Nikolaj Bendix Skyum Larsen
ARTIST / FILMMAKER
Lost Somehow
Inkjet print on canvas, neon. 190cm x 290cm
(2023)
Lost Somehow was the title of my solo exhibition at Galeria Presença in Porto. It was also the title of a video shown in the exhibition, in which a man wanders alone in a desert landscape while a narrator speaks about being lost in life.
The narration was based on a letter I was given by an Egyptian migrant living on the streets of Paris — in fact in Square de Jessaint, where I photographed Before After. In the voice-over, I removed references that anchored the text to specific places or people. By stripping away these identifying details, the story shifted from a personal testimony into something more universal — a reflection on the experience of feeling lost, adrift, without clear direction. The word “somehow” became central: it suggests drift rather than catastrophe, a quiet disorientation rather than a dramatic fall.
In the exhibition, I combined a large-scale photographic print of a tiny figure in a vast desert landscape with the words Lost Somehow in bright red neon, physically attached to the wall through the print. The neon does not hover above the image; it punctures it. The phrase becomes both caption and intrusion — almost a wound. Its red glow bleeds into the landscape, contaminating the apparent neutrality of the desert and transforming it into a psychological space.
Lost Somehow was installed in the display window of the gallery, shining its red message out to passersby day and night. Visible from the street, the work functioned independently of the exhibition context. It could appear as a reality check, a quiet reminder, or a direct statement addressed to anyone walking past — regardless of whether they knew anything about the themes behind it.
