Where Did the Magic Go?
Where did imagination disappear, in architecture, literature, ready-made meals, podcasts? Most importantly, where did the magic go between us?
The pandemic reshaped, filtered, and tested the friendship between photographer Yina Chan and illustrator Tone Emblemsvåg. Isolated at opposite ends of Norway, Yina in the forests of Trysil, Tone in the city of Oslo. They found themselves craving collaboration, driven by uncertainty and a need to create.
Yina captured the vast, quiet landscapes of Trysil, sending images to Tone, digitally. In response, Tone summoned figures from her imagination, inspired by beloved books, old films, and the surreal world of David Lynch, worlds apart from Yina’s forest refuge.
The forest, like art, is one of the last places where you can truly get lost, and perhaps feel something real. It silences the noise of the world while whispering its own secrets through shadows, shifting light, and scents long forgotten in urban life. Dark enough for glowing fantasies, vague enough to awaken dormant curiosity.
In a time when instinct and mystery are undervalued, this project seeks to reclaim a sense of wonder, something that doesn’t need to be explained, only felt. It invites you to step into the tangled moss, over gnarled roots, into damp hollows where you just might get stuck. To glimpse sketches, figures, and silhouettes that exist only in stories, half-remembered dreams, and now, in this exhibition.
If you’re wondering where the magic went, whether in the pandemic, in nature, in everyday life, perhaps it never left. You just have to look differently.
Text by Karl Eirik Haug.
