Time Out New York | Mar 11–17, 2010

Lars Laumann at Foxy Production

Cryptomnesia—the unconscious copying of someone else’s work—was allegedly what happened to author and activist Helen Keller, who was accused of lifting the words for “The Frost King,” a short story she wrote as an 11-year-old. This controversy is a key factor in Kari & Knut, the main video in Norwegian artist Lars Laumann’s New York solo debut, an engrossing show that deals with faulty memories, repetition, and the transmission and suppression of radical ideas.

Kari & Knut (which is named after a Norwegian children’s game) intersplices shots of book burnings and Germans destroying busts of Hitler with an Iranian television drama based on J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Laumann skillfully manipulates the footage to create a new narrative wherein the main female character, who feels trapped at a school where she’s forced to listen to anti-American diatribes, views the Keller episode as an example of how difficult it is to challenge the status quo. The video’s youthful narrator informs viewers that when Keller’s books were burned by German students in 1933, Keller responded with, “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas.” Laumann’s associative leaps take time to digest and aren’t always easy to untangle, but the results are unusually rich. That history repeats itself as farce seems to be the underlying message of Kari & Knut, as well as another video that remixes Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous breakdown of “known knowns” and “unknown unknowns,” but both works ultimately affirm that powerful ideas will always find channels of expression.

To read this review on Time Out's website, click here.

Time Out New York | Mar 11–17, 2010

Lars Laumann at Foxy Production

Cryptomnesia—the unconscious copying of someone else’s work—was allegedly what happened to author and activist Helen Keller, who was accused of lifting the words for “The Frost King,” a short story she wrote as an 11-year-old. This controversy is a key factor in Kari & Knut, the main video in Norwegian artist Lars Laumann’s New York solo debut, an engrossing show that deals with faulty memories, repetition, and the transmission and suppression of radical ideas.

Kari & Knut (which is named after a Norwegian children’s game) intersplices shots of book burnings and Germans destroying busts of Hitler with an Iranian television drama based on J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Laumann skillfully manipulates the footage to create a new narrative wherein the main female character, who feels trapped at a school where she’s forced to listen to anti-American diatribes, views the Keller episode as an example of how difficult it is to challenge the status quo. The video’s youthful narrator informs viewers that when Keller’s books were burned by German students in 1933, Keller responded with, “History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas.” Laumann’s associative leaps take time to digest and aren’t always easy to untangle, but the results are unusually rich. That history repeats itself as farce seems to be the underlying message of Kari & Knut, as well as another video that remixes Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous breakdown of “known knowns” and “unknown unknowns,” but both works ultimately affirm that powerful ideas will always find channels of expression.

To read this review on Time Out's website, click here.

Lars Laumann, "Kari & Knut", 2010