It Cannot be Contained
2023


16mm film transferred to HD video and HD video, 32:04 min, 17:29 min and 7:08 min, mdf-board, bean bags, sponges, mouth blown glass, carpet, led tubes

Atelier Nord, Oslo, 2023
The exhibition It Cannot be Contained at Atelier Nord revolves around the film with the same title, where Aas weaves together different stories related to blood. The body is a container for blood, while blood itself is a container that transports oxygen to the body's cells. The film shows how blood pulses through history and science as both symbol and matter. In this way, blood has nurtured perceptions of race, vitality, heredity, disease and death, among other things.

Containers are also central to A Letter to Zoe (2021), an essay film structured as a letter sent from one woman to another. The female voice in the film talks about her home, pregnant bodies and the copper cylinders used to house buried nuclear waste in southern Sweden. A container, the woman claims, always has the possibility of leaks. A containers' surroundings, barriers and contents constantly affect each other, and as such it is not always clear where a given container begins and ends.

The short video Kropp med lokk (Or how to make a chocolate cake) (2023) consists of close-ups of women opening and closing Tupperware boxes accompanied by a meditative soundtrack featuring resonating gongs. In addition, Aas is showing a series of sculptures made of glass based on construction drawings by the American artist and inventor Frances Gabe (1915 – 2016). By designing a self-cleaning house, equipped with a sprinkler system and drainage channels in the floor Gabe sought to free women from the monotony of housework. The self-cleaning house is thus a leaking container, just as the blood also "leaks" meaning far beyond its material form.

Excerpt from text by Nicholas Norton for the press release