DO I ACCEPT THAT
THE FUTURE IS LOOPED?

(2018–2021)

Do I Accept that the Future is Looped? is a video installation on view for passengers in the trains passing by the metro station Valkyrie Plass in Oslo, 13 - 20 October 2021.

In 2018, Sara Eliassen realized a video-triptych breaking free statues by the celebrated Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland (1869–1943) by appropriating and questioning a technique from Leni Riefenstahl’s film Olympia (1938), where classical statues transition into idealized athletic bodies. Do I Accept that the Future is Looped? speculated a similarity of problematic ideals between the two artists on progress and the desire for the archetypical human, returning in a loop in screen culture. The triptych was first shown in the exhibition The Feedback Loop: Fragmented, Munchmuseum on the Move—Kunsthall Oslo in 2018. A new version of the triptych, will be installed as a zoetrope installation in the closed down station for a week— only to be experienced by the commuters in the trains passing by, themselves providing the movement for the sequence of still images on display in the abandoned station.

The installation is also the starting point for the site-specific event and nightly séance Under the Park scheduled for the night of Saturday, 16 October 2021.

The video was made with Katrine Bull Evensen, choreographer; Kristin Brathagen/ Erlend Auestad Danielsen/ Ivar Sverrisson; performers; Philip Øgaard, cinematographer; Henry Cummings and David Tobias Bonde Jensen, Vfx supervisors; Endre Eldøy, producer.

Sara Eliassen is an artist and filmmaker and currently a PhD candidate in artistic research at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo. Eliassen has a conceptual cinema practice also involving projects in public space: The Feedback Loop, commissioned by The Munch Museum (2018) and presented in collaboration with Kunsthall Oslo, is her last site-specific project. Eliassen’s films Still Birds (2009) and A Blank Slate (2014) have played extensively at international film festivals, including the Venice Film Festival, The International Film Festival Rotterdam, and The Sundance Film Festival.