SCRIM

Book Review

Photobook: SCRIM

Specs: Hardcover, 152 pages, 190 x 245 mm

Price: €40

SCRIM is a lightweight transparent fabric that is often used in cinemas or bookbinding particularly because of its very light texture. It is also the material that surrounds the eponymous book composed by Ida Nissen (b. 1986, Denmark) and published by Lodret Vandret. Her monograph can be understood as a record of her creative process and her search for something preceding language. Reflecting on her identity as a transnational adoptee, her country of origin, South Korea only exists in fragments in Nissen’s mind. Sparked by this personal mystery and vague memory, she presents a body of work that translates such an imagined place and its untold stories into a visual narrative by means of association.

Nissen showcases a broad spectrum of her influences, ranging from her darkroom experiments to her collages composed of analogue prints. Her works combine personal memories with found materials such as images, book clippings, and cut-out shapes to mirror her stream of consciousness.

Clothbound in a granite-black fabric and printed in silver Pantone ink, SCRIM in its form encapsulates Nissen’s analogue practice. As elaborated by the publisher, Favorit Hangul was used as the typeface for the book, underlying the artist’s search for her South Korean identity since the inspiration for the lettering was the general outlook of the Korean hangul alphabet, especially its tubular and geometric shapes.

“(…) Bridging the way between hidden and revealed, close and foreign, through both the design and featured materials, SCRIM becomes a portal to the in-between.“

Nissen opens with an index of colour filters and exposure times, later showing new experiments and finished work from her project Compile Your Inventory. The multifacet readings of her book pose questions to the very medium and our existence, debunking any reference to linearity or uniformity. Ambiguity becomes the connecting factor of her photographs and montages that are both monochrome and colourful, changing in nature yet resembling each other at the same time. Bridging the way between hidden and revealed, close and foreign, through both the design and featured materials, SCRIM becomes a portal to the in-between.

“(…) She refuses to understand her past and origins in a static and given way, instead, she turns them into water-like images, those that embrace the state of perplexity and fluidity.“

As Japanese philosopher Miyamoto Musashi once proclaimed, central to our contemporary reality, fluidity and discontinuity are our guiding lines in life whereas dogmatism can only lead to one-way death. Nissen has a similar approach to her work as she imagines, transforms, and re-creates memories that are deeply personal into something conceptual and touching. She refuses to understand her past and origins in a static and given way, instead, she turns them into water-like images, those that embrace the state of perplexity and fluidity. SCRIM is thus an invitation to a boat-like voyage with Nissen; her guiding the rudder while following the directions of the spectator…

Ida Nissen

is is a London-based multi-media artist who studied at Valand Academy, Gothenburg, and the Royal College of Art in London. Interested in the transitions between hidden and revealed, foreign or alike, leaps of memory and thought; her layered images are often created with material through a variety of approaches, including still life, cut outs, or with remnants from the darkroom functioning as a ritual site of production. Nissen was a recipient of the Hasselblad Foundation Photobook Grant 2022.

Lodret Vandret

is an independent publishing house founded in 2010 by artists Flemming Ove Bech and Johan Rosenmunthe. Lodret Vandret is based between Copenhagen and Berlin. Collaboration is at the very core of their practice, be it with individual artists or collectives, they always strive to merge individual sensibilities. They also founded One Thousand Books – a series of events conceived to enable and cultivate community around independent and self-publishing.

SCRIM is available for purchase here.

Text by Linda Zhengová

Curator of Discarded Magazine & XXX

She is a photographer and writer dealing with the topics of trauma, gender and sexuality.