Volatile communities: Nicolai Howalt in conversation with Henning Wettendorff
Sweaty, dazed, bloody and exhausted, we see the young men and boys in Nicolai Howalt's Boxer, a series that portrays an ambiguous, passionate, masculine community.
Communities and circuits
Experience one of Denmark's greatest contemporary art photographers in an interview with Henning Wettendorff about his work. Over the past decades, Howalt has worked with abstract works that revolve around existential questions and at the same time testify to Howalt's interest in materiality, time, science, technology and history. For the conversation in The Black Diamond, Howalt will talk about observing and understanding communities - and about portraying them.
The conversation will be based on the work that can be experienced in the Royal Danish Library's exhibition The Camera and Us from the series Boxer: A young boy in white boxers looks sullenly at the viewer. The Boxer series is a series of uniform portraits before and just after a boxing match. The ambiguous work depicts a strange leisure interest with fighting spirit and bloodlust, a community revolving around a shared passion.
Boxer, before and after fight
In the 2011 series Endings, Howalt also works with communities, but on a planetary scale. He points out how cosmic dust has been absolutely essential for man to exist in the universe at all. In the series, Howalt has actually photographed ashes from crematoria, i.e. from the end of life. But it is not death as a personal matter that occupies him in the works – it is rather the possible cycle that the dead body can enter into when the person chooses to be cremated. A cycle that can potentially fuel new life.
Genre engineering experiments
Howalt has worked with experimental photographic techniques in several series. In the series A Journey: The Near Future from 2022, Howalt starts from the photographic panoramas of the surface of Mars, which robots from NASA have recorded and sent back to earth. Howalt has transferred the digital information to photographic negatives. In Light Break from 2015, Howalt is inspired by medical light therapy from the end of the 1800s, developed by doctor and Nobel laureate Niels Ryberg Finsen (1860-1904). In Light Break, Howalt uses both Finsen's original colour filters and lenses and modern colour filters to create a series of uniquely colourful and seemingly abstract photographs. Both visible and invisible areas of the light spectrum, and the power of the life-giving as well as destructive radiations from sunlight.
Participants
Nicolai Howalt
Nicolai Howalt has worked with photography since the 1990s, and is a prominent visual artist in a Danish as well as international context. Howalt has received numerous awards, including from the Danish Arts Foundation in 2019 and Aage & Yelva Nimbs Foundation's honorary prize in 2021. Howalt's series Boxer from 2005 is included in the library's exhibition The Camera and Us.
Henning Wettendorff
Henning Wettendorf is a photographer and web consultant. He is educated in photo history and communication from Lund University and works with publications, teaching and web development. Wettendorff is the former editor of KATALOG – Journal of Photography & Video and since 2021 has helped to publish the journal Social Kritik.
