(b. 1977, NO) holds degrees from Napier University in Edinburgh and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Honerud works within the tradition of documentary photography, although her subjects are far from conventional.

Her work has previously been shown at venues including Perspektivet Museum (NO), Høyersten Contemporary (NO), Preus Museum (NO), MELK (NO), Les Rencontres d’Arles (FR), QB Gallery (NO), CHART (DK), and Nitja (NO).

Honerud is Associate Professor of Photography at the University of South-Eastern Norway, where she leads the research group Research in Art and Design. She serves on the board of the non-profit organisation Yoga and Sports with Refugees in Greece, and was Deputy Chair of the National Jury for the 2024/2025 Autumn Exhibition (Høstutstillingen). She lives and works in Kongsberg and is represented by MELK.

Hilde Honerud

As I write this, wildfires have a chokehold on parts of Southern Europe, and there’s pushback against migration 

 They are just one of many crises unfolding simultaneously. In times like these, I often think back to something a friend said in the wake of a widely publicized tragedy several years ago. I had been criticizing what I saw as the West's selective empathy when she reminded me that no one can be expected to care about everything, all at once. People have always had their biases, and they always will. What matters, she argued, is that people don't lose their ability to care, and that has stuck with me ever since.

As a member of the queer community and a person of color, the rise of far-right movements and transphobia is daunting. Climate change presents a different but equally constant source of anxiety. The Swedish term 

, coined a few years ago, meaning the guilt associated with air travel, may not weigh heavily on me personally, but as a young parent, it's easy to understand why someone might think twice before boarding a plane.

Anxieties about the future, the world her children will grow up in, form the point of departure for Hilde Honerud’s evolving project 

, first presented at MELK in 2024, today encompassing more than 70 images. Unlike the late Susan Sontag, to whose work the project title nods, Honerud is less concerned with scrutinizing photography than with its capacity to engage with real and pressing questions. This approach is familiar from 

, my first encounter with Honerud’s compelling work, which turned the lens towards the young refugees of Moria Camp on the island of Lesvos in Greece.

Accompanied by her husband and children, Honerud has traveled to places, both near and far, including remote and highly inaccessible sites. Having the children in tow is fundamental to the work, their gaze and curiosity challenging and nuancing Honerud’s own. I even once encountered the family during my own travels on the beaches of San Sebastián, a moment that brought to mind how small the world really is.

Family is not only present behind the lens but also implicitly appears in this new iteration of the work, for instance in the image of a dark silhouette of a figure wearing a cap, juxtaposed with what appears to be a production site of sorts. This kind of manipulation is not merely a formal device but a crucial element of the work, encouraging the viewer to observe and, in Honerud’s own words, remain vigilant. The editing stage is equally important as the many field trips, allowing for reflection on the experiences gathered along the way, each image holding stories well beyond what can be seen at face value.

The exhibition, after much deliberation, is titled 

, meaning "truth" in Ancient Greek. The images are diverse, varying in nature, scale, and motif. Among them are industrial sites and plants, endangered species, and even forests on fire. A body of work that at first glance can evoke different feelings and appear puzzling eventually starts to make sense to me the more time is spent with it. I gather it’s not about isolating singular occurrences but rather showing the complexity and entanglement of things, underlining that many truths can coexist at once.

Honerud draws on writer and thinker Rebecca Solnit’s rejection of the binary between optimism and pessimism regarding the future. Progress is not linear, and the effects of collective effort can be difficult to recognize in real time, often becoming visible only with hindsight. That uncertainty, however, leaves room for hope, an idea reflected in 

 through gestures of care and labour, recalling the importance of putting in the work for substantial change.

Text by Koshik Zaman

Aletheia is supported by: Kulturdirektoratet Visuell Kunst, Bergesenstiftelsen,, NOFOFO, Norsk Fagfotografers fond, Fritt Ord, Regionale prosjektmidler, Fond for Lyd og bilde, Vederlagsfondet

, Hilde Honerud's third solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition opens on Thursday, August 20, with a reception at Elisenbergveien 7 from 18.00–20.00.

Aletheia

 (b. 1977), living in Kongsberg, Norway, is a visual artist and associate professor of photography at the University of South-Eastern Norway. Her thematic content is close to journalistic, but the motifs are far from classic and often abstract. Through a formal approach, she investigates how precarious political and social conditions can be experienced through the everyday and recognizable.

Honerud has recently exhibited at Les Rencontres d'Arles, CHART Art Fair, MELK, Nord-Trøndelag Art Museum, QB Gallery, Nitja Center for Contemporary Art, Kristiansand Kunsthall, and more. She has been awarded the title of county artist in Buskerud and has participated several times in juried national exhibitions.

She studied at Napier University in Scotland and at the Academy of Fine Arts, (MA) in Oslo. Honerud has been actively involved in building up the Kongsberg Art Association's exhibition program and sits on the board of the voluntary organization Yoga and Sports with Refugees in Greece. She served on FFF's scholarship committee in 2022/23, as chair in 2022. She is on the National Jury for 2024/25 and leads the research group Research in Art and Design at the University of South-Eastern Norway.


What does it take to be prepared? How do one prepare for a future that looms large, seemingly consisting of a complex web of continuous and interconnected crises? What roles may photography take in this waning belief in the future? These questions are underlying in Hilde Honerud’s new body of work, 

, in which she has photographed practices of emergency preparedness.

Emergency preparedness refers to the measures and actions taken to ensure readiness to respond effectively to emergencies and disasters. It involves planning, organizing resources, and coordinating efforts to mitigate the impact of potential crises, involving proactive measures directed at future events. Traveling with her family to locations in Europe and Australia, as well as her home county of Buskerud, Honerud has captured motifs that span from small-scale individual “prepping” via nationally organized emergency services to globally scaled initiatives and corporations developing future food supplies, medicines and energy.

The twenty-two photographs on view can roughly be sorted in four categories: semi-close ups of hands that carefully hold an apple, adjusts a helmet, or handle a machine – minor actions directed at major threats, landscapes that have suffered environmental damage, emergency service exercises involving emblematic danger signals such as fire and smoke, and close-ups of models or sculptures of bodily parts. The risks and possibilities of the future are complex, contradictory, and difficult to keep in eyesight and to act on. Honerud’s photographs reflect an ambition to try.

, the project’s title, is an obvious reference to Susan Sontag’s seminal book-length essay 

 (2003). (This was Sontag’s last publication before her untimely death the year after.) Discussing a variety of historical examples, Sontag here reflects on the ethical and epistemological complexities involved in viewing photographs of human suffering and atrocities. Such photographs may on the one hand instigate (an unhelpful?) suffering by proxy, on the other they risk numbing the viewer.

Particularly relevant for Honerud’s project is Sontag’s pondering on the ambiguity of photographic “truth” and of whether staged or edited photographs may still convey any such thing. While Honerud’s practice is rooted in the long-standing tradition of socially engaged documentary, 

 continues her more recent experimaentation with image manipulation by using Photoshop against the grain. Interspersed across the gallery are a handful of photographs that tickle both our perception and cognition in that they do not seem to add up to one coherent image. In one work, a butterfly on a leaf, photographed in the botanical garden in Copenhagen, is cloned and stamped at a different size. Two versions of the same detail interlace to convey a jolted slide of scale that subtly evokes a slippage between self and world, micro- and macrolevel events (think of the butterfly effect), present and future.

Another key point Sontag discusses is the power that photography has in shaping collective memory and historical consciousness by highlighting and preserving significant events. Honerud’s photographs highlight key developments in the present but are also directed at the future. Her project thereby harbors an overarching question of whether we are witnessing an expansion in photography’s temporality. Through most of its history, photography has been seen as a witness or reservoir of the past, and as a medium that fixes and stores time. With digital photography’s algorithmic and networked conditions for capturing and immediate dissemination images and data, this has changed. Not only does photography point to and participate in a present; it is also increasingly involved in procedures for assessing and predicting future events, risks and outcomes. In this sense, photography is itself enmeshed in practices and systems of emergency preparedness.

– Hilde Honerud's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Regarding the Pain of the Future

 (b. 1977) lives and works in Kongsberg, Norway. She is educated at the National Academy of Arts in Oslo and is an associate professor of photography at the University of Southeastern Norway. In 2018 she was awarded county artist of the year in Buskerud, she’s held recent solo exhibitions at RAKE (Trondheim), Kunstmuseet Nord-Trøndelag, Tenthaus (Oslo), Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Buskerud kunstsenter (Drammen) and Bærum kunsthall. She is included in several private and public collections.

Moria Camp was notorious for being Europe’s worst refugee camp and housed somewhere between 6000–21000 people depending on the influx. The camp was originally dimensioned for 3000 people. In September 2020 it burned down, and a new camp was built on Lesvos.
The situation in the Mediterranean is still very severe and Europe continues to violate basic human rights.

In the last three years, Hilde Honerud has carried out a major work associated with Moria Camp, on the island of Lesvos in Greece. She has joined people doing sports through the organization 

. The exhibition and artists’ books showcases a selection from this work.

Honerud works in the tradition of documentary photography, but her motifs are far from the classical. In a time where images of catastrophic events are part of everyday life, there is a need to question how to communicate these incidents through images. Honerud refers to Jon Berger’s essay 

(1978) regarding her approach to this philosophy: “

For the photographer this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed. The distinction is crucial.”

MELK is thrilled to open the doors to our brand new exhibition space in the old stable in Hallings gate 5. We will inaugurate the new Oslo space with a solo exhibition and book launch by Hilde Honerud.

Hilde Honerud works in the tradition of documentary photography, but her motifs are far from classical. In a time where news of catastrophic events are part of everyday life, there is a need to question how to communicate these incidents through images. Honerud refers to John Berger’s essay: Uses of Photography (1978) when explaining her position on this subject: “For the photographer, this means thinking of her or himself not so much as a reporter to the rest of the world but rather, as a recorder for those involved in the events photographed. The distinction is crucial.”

Currently, she works on forms of photographic representation in a time when the future is no longer a given opportunity for the individual future, but a potential for loss and suffering. She argues that this creates a new relation between time, world and self that calls for new forms of representation. The artistic philosophy in these works is deliberated further in 

 and Journal for Artistic Research, issue 29.