Time Is My Body is framed by crashing waves and seaweed, children examining what they find on the beach and hands wrapping around huge whale vertebrae. The video triptych Olaus Magnus Theory was created on the coast of Finnmark in northern Norway, where Signe Johannessen's family comes from. A place from where it would be possible to travel by water all the way to Bohuslän Museum. 

The title of the exhibition is taken from the new installation Time Is My Body, which is based on a collection of shells assembled by a local station inspector Lundgren and that was donated to the museum in 1930. This collection, which consists of shells and mussels from all over the world, takes on new meanings through Johannessen’s lens, where death and man’s insatiable desire to possess, desire and classify are at the center.  

Boundless like the vast bodies of water that surround our planet, Time Is My Body moves both above and below the sea’s surface. The backbone of the exhibition is a series of works that relate to the oceanic in different ways, suggesting both human and more-than-human relationships and narratives.  

Johannessen’s dialogical explorations revolve around the oceanic and the hybridity of bodies are, time is out of joint but in the cracks new subjects and relationships emerge, soaked in care.  

Signe Johannessen (1978) studied at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She works with sculpture, video, drawing and performance. Together with artist Erik Rören, she forms the artist duo Rören/Johannessen. Johannessen is also one of the founders and artistic directors of Art Lab Gnesta.