Entry Title: " Chapter III, Behold"
Name: Bjorn Veno, United Kingdom


Entry Description: I've sailed the seven sees, imprisoned as a pirate in New York, fished sharks and sailed deep in to the Amazon. These are the tales of Venø's father from the days men were men, when men did not suffer from depression, instead he clenched his fist and thought his way through adversary with sheer will alone. Trying to live up to these ideas to day may create conflicts within the man and it is these conflicts Venø investigates, by putting him self in to a state of distress with three maternal figures, urinating on his pillow and confronting his father.

Following on from Sirkel, Veno presents two additional chapters of his on-going series of works entitled Paradigm and Behold. Veno continues his exploration and research into contemporary issues of male identity and the struggles surrounding what it means to be a man in todays society. The photographs - whose composition and planning is as exquisite as it is rigorous - seem to sit half way between the still frame of an unidentified documentary film and the complex narratives of painting. Personally playing the main character in each photograph, Venos narrative scenes are based on personal facts and specific memories from his past. The works are tinted with a fictional impression due to the combination of high-end production and incongruous elements, and yet a sincere and unsettling sense of loss, tension and despair transpires. Often presenting the scenes of his fictional autobiographies in places and settings which are personal to him from his ancestors Norwegian farmland to his various childhood homes Veno uses automated performance as a way to access his subconscious. In Paradigm, Veno steps into the space between childhood fantasy and adult suffering, revisiting the houses in which he once lived and now negotiating his response with the physical language of the body. Somewhere between a refuge and an adventure, this return into the past is inevitably laced with melancholia and yet we discover him, with a feeling of unease and empathy, as an adult desperately trying to find meaning to his own expectations of what it is to be a man. Introducing an additional character in the Behold series, Veno casts family members (and often female members who are more likely to understand his predicament) in order to portray his scenes of despair, and simultaneously initiates a sincere dialogue throughout these complex relationships. The figure of the woman also represents a new question mark around his understanding of his own identity. The role of women having become increasingly blurred in our current society, has lead him to question the foundations of his irrational fear of them - which he believes may result in a loss of his status as a man.