In Salad Hilowle’s work Behållarna (The Containers), for the National Archives in Härnösand, the archive becomes not only a place for preserved history, but also for what has fallen outside. With traces, carvings and branding marks, the work lets the silences emerge and invites a different reading of the past.
In the new National Archives in Härnösand, there is room for around 300 kilometres of Sweden’s history. Here, traces of individual lives are preserved in parish registers, court documents and property deeds. Through these documents, but also through maps, photographs and drawings, the story of a country and a society in change come into view. This is also where Salad Hilowle’s work Behållarna (The Containers) has emerged and taken its place. Instead of illustrating the contents of the archive, Hilowle collects traces, fragments and imprints that rather tell about the archiving itself – about the selection, the gaps and the silences.
The artwork meets the visitor in the form of a large-scale relief at the main entrance and continues along supporting pillars further into the building. Through carvings, burnt marks and milled shapes, a kind of archive in itself is suggested – but also a movement beyond the visible. The traces open up associations to things we ourselves must search for, formulate and reformulate. A story that lies in the in-between: in the burnt edge of a document, in an inkblot that has spread across the paper.
On the wall at the entrance, shapes appear that can be interpreted as a mountain landscape, a vortex, a map, a grid – or a handwriting that takes shape in the wood. A different kind of landscape to read, interpret and imagine. Everything is chiselled and burned into the building. It is a work that does not provide ready-made answers, but asks questions about memory, oblivion and interpretation.
The surfaces, traces and structures of the reliefs function as a sounding board open to interpretation. They remind us that history is not only found in what can be read directly from the texts, but also in what is missing. What has disappeared, been forgotten or never been written down. Through shifts in light and shadow, the different layers of the work emerge. Perspectives change depending on where we stand. A wall with scratches and marks. An archive and its void.
Artist biography Salad Hilowle
Salad Hilowle (born 1986 in Mogadishu, Somalia, lives and works in Stockholm) holds a master’s degree in Fine Art from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2020). Hilowle’s artistic practice is research-driven and he works with a range of artistic materials and media such as film, installation, sculpture, photography, sound and performance.
