Record of a Sneeze lingers in a space that holds both presence and absence. Materializing through large and small scale paintings; a site-specific installation across two rooms that interacts with the windows of BO, the work inhabits a necessary uncertainty, doubt and reflections on personal experiences with social-phobia, and it invites a hallucinatory crowd into the space as permanent guests.
The exhibition takes its title from the 1894 black-and-white film by William Dickinson, considered the first copyrighted motion picture. Capturing Fred Ott sneezing after a bump of snuff, it unintentionally became a historical document. In that unguarded moment, like all sneezes, he is caught in an almost reluctant bliss, an image still available for scrutiny 131 years later.
Record of a Sneeze interacts with both the idea of the accidental glory of this film and the uncontrollable force of a sneeze, violent, momentary, and nearly impossible to suppress. An impulse vanishing before it fully manifests. Imagine a sneeze punctuating the timeline.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The exhibition is kindly and generously supported by Den Hielmstierne-Rosencroneske Stiftelse and Grosserer L. F. Foghts Fond.
David Noro (b. 1993, DK/ITA) is a visual artist based in Oslo, Norway and Copenhagen, Denmark. He has studied Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam(2014-2018), and is currently attending the MFA-programme in Fine Arts at Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2023-2025).
Noro is a painter who also works with collage, drawing, textile and sculpture. Based on a personal archive of words, texts, songs, and conversations, Noro relays fragments from the everyday, translating them into compositions where traces of narrative emerge and dissolve through mark-making, collage, and material explorations.
