Bjorn Veno – Arthemist

Film Screening

ARTHEMIST lighthouse 48 is a 63-minute performance film and an accompanying book, ARTHEMIST lighthouse 48: Why tie your head to a tree when no one is looking? In this fully independent work, Norwegian artist Bjørn Venø inhabits the Arthemist: an outsider traversing liminal, deeply personal spaces. Through visceral emotion, intuition, and symbolic gestures, he fractures the boundaries of structured perception and reaches toward a state of becoming that exists outside imposed ways of being.

Filmed over 15 months on the island where he grew up, the project is bound to the memory of the land and the need for healing and reclamation. Venø authored every facet of the work, embodying it as a performance artist, cinematographer, sound designer, and editor. Across 54 intuitive actions performed over a year, the film distils 48 of them into lived ritual, movement, resistance, and communion with the unknown.

The book holds the wider archive through still images, experimental poetry, and text, and includes a foreword by philosopher Hans-Georg Möller. Each page oscillates between documentation and incantation, image and word, presence and absence. There is no fear of failure, no guardrails leading to success; the work fumbles through darkness into the uncaring embrace of the unknown, where words are eaten by fish.
Together, film and book extend the enquiry of Venø’s first book ARTHEMIST STATEMENT 2.6, translating meditations on struggle, transformation, and the unknown into a practice that challenges commodification and the passive gaze. What remains is a living archive of perception and becoming.