Wiggle Room is a non-linear, retrospective, image-based book. The book provides a comprehensive presentation of Andrea Bakketun's artistic practice over the past seventeen years. It explores what happens when works are resumed with new experiences and fields of interest, and what appears when they are connected across time and context.

Monumental soap sculptures, pump systems, video collages, research-based projects and kinetic sculptures directed by insects — Bakketun's works operate in a state of flux, processed through a rich spectrum of materials and media. The fragility and impermanence of the relationship between subject and object in the world around us is explored intuitively and in an eclectic manner. In Bakketun's work, however, the juxtaposition itself takes precedence over the parties involved; it is in the combination of elements that the works arise. The processes can be reminiscent of alchemical activity in which driftwood from consumer society is joined with the forces of nature.

Together with designer Franziska Nast, Bakketun has worked with her own image archive as an open material and source. They have fragmented and reassembled works in an undulating dramaturgical and non-hierarchical way. Wiggle Room allows several directions at the same time and explores the openness to change, new connections and derailments in Bakketun's work. Works are reactivated and meet across time and context. The reader is also given the opportunity to form new narratives, without any right answer or direction.

The image material in the book is accompanied by newly written texts by musician and artist Espen Sommer Eide (NO) and curator and writer Maija Rudovska (LV), in addition to text work and diary notes written by Bakketun herself.

The book is published on its own and together with Grand Complications, a 212-page book published by Distanz Verlag in 2020.

Arts Council Norway, The Audio and Visual Fund, Ingrid Lindbäck Langaard's foundation and the Visual Artists' Remuneration Fund have supported the book.

Photos: Grieg Wyller forlag/Istvan Virag

The book can be purchased at the following locations.