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Jamais Vu is French for “Never Seen” and is used in psychiatry as the antonym for “Déjà vu” – to describe an experience of seeing things that surround you every day as if you’ve not noticed them before.

As a title for this exhibition, the notion of Jamais Vu refers to my own experience of coming to terms with the defining influence on my generation of the developing Norwegian oil industry during my years of growing up in Oslo in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This realization was triggered by the large class action law suit brought on in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s by the alliance for the divers in the North Sea (Nordsjødykkeralliansen NSDA), in which the alliance is claiming enormous reparations for devastating negligence on the part of the Norwegian State in pushing the divers to work under extreme and untested conditions in a race to get the oil extracted as quickly as possible. The list of outrageous conditions and serious accidents is long and many of the divers have suffered - some have even committed suicide - in the years since the industry first developed in Norway in the early 1970’s.

The primary agent conveying this condition in the exhibition is the juxtaposition and collage of two sets of archival imagery from the 1970’s: advertisements for vacation packages to the Mediterranean – Norwegian tourism to Spain and the Canary Islands among other places boomed in this decade, and became a nation-wide expression of the relative prosperity of the new middle class – and documentation of the divers working in the North Sea preparing oil rigs. Historically, both these activities occurred parallel around that time, and have the obvious relationship that the huge profits generated by the industry employing the divers was financing the leisure of the Mediterranean tourism suddenly available for the new middle class in Norway. But beneath the macro-economical links, there was a lack of awareness of the centrality and complexity of this industry at least in the urban, academic environment I grew up in, and in our culture of the time, the oil industry was a brave new adventure whitewashed in the glorifying light of national pride, progress and prosperity for the people.

In addition to the collage as rhetorical device, the painted works in the show consist of asphalt on neoprene rubber – which is a material commonly used to make divers’ suits. Also, the fact that many of the images are silk-screened has a historical echo which refers to politically motivated art of the 1970’s.

Review of "Jamis Vu" in Norwegian:

http://www.dagbladet.no/tekstarkiv/artikkel.php?id=5001060040920&tag=item&words=tomas%3Bramberg