Trine Lise Nedreaas: Mac Donaldi - King Of Soap Bubbles
1 May—20 June 2009
Galerie Michael Janssen Berlin

„I am interested in people‘s reason for being and the drive to carry on and get ouf of bed every morning. I admire the enthusiasts, the people who try again and again, often banging their head against the wall; the different outlets people have for creating meaning, be it sausage eating, weightlifting, singing or acting as corpses. I sympathize with stuttering, stumbling and singing out of tune and I am fascinated by the weird and the beautiful, the vast and strange variety of human endeavours.“

This, in a few words, is the basic concept behind the work of Trine Lise Nedreaas, the fil rouge uniting her unusual and disturbing visions of life.
Nedreaas is concerned with the absurd and with how unusual normality really is. She is inspired by human bizarreness and the things that surround her. She primarily uses film and video, installations and performance to create an aesthetic of the grotesque.

Nedreaas approaches people‘s stories and curious news items in a critical spirit and studies them like an anthropologist, seeking to grasp their deeper meaning. She collects information from various sources like books and the internet until she has a thorough, overall vision of the subject in question, managing to keep the work‘s fresh and natural appeal, whilst avoiding mere intellectual lucubration. She builds her work, allowing people to relive the emotions and melancholy of her ideas and dig up their most profond meaning. Obsessed by passion, manias, blindness, worry, her art is about contradiction, about the subtle beauty of the non-canonical.

In her new film Trine Lise Nedreaas presents the great Mac Donaldi, King of Soap Bubbles. A mystical Mac Donaldi appears as a god-like being, a master of his own universe. Omnipotent yet playful he creates mesmerizing smoke-filled bubbles that hover in the air before their brief existence draws to an inevitable close with a pop and a puff of smoke.


Trine Lise Nedreaas: Mac Donaldi - King Of Soap Bubbles, 2009, 16 mm Film, Silent, 06‘17‘‘, Edition 2 + 1 AP

Mammou Bensalah as Mac Donaldi - King of Soap Bubbles, Camera: Carlos Vasquez

Thanks to curator paz Aburto Guevara
filmed in front of a live audience at COMA - Center for Opinions in Music and Art, Berlin, November 11, 2008. Supported By: Arts Council Norway and The Norwegian Artist Association