A conversation with artist Henrik Haukeland

Image credit Henrik Haukeland 2023

Henrik Haukeland is a Melbourne artist creating cleverly unnerving and visually striking video art with found footage, movie stills, and AI. Originally from Sweden, Henrik studied fine arts at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts, Sweden, the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and the University of Bergen, Norway. He has exhibited his work in solo and group shows in Australia, Europe and the U.S.

I came across Henrik’s work via a short video piece called Carl Sagan 1985, a haunting visual remix of the scientist Carl Sagan’s testimony before the U.S. congress on the perils of climate change. Another video artwork, The End, is “a monument to the (upcoming) end of the world”, while A Hard-Earned Thirst used AI to reimagine VB beer ads, offering a vision of Australian masculinity, AI, and the future of work that is both eerie and comic. I talked with Henrik about the relationships between art and climate change.

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Catherine: Tell me about the Carl Sagan video art piece you made.

Henrik: I had two weeks to make the piece for a public program on heat at KINGS Artist-Run. I liked the Carl Sagan clip because he just sounds so sensible, and explains climate change in terms that anyone could understand. And the fact that it's 40 years ago, that they knew about climate change already then—it was perfectly clear what could happen.

Sagan is trying to explain to the politicians, because they're the ones that can act and do something. And he talks about how it's going to affect your children and grandchildren, which is us, now. He even says that it might already be too late, he kind of confesses this.

The addition of the years going by was the last thing I added. First, I added fire, as a juxtaposition. I really wanted to bring in the fact that four decades have gone by, and we're still in the same spot almost, still talking about it. Not enough action, just more and more talk.

Catherine: What are your thoughts on art as a medium for engaging with climate change?

Henrik: I like the freedom that comes with art, and that you're not really there to teach people about anything. They can learn something, maybe by accident. We are there to try to make people think, for themselves, about something. So I think it's a more open form than if you're, say, a journalist. People need to make up their own mind, rather than have it served on a platter.

And there needs to be a vagueness to art, it can't be too clear. You have to give the audience keys to unlock the thing, but then they have to do a certain percent of it themselves. And that's why you get very different reactions to artworks, which is good. It can be boring to just hear facts about something. You're not just being told this is the way it is. But you have to come to the conclusion yourself, how you feel about it, or relate to it.

Art involves you stepping into this room which is different from other rooms. It helps you look at a subject from a different angle. It is an investigative form, but it doesn't really fit with scientific rules of investigation. I can kind of borrow a bit from science or something else, and then create something outside of that.

Catherine: What is the impact of making art about climate change on the artist?

Henrik: When you start researching, and you begin moving into something more actively, you dig into the subject matter—a deep dive. The theme might not be something you have a lot of previous knowledge about, so you have to learn. But also, recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how art isn’t really good for the environment. There's a lot of art objects that are produced. And what happens to those objects, in the end—because not every object ends up in a museum or has a life and a function. So what is the responsibility of the artists to take care of their own production, and what happens to it? A lot of it ends up in storage, just sitting there, and eventually it's thrown away. Because it becomes unsustainable to save it. Because you produce a lot more than you sell. That’s part of the process.

Catherine: What do you like about the medium of video?

Henrik: Currently, I mostly make videos, which feels sustainable because it's not an object. It requires electricity to make, of course, and you have to store the thing. But the biggest advantage is that you can do it on a laptop. If you're using found visual material as I did, in this case, it's already there.

But the challenge is to get people to engage with video. In galleries, museums, people tend to just walk by them, or watch for a minute. I usually do videos in combination with other things. So I might create kind of an environment where that correlates to what's in the video. So that gives people an experience of walking into something bigger and more encompassing.

Catherine: What about the relationship between art and climate justice? 

Henrik: Interestingly, you see climate activists targeting artworks these days—for example, throwing paint at them. I guess it's because it gets a reaction. You're going to be in the newspaper, if you throw paint at the Mona Lisa. So it draws attention to the cause. The more famous the artwork, the more attention you're going to get. But it's also kind of a destructive act. It can alienate people. ‘Why are you throwing something at my favourite painting?’ Is that going to help? I’m not certain. Maybe it gets attention because you're transgressing some kind of boundary, that you’re not supposed to destroy art.

The more people do creative work about climate change, the better, because that is keeping the conversation alive. I think the danger is apathy. Feeling that it's hopeless, that we're going to screw this up anyway. So we might as well just have a big party till it doesn't work anymore. Which, of course, is not the right way of dealing with it. I read recently that China is going to open a new fossil fuel plant every week, to meet the demands of their industry. And meanwhile, I'm trying to separate the plastic from the metal part of my olive oil container, to recycle. And that is the problem. Because no one can solve it on their own.

Catherine: Tell us about your current exhibition at Blindside?

It’s an experimental piece of writing, made with the building blocks of title cards from films. I collected thousands of title cards, and then put them together to create longer sentences and paragraphs—which, then, end up constructing new meanings and ideas. An AI-generated voice reads the text, and the title cards serve as the subtitles to the voice. The results can both be humoristic and confronting, and seems to unveil our collective cultural fantasies. A lot of my work tends to circulate around consumption and excess. I myself have consumed a vast amount of films in my life—and making this work really made me question, what have I been feeding myself?

Henrik’s recent work is exhibited at BLINDSIDE in Melbourne, Australia. The exhibition is available online until 30 November 2024.