Hedda Roterud Amundsen
The Advantages of Depression (Season Six)

Opening night at Stefan Stambolovo 36th Street 19:00

You lie in bed for so long that chronology begins to dissolve. Days blur, marked only by the ritual of opening the pill organizer—one compartment per morning, a minimal gesture of structure. Night intensifies everything. Emotions amplify. The room accumulates: half-eaten leftovers, empty beer cans, dirty underwear, an overflowing ashtray. You stream series on repeat. Porn, too. Not out of pleasure, but because repetition asks less than action. The romantic notion of the suffering artist lingers—genius forged in agony—but there is no making here. Only gathering. Screenshots. Phrases. A gesture. Collecting becomes a way to mark time. Eventually you leave the room. You begin picking up rocks, as you did as a child. One by one. Solid, uncomplicated. Their weight is real. Holding them steadies you—a tactile way of reconnecting with the world. Years later, the archive becomes a gravitational core—not a finished narrative, but a system for returning.

(╥_╥)

The Advantages of Depression is an ongoing project developed over multiple “seasons,” inspired by the episodic structure of television series. It began during a period of severe depression, when collecting and organizing became a survival strategy. I gathered 500 rocks from nature and archived an equal number of subtitles from the TV shows I watched while bedridden—series that functioned not only as distraction, but as emotional scaffolding. These two collections form the core of an evolving archive that I now sample, transform, and recompose across different media. Gathering is where the work begins—not as concept, but as impulse.

Humans have always collected: first for survival, then for memory, meaning, beauty. Long before museums, people gathered stones, shells, and fragments not for their function, but for their form—early gestures of sense-making. My archive follows this lineage: rocks, subtitles, media debris, visual excess. But it also mirrors an internal excavation. Like archaeology, the act of collecting becomes a way to sift through layers, trace patterns, hold onto fragments that resist resolution. It’s a method of externalizing what can’t yet be said, and of shaping something coherent from what feels scattered.

As I continue working with the archive, new visual and textual fragments are added—images of junk food, painkillers, alcohol, and symbols alluding to sex (like fruit, nudes, or suggestive objects). These additions reflect how essential needs can shift into excess or absence when shaped by mental illness. But each path always circles back to the original archive: the rocks and the subtitles remain the gravitational center of the works.

Each iteration of the project explores how the same story can shift in meaning when filtered through new forms—sculptural, textual, performative. At the core lies an interest in how autobiographical fragments intersect with collective memory, and how meaning is produced in the space between image, language, materiality and context. Popular culture, especially television, becomes both medium and subject: a site where desire, shame, psychology, and body politics play out. Like folklore, it is shared, mutable, intimate—shaped as much by repetition as reinvention.

(╥_╥)

Hedda Roterud Amundsen (b. 1989, Hamar) is a visual artist working across media including performance, artist books, photography, sculpture, and installation. Her practice is grounded in a collage-based methodology, where gathering, organizing, and recomposing materials—whether visual, textual, or experiential—shapes the development of all her works. She holds an MFA from the Academy of Fine Art, Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2012–2014), and a BFA from LASALLE College of the Arts in Singapore (2009–2012). In 2025, she was awarded a two-year Government Grant for Emerging Artists. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Bærum Kunsthall (NO) and Project Space Carl Berner, Norwegian Sculptors Association (NO). Selected group exhibitions include the 137th Annual National Art Exhibition, Høstutstillingen (2024) at Kunstnernes Hus (NO), and KRAFT Bergen (NO). Performance works have been presented at Projektrum Hjärne (SE), Mazovian Museum (PL), and Kunstbanken Centre for Contemporary Art (NO). She has published seven artist books.

(╥_╥)

The exhibition is supported by OCA - Office of Contemporary Art Norway. Many thanks to Tequila Bar Fnky Mnky for serving free drinks at the opening night.