Silver Pine Trees, 2025
Contact prints with 4x5 inch negatives. Exposed with lightning/fire sparks an only light source in the darkroom.
Sokushinbutsu (fixed resin), 2025
Deathmask of a pine tree cast in refined resin. Installed in wooden lightbox
Film stills from the video essay Burn / Raking Light, 2025.
Distributed by Filmform, The Swedish Art Film and Video archive, Excerpt
"Weronika Bela and Ivar Hagren collaborate as Hagren/Bela. They primarily work with analog black and white photography, utilizing both traditional and experimental techniques, alongside mediums such as drawing, video and spatial installation. In several works they take on a more-than-human perspective on plants and trees that, like the photographic apparatus, function as a light-sensitive medium. The works Silver Pine Trees (2025) as well as the films Burn and Raking Light (2025) involve the organic photosynthesis of plants and the organizing photography of the camera, an artistic symbiosis that expands our understanding of both. The seemingly dead tree and the mummified monk live on and at the same time die through the photograph as a transparent medium.”
- A Field Guide to the Dark Flora, Timo Menke
"Through exposures with large-format negatives and methodical notes in moving images, with motifs from Swedish nature reserves, the artist duo Hagren/Bela make visible a series of black-and-white snapshots of the rare elements of dead wood in our forest landscapes. Creating haunting images by exposing prints in the darkroom using sparks and flames from a lighter allude to how the pine tree, by being ravaged by lightning strikes and fires, increases its resin production in such a way that it ultimately embalms itself. And from the artists photographs, filmed sequences and resin casts – where traces of something elusive are fixed – the silver pines rise as primeval forest-like tree relics; as remnants of coniferous forest with an ability to abolish the boundary between living and dead. Perhaps the portrayed trees, with such an age that their trunks shimmer silver-gray, can be seen as reminders of the transience of life? But in their state of limbo, the dead wood also constitutes a prerequisite for survival, as invaluable habitats for around half of all red-listed species in our forests.”
- Erik Anderman