The Human Orchid
Aldea - Center for Contemporary art, Design and Technology,
Bergen, Norway, 2025
Photocredit: Arne Skaug Olsen
Aldea presents The Human Orchid, a solo exhibition by Swedish artist Lena Bergendahl, bringing together her recent film The Human Orchid and the series Masks, a suite of flexographic clichés produced through a hybrid process of printmaking and mechanical reproduction.
Bergendahl’s practice moves along the porous borders between art, technology, and the human body. Her works often emerge from encounters with obsolete or specialized machines, tools that once mediated care, communication, or image production. In The Human Orchid, the artist traces the strange intimacy between technological invention and human desire, weaving archival material and cinematic reconstruction into speculative anatomy of empathy and control.
The Masks series extends this exploration into the surface of the image itself. Using industrial printing plates as sculptural and reflective objects, Bergendahl shifts attention from representation to process—from the printed image to the mechanical and affective gestures that make it possible.
Across film and print, Bergendahl reveals technology not as a distant or neutral force, but as a living texture within human experience—an infrastructure of thought, touch, and imagination. Her works explore how tools designed for precision and repetition also carry traces of care, memory, and transformation, asking what remains human in the technological gesture.
Together, these works invite viewers to consider the technologies that sustain and transform human life—not as neutral tools, but as extensions of imagination, touch, and memory.
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