Søren Lilholt

Echoes are (un)anticipated responses from a future self. 

A contingent preposition is neither true nor false – and yet a contingency is a potential future reality – often of grim consequences.

Images are creations reaching for the future.
They offer themselves to vision.
And once seen they dissolve into echoes of a self-reflection that lends itself to a historical consciousness.

The echo image is a reflection blurring the boundaries between subject and world.
A vision that at one and the same time originates from the world and from somewhere else.
A vision that answers our questions in a voice belonging to ourselves and someone not exactly ourselves.

It is a cyclical unfolding that reaches beyond the search for verification and instead puts us in contact with the unknown. It is a generative behaviour that however abstract or concrete depict our world – the subjective as well as the collective – the conscious as well as the unconscious.

Echoes of contingency investigates the possibility for images to resonate as such impermanent echoes of the world.

The project began as an intuitive visual exploration. Trying to conduct a visual philosophy inspired by the thoughts of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I started to investigate whether a compulsive production of imagery might reveal an archive of echoing responses to my own questions to or conscious / unconscious feelings about a world that in recent years have felt out of balance to me.

Covered by special made filters, which only allow the viewer to see the images when standing directly in front of them, the works fluctuate between the visible / invisible. Each image is isolated in its own private sphere denying the spectator the opportunity to see the works in their collective entirety. Instead the images compel the viewers to engage the echoes of their own memory and imagination in the unfolding of the work.

Søren Lilholt (born 1986) is a Danish artist living and working in Copenhagen. He has studied at Fatamorgana, Danish School of Art Photography and holds an MA in Visual Culture from Copenhagen University. Attracted to the seemingly incomprehensible, the dissimilar similarity of everything and the subtle ability of photography to alter the perception of things, his artistic practice is deeply rooted in a phenomenological approach to photography and visuality – a process that aims at delving deep into a perceptual openness towards the world. His work has been published in Der Greif, exhibited at The Spring Exhibition at Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, and most recently at the Copenhagen Photo Festival.