The Story Is Not All Mine, Nor Told By Me Alone

Multiple stories disorder

Meetings and conversations are central to Gitte Villesen’s work. She documents these encounters in videos, photographic series, and installations, which are often combined with additional material such as photographs, texts, or collections of objects. 

“All my works start with a curiosity toward a specific person—and how each person approaches their life, certain attitudes, their passions, ideas and dreams, and how this combines with the reality in which they live, whether that’s related to gender, or cultural or historical circumstances. The work deals with stories, and an awareness of what it means to tell someone else’s story. Each work is a portrait of a meeting as much as it is a portrait of a specific person. In some works, and to varying degrees, the participants are involved in the discussion about their own representation as collaborators.”
 
The book presents most of Gitte Villesen’s works made since 1994. Each work is described in a text by the artist, which provides the story behind how the meetings happened. The book also includes texts by Brett Bloom, Hanne Loreck, Jan Verwoert, and an interview conducted by Lotte Moller. The title of the book is a quote taken from Ursula Le Guin’s 1969 science-fiction novel “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

The publication is part of the series of artists’ projects edited by Christoph Keller.