Tantric Viewing

BY: Jes Zurell

What name do you give to the place where your most secret thoughts sleep? You know the place – it’s the gritty underbelly of your brain that comes out best after one too many glasses of wine. It’s the place that practitioners of meditation claim to reach, but can never put into words. It’s the feeling of vertigo when you look in a mirror, that bursting release at a tantric climax.

It is the moment of pause that happens when you wonder, without intent, what it feels like to die, and it is the moment when you contemplate selfhood, existence, and why it is that you take air to and from your lungs for years on end.

What is the name for that place? It’s a provocative question.

Trine Søndergaard has an answer for us to consider. As a Danish photographer, highly regarded for her formal depictions of contemporary women’s inner selves, she taps those recondite moments and bleeds them into two-dimensional work. Her new show at Bruce Silverstein in New York is inspired by a phrase from the diary of Franz Kafka, “a world inside,” which alludes to the cerebral interiors we all possess. Just as Kafka’s Metamorphosis was buggy and bizarre, so are the head-dressed women of Søndergaard’s portraits.

This acroamatic spaces in Søndergaard’s works offer her perspective on female identity. Her images become metaphors that intensify our perception of reality, and invite us to stand in that nameless place for a little longer than would normally be comfortable. It’s a tantric exercise in viewing, and if you’re willing to put in the time, you won’t be disappointed.

Trine Søndergaard: A Reflection is on view at the Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York from May 3 through June 30, 2018.