Mark
Wennberg

Mark Wennberg is a visual artist whose practice spans painting, photography, and archival research, with a sustained focus on memory, place, and the shifting nature of belonging. Having grown up across multiple countries and cultural contexts, and with European, Eurasian, and Indonesian heritage, he has developed a particular sensitivity to how identity is shaped by movement, transition, and interwoven histories.

His artistic approach merges archival material, personal imagery, and painterly reconstruction, often drawing on long-standing photographic fieldwork and a self-directed studio practice. Working across installation and expanded painting, he explores migration, inherited narratives, and the subtle traces left when people, structures, and stories disappear or change over time.

His work has been exhibited in Norway and internationally, and continues to investigate how personal and collective memory can be activated, reframed, and reimagined through visual form.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work explores how memory, identity, and inherited histories can be reactivated through painting. I draw on two interconnected image archives: an extensive family collection spanning the 20th century and a decade of photographic fieldwork from abandoned buildings and urban exploration. These materials form a visual foundation from which I reconstruct, fragment, and recompose spaces and figures, seeking to trace how lives and histories become visible — or remain concealed — over time.

Working with wall-based installations composed with modular panels, I juxtapose portraits with architectural interiors. This pairing creates a symbolic negotiation between presence and absence, where the human figure and the rooms it once inhabited appear to speak across temporal and geographical distances. The works engage with themes of migration, displacement, and cultural hybridity, informed in part by my own multi-rooted background and a childhood marked by continual movement between places and languages.

Painting becomes both a method of preservation and a means of transformation. Rather than depicting memory as fixed, I approach it as layered, unstable, and porous — something constructed, revised, and reimagined. Through material shifts, erasures, and repeated redrawing, I explore how personal narratives echo larger structures shaped by colonial legacies, decolonialisation processes, and the fragility of archival histories.

Ultimately, my practice examines what remains when images outlast the people and contexts they belonged to. By reassembling fragments from these archives, I seek to create works that are not only about remembering but also about acknowledging the gaps, silences, and uncertainties inherent in memory itself.