Galleri Brandstrup is proud to present “Veien til Dakotah” (The Road to Dakota) a solo exhibition by Dag Alveng. The exhibition opens Thursday Ooctober 23, 2025, at 6pm.
In this new body of work, Alveng traces a journey across the American Midwest, from Chicago to Montana, through towns that have all but disappeared. He stops at empty crossroads, silent gas stations, and fading facades, remnants of once-thriving communities founded by Norwegian immigrants. In Lily, South Dakota, population four, only two remain.
The photographs on view emerge from a deep experience of stillness and presence. What began with a single image of two buildings in South Dakota unfolded into a larger reflection on time, memory, and disappearance. Through these black-and-white works, Alveng observes the quiet persistence of light and the slow erosion of place, capturing landscapes where human traces linger like afterimages.
Alveng works exclusively with analogue photography, maintaining a precise and uncompromising approach to technique. Each print reflects his devotion to light, detail, and the materiality of the photographic process. For Alveng, the camera is not merely a tool for documentation but a means of perceiving the world, a way to measure time through presence.
Behind the images lies the story of Norwegian emigration: families who left Telemark to cross nearly five hundred miles, from the steep valleys of Tinnsjø to the vast plains of Dakota. More than 800,000 Norwegians sought a new life on the prairie. In Alveng’s photographs, we encounter America today, a place where the idea of freedom and opportunity has fractured, and where the landscape itself carries the weight of history.
Through his restrained and precise language of light and structure, Alveng reveals how decay and endurance coexist. His photographs offer a way to see a culture in slow dissolution, where time becomes both subject and medium. In these images, the boundary between observation and experience fades; reality itself becomes the picture.
Dag Alveng is considered a pioneer of Norwegian photographic art. He has exhibited widely in Norway and abroad, and his works are represented in major institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and The National Museum in Oslo. In 2018, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter presented a large retrospective of his work.
As part of the exhibition, the sound work Trøblete minner fra Minnesota (2025) by composer Dag Aak Sveinar will also be presented. Performed by Tredje Natt, the piece consists of three movements and will be played as an installation in the gallery throughout the exhibition period.