Kihlberg & Henry | Formations

Danielle Arnaud, London, May 2020

Kihlberg & Henry’s Formations series feels like an act of trickery, an illusion, a moment beyond what is usually conceivable. We are used to a concrete, yet invisible, dividing line between land and air. Birds belong in the sky. Planes live there too, although they do not necessarily belong. But books exist stacked or singularly - on shelves, in bags, between sheets. Through these photographic compositions, Kihlberg & Henry transgress this boundary. Propelling books into the sky, they capture them mid-flight - the camera’s shutter providing our insight into a moment otherwise unseen. Layered against cloud formations, the books exist beyond their usual surroundings - the wind spreading their pages in the same way that they would be soaked by the sea.

The works’ titles are amalgamations of the names of the books and the names of the cloud formations, the individuality of each one mirrored in the other. John Cage’s Silence is flung into a Cirrocumulus Stratiformis formation, its quiet, stretched out layers evoking the fragility of silence, how it can prolong the gaps between us. Marshall Berman’s book All That Is Solid Melts into Air sits against Cumulus Congestus and Pannus formations, the solidity of its outline matched by these thick clouds, their looming hint of rain showing no signs of melting. Although there is something surreal in the sight of books among the clouds, in other ways this pairing makes perfect sense - both the acts of reading and cloud gazing a form of meditation, the transience of which can only be half-captured in the stillness of photography. The unfurling movement of the clouds, or the books falling from them in a perfect arc, I like to imagine, exists in our imagination beyond the work, beyond what the camera lets us see.