Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri

b. 1975, Norway

Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri (Norway, b.1975), graduated from the National Academy of Arts in Oslo. Growing up in an environment full of creativity in childhood, Kari Anne escaped from the typical Norwegian minimalist style, inherited the melancholy and cold temperament of Northern Europe, using old clothes, rags, and fragments of fabrics, restitched them and created her own language in textile art. Focusing on the theme of limitations, expectations, regulations, and isolation, these are the subject the each individual confront in the collective society. Kari Anne had exhibited in Kunstmuseet Nord Trøndelag, Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum in Norway, and Socle Du Monde Biennale in Denmark. Her works are permanently collected by Kongsberg Municipality, Den Norske Husflidforening and many other important institutions.

Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri's childhood came from a poor family. Her mother, a tailor, often used old clothes and other easily available fabrics to create designs, transforming decay into magic, which deeply influenced Bahri's interest in fabrics. The untimely death of her father left her in isolation, silence, self-doubt, and a feeling of being trapped in her own body. Through the process of creating by weaving, patching, and sewing together fabric scraps, she found a way to express herself. Her mother's inspiration as a medium and her father's imagery frequently appear in her creative content. She once said: "I use clothes and fabrics as a language of communication to liberate their function of packaging the body." Fabrics are materials with warmth. Clothing, as an object to cover the body, has the most intimate contact with personal skin. Once it is new, After clothing is worn, it is no longer in a new state. A person's mental state and emotions will leave traces of time on the clothing. It is a private dialogue with oneself, and it is also an individual's external image of himself in society.

Bahri makes good use of hand sewing methods and spends a long time with the collected fabrics to explore the details of the fibers.Using natural materials such as cotton, linen, and wool, Bahri often chooses white or neutral colors for presentation. She believes that art often reflects the heavier aspects of life. The use of neutral colors allows the artwork to be free from the influence of either pleasant or sad emotions. It liberates the confined body, transcending the limitations of self-imposed constraints and thereby creating a unique life story.Using weaving thread as a paintbrush, her creations explore issues such as Limitations, Restrictions, Expectations, and Isolation in current society. Through the reinterpretation and recreation of the chaos, abandonment, flaws, decay, and imperfections of ready-made objects, she allows viewers to escape from their own circles. , reflect on the memory experience from an objective position, and from this position stimulate the process of self-dialogue, identification, and compromise of "who I was in the past," "who I am in the future," and "who I can be."

In the textile art of the 20th century, artists used the toughness of fibers and the intimacy of fabrics to connect the body to express their own positions and differentiate themselves from traditional weaving techniques. Anni Albers, a German-American artist, was the first to break the boundaries between art and craft. She used the characteristics of fabric fibers to incorporate natural materials, synthetic threads, and metal plastics into tapestries to study the geometric layout and composition of the picture balance.American artist Judith Scott is renowned for her use of textile wrapping to create a series of everyday objects. The linear, entwined forms suggest a process that alludes to rituals and games.Contemporary Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota uses installations composed of wool and ready-made objects to guide viewers to experience the journey of life and completely record the fear of death.Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri's works, in contrast to representing the individual experience of life through weaving, involve old fabric traces, hand-sewn threads, and stitching together fragments of time. Her art serves as a counterforce against the societal values impacting individuality, offering a more profound and nuanced interpretation.

Kari Anne Helleberg Bahri uses Textile art as a storytelling medium. On the surface, she manipulates chaotic elements such as rags, fabrics, threads, and fragments. In fact, she deeply dissects the memory temperature felt by clothing traces and the psychology hidden in the profound inner world. State, through creation, she presents a microcosm of human nature with emotions of joy, anger, sorrow, and joy. Her art is a critical reconciliation, and it is also a concern for the depths of the soul.