Sara Krøgholt Trier is a visual artist with a master from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and a diploma in writing from Biskops Arnös författarskola. She investigates constructions of reality, often deploying 3D animation and text to examine how fictions determine how we are able to exist, move, and perceive the world. She explores the space between speculation and the concrete through composition and staging, generating a dream logic that renders uncanny our apprehension of daily life
Do you see the crooked line in the wall? (2024)
Sara Krøgholt Trier’s work Do you see the crooked line in the wall? is an animated film set in an ambiguous cityscape, a non-place that could be anywhere in our globalized and privatized environment, an abstract, homogenized, banal, and frozen space. There are no natural light sources, only flickering and tremulous glares from digitally rendered urban utilities, as if the film is played out on a theatrical stage, a black box isolated from the world, yet somehow a metonym for it.
The characters look throughout their world for meaning and authentic experience, but find only bureaucratic and commercial messages. Elaborating both animation and urbanism as practices in scenographic world-building, their environment is minimally furnished with abstracted representations of the urban landscape, a tree here, a bench or a fountain there, an empty office. The city is no longer a space for social life or for identification, rather it seems to organize isolation and separation. Like the characters, the space has lost its own concrete reality, its very particularity, yet it is also the subject of surveillance, not least of all from the audience themselves.
Through both sincerity and humor, Sara Krøgholt Trier points to the ways the built environment, technology, and other ideological and physical infrastructures influence the way we are able to move and act in the world, organizing our social forms, and thereby patterning how we perceive reality. The overt staging of reality as a set, a mere projection or representation, encourages the audience to see themselves from the outside, and self-reflect, asking: ‘What fictions do I find myself a part of? Are there other stories available than the ones that I have previously known?
"During my stay at Open Workshop I have been given the opportunity to engage with artists and storytellers from diverse backgrounds, which has provided me with valuable insights into other professional paths than my own. As a trained visual artist, my language has surely been shaped by the vocabulary of the art world but surrounded by inspiring co-residents and with Open Workshop’s monthly project meetings, I’ve been given the opportunity to talk about my film from a more conventional filmmaking point-of-view and thereby to expand beyond the confines of traditional art discourse. My time at the residency has improved my skill set but also broadened my perspective on the intersection of art and film, and I’m eager to explore how I in the future can learn to navigate both realms simultaneously."
Check out Sarah Krøgholt Trier here
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See "Do you see the crooked line in the wall?" on youtube