is sort of given. This time, I tried to let the title come to me. Actually, I’ve tried to let the exhibition as such come to me, which sounds strange, when there have been so many locations and recordings, so much planning and reading.
Aletheia stems from Ancient Greek. It can be translated directly as “truth”, but the literal meaning is, as I understand it, something closer to unconcealment – the process through which something hidden becomes visible. It’s an open-ended term. I am interested in truth not as something fixed or easily revealed, but as something that emerges through looking, attention and interpretation. Like Wolfgang Tillmans’ beautiful title, To Look Without Fear.
The title could work well with photography in general. A photograph appears to show something directly, but always contains absences and choices. But that is not really it. To me, it has always appeared a little lazy, or convenient, to merely observe that photographs can be untruthful and let that be the final word. What makes this interesting – and challenging – is to accept that instability and then ask: how can we still use photography to engage with real and important matters? And in this exhibition, it is not only what we looked for, but what emerged when we set out to find how to visually work with the idea of a threatening future.
K.Z: “We” refers to your husband Jon, correct? Can you tell me more about the ongoing work this exhibition is part of, and how the two of you collaborate on it?
H.H: Yes, with this project I explore how photographs can hold the uncertainty of the future, and how images can fluctuate between documentation and construction. The starting point was realizing that we would have to find a way to talk about the future with our children when the future no longer seemed hopeful, at least not in the way it used to.
When I started this work, it was from a very dark place. It was not only about the way the world was going; it was other things as well. I had completed GYM, about refugees navigating their existence through sports on Lesbos, where I found myself confronting the utter meaninglessness of our lives being products of chance – and, really, the unacceptability of my own privilege. There was no way around that if I was to really work with it. And then, prosaically, I had a bad shoulder that prevented me from sleeping properly for a few years, and anyone who has experienced that knows how it affects your emotions. And then there was the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, catastrophic climate change and … it was dark.
Since we met, Jon and I have always worked together, and in this project that collaboration is quite relevant. Because of his background in central government, and now as a public administration researcher, he can bring quite nuanced insights into the mechanisms of society. This would work as a resistance or boundary against simplifying observations, and the sociological tools help us to really observe what is going on.
Step by step, it evolved into a project in which we were looking for places that speak about the future: about fears, but also about working with the future, and about how nothing is isolated. The ways in which things relate to the future, what people worry about with the future, and the care they put into their work are all connected. This is reflected in how we find new locations, but also in how the exhibition is put together: not as a close-up study of one thing, but as an exploration of how different places and concerns stand together.
Isolating one case or one problem from the larger systems surrounding it may create clarity, but it does not reflect how reality actually works. I want to make something that reflects that complexity.
K.Z: Regarding the Pain of the Future obviously nods to Susan Sontag, but in our conversations, you have also mentioned Rebecca Solnit’s The Beginning Comes After the End, which I just picked up. What are some of her ideas that resonate with you and this work?
H.H: It is the insistence on rejecting the optimism/realism dichotomy and replacing it with hope, and reminding us how change is so often difficult to recognize as it is happening, and that something good may come out.
This is forceful to me, as my image-making has revolved around subjects and situations that can easily produce despair: ecological collapse, technological power, the refugee crisis, the militarization of landscapes, species loss, and systems that feel too large to influence.
Leaning on Solnit’s history of activism against the tide, and her insistence on still holding on to hope as an opening, that reinforces the capacity to imagine a future without denying the seriousness of the present.
K.Z: The project is composed of a very diverse body of images, ranging both in character and motif. Some images are evidently manipulated, others less at face value. How have you approached the selection for this show?
H.H: It really is massive material, and we’ve been to so many places and met so many people, in what could easily have become separate themes: climate change, technology, energy, endangered species, military preparedness, infrastructure, ecological farming and biotech. To create one experience from it is not something that comes easily.
The manipulations are, to me, both a reminder for the viewer to stay vigilant and a reminder that it is me they need to trust, not the images. But the process of making them is also a sort of second photographic enactment, in which I immerse myself in the photograph with my experience and feeling of the place. It is a process very similar to the attentiveness of photographing on location, and it is dialogical.
As you say, the manipulations are only part of the selection. The selection process is not only about each individual work, but about seeing how the exhibition comes together as a whole. I think of an exhibition as a film: there can be shifts in style, tempo, colour and visual language, while a certain feeling still holds it together as one experience. You enter it visually before you enter the individual stories. Each image carries its own story, but the larger story emerges through the connections between them. And the story can never replace the artistic; I will never compromise the visual experience.
I have tried to trust the images to hold that story, and to see what emerges when I let the exhibition do the work. One interesting illustration of that is how, this time, the worker became a theme in itself.
It wasn’t my intention, but three images – one from a flower export terminal in Amsterdam, one of sherpas in the Lofoten mountains, and one of “the melt” at an industrial furnace – turned out to tune towards the importance of craftsmanship, dangerous work and the human agency involved in holding the future together.
K.Z: For the project, you have notably been traveling to various places, often with your family in tow. I even once bumped into you on the beaches of San Sebastián, which at the time felt like a reminder of how small the world really is. How has having your kids along on your work travels shaped the work?
H.H: Yes, that was something. I had never met you IRL before that. I was like, “That guy looks exactly like… No, wait, that’s not possible!” I really enjoyed meeting you and your family at the beach.
To answer your question, the two are inseparable. My husband and I have always worked this way. When we first met, we realised that we wanted to build both our work and our life together, and that this required some conscious choices.
I grew up in a working-class home in an agricultural area, and we found it useful to think of our life as running a farm – especially when the children were small. A farm is both a place to live and a place to work, and everything has to add up. There is planning, production and maintenance, but also income, care and the need for a meaningful life.
We do things together when it makes sense and when it is valuable for everyone involved. And of course especially in this project, it is fundamental that our children are part of the process.
It is also interesting how their presence affected the people we met. A lot of the work is about talking with people along the way. Our youngest son was between 8 and 11 during the recordings, and the oldest was between 11 and 14.
There is something about explaining your work to children and young people who ask playful and curious questions. Walking through the stone-crushing machines of an arctic mine is different with children looking for magnetic rocks and big machines. Entering the generator room of a 100 MW thermal energy plant is different with the awe-struck face of a child beside you.
I think it also helped us approach people with a sort of agenda-free interest: to be transparent about our own views, while also remaining open and curious. This appeared to be very welcome, almost freeing, allowing people to show their pride in their work, the nuances of their concerns, and how they think about what they are part of.
K.Z: Some of the sites depicted in this body of work are very inaccessible and subject to permits and rigid bureaucracy. Could you describe one experience that captures what the working process is like?
H.H: When it comes to permits, a solid portion of bureaucratic stamina and long-term planning comes in handy, and it is very useful to be a team, with access to both artistic and bureaucratic languages.
One image in which both permits and access came into play depicts the Globus II signals intelligence station in Vardø, combined in a montage with Pomorstjerneblom, a near-extinct flower in the region.
The Globus II is – well, maybe, to make sure I do not say too much, you should Google it – a military station very close to the Russian border, quite central to military surveillance in the North. It is smack in the middle of the small town of Vardø, on an island in the Barents Sea, connected to the mainland by a tunnel. You do not find a society more mentally prepared for disaster in Norway.
Anyway, there are many photographs of the station taken from a distance, but to get close, as I need to do for my expression, you’d be arrested. We had to go through the chain of command. I’m not sure how far up the request went, but I believe it was discussed all the way up.
We started the process about three months before, and even when we arrived in Kirkenes, a few days before the planned visit, we got a call saying that this would not be possible after all. Which is how this project goes, and sometimes it just doesn´t work out.
When we got there, we ended up speaking with the station commander for an hour, which was incredibly interesting. But it would be safe to say that he observed us just as much as we learned from him.
The other part of the manipulation, the flowers, is also interesting in terms of how it came to pass. It tracks back to a recording of near-extinct regional butterflies. The man who breeded them pointed us to a NIBIO (ed’s note: the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research) station where they work to reintroduce critically endangered wild orchids. They showed us how to find registered locations for near-extinct flowers.
After that, when we were on the road, we would check the registrations to see if there were any observations of extremely endangered species, which obviously turned into quite a playful family treasure hunt.
When you find the field where five or six tiny flowers have sometimes been observed, hiding in the tall grass, well, it is a different form of inaccessibility. So that is how we came across the Pomorstjerneblom, which is this tiny flower that was introduced in the eighteenth century through the Pomor trade between Norway and Russia, and is now found in only a very few places.
K.Z: This exhibition marks the third iteration, including last year’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone at Buskerud Art Centre, Norway. Where do you see the project moving from here?
H.H: I sort of can’t, and won’t, stop. Partly because many of the forms of access I get take so much time. This autumn, I will be involved in a Nordic NATO preparedness exercise; this is the kind of access that takes years to secure. I have plenty of other plans, but what will actually work out is too early to say.
I also see this as not so much one project as a core that spins off into different chapters. Although it is one ongoing project, it evolves by itself, and with me. Like the one you mentioned, which really is about youth, and how young people have to train to face the consequences of the shortcomings of my generation and the one before.
One thing I want to try is to see if I can push the images further in their deconstruction. I think, with these photographs, it is not entirely up to me how to manipulate them. It has to do with retaining the link to storytelling and reality.
I sort of sense where the boundary is: what I can and should do, and what I should not do. Still, there is space. I want to go further, to see if I can find a way to let the photographs allow me to be even more playful in how I work with them, and to push their limits further than I did this time.
Koshik Zaman is a freelance writer and independent curator based in Stockholm, Sweden. He has been a contributor editor to Daily Lazy since 2026.
All images courtesy of the artist.
Aletheia opens on Aug 20 at MELK, Oslo.