Christopher Robin Nordström – Anatomy of Incidents

There seems to be a human impulse to look at things that, out of consideration for those affected, we ought to avert our eyes from. Accidents are a case in point. Crashed cars and similar incidents attract crowds of onlookers who are not there to help, but simply to watch. The strength of this fascination helps explain why accidents have always been a staple of the news media. Before the turn of the twentieth century, however, when photographs could not yet be convincingly reproduced in daily newspapers, readers had to make do with drawings and written eyewitness accounts.

In Anatomy of Incidents, Christopher Robin Nordström has returned to a world of high speeds, exhilaration and danger: velodrome cycling. The sport enjoyed its heyday from the 1880s to the 1920s. It demanded extreme endurance and entailed considerable risks of injury and death, making it not entirely unlike the gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome. Thanks to the rise of the mass media, successful cyclists could become international stars and earn enormous sums of money. In short, the sport had everything it needed to become a popular spectacle.

The images in the exhibition recreate dramatic events from the careers of celebrated velodrome cyclists and can be described as a form of media-historical reconstruction. The cyclists’ high speeds and the suddenness of accidents long made it impossible to capture the events themselves with a camera. The equipment was too cumbersome, and exposure times too long. The only option was to photograph an accident after it had already happened. In some cases, as in Christopher Robin Nordström’s work, this meant staging the aftermath of the catastrophe. To provide the greatest possible overview, the scenes are (and were) photographed from above, so that the bodies and bicycles scattered across the floor form a choreographed, frozen movement. The gap between the composed stillness of these reconstructions and the tumult and noise of the accidents themselves characterises both the historical images and the new works.

In a fascinating way, this gap makes the reconstructed moment seem to float outside time, and, paradoxically, we appear to witness the catastrophe both before and after it has occurred. As though nothing had really happened to those involved in the accident.

Please join us for an Artist Talk with Christopher Robin Nordström on Thursday 3 December at 18:00, moderated by Niclas Östlind. Email us on rsvp@chgallery.se if you wish to attend.