The works from the series On the Whispering Wind are from the Roman city of Pompeii, buried by volcanic ash in 79 AD. About 2,000 of its inhabitants became victims of the eruption from Vesuvius. During excavations in the 18th century, archaeologists discovered mysterious cavities below the layers of ash and soil. During a decade of excavations, these pockets remained an enigma, until attempts were made to fill the cavities with plaster. As the plaster hardened and the surrounding ash was removed, full-scale negative casts emerged of bodies frozen in time, facing their inevitable tragedy. The matte, coarse plaster casts give shape to the bodies encased by the ash nearly two millennia ago.

The enigmatic plaster casts defy categorization. They have been made during the last 150 years, but from moulds shaped 2.000 years ago. Are they antique or modern, made by man or of nature? Does it make sense to describe them as sculptures, or are they something else altogether? Among other things, Gleditsch's photographs deal with ephemerality, and the moral implications of photographing a 2,000-year-old direct impression of lived life, as opposed to making an image of a marble sculpture.

A recurring feature of Gleditsch's artistic production is the emphasis on how unintentional shifts in meaning affect the dissemination of historical events, and this exhibition is no exception. A brownish-red colour dominate the walls of Pompeii. It is perhaps the single most iconic colour of antiquity. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Pompeian red became a fashionable symbol in culturally well-to-do homes in Northern Europe. Countless living rooms got painted in this colour that simultaneously signified good taste, a familiarity with antiquity and the new science of archaeology. However, recent research has cast doubt on whether the walls of Pompeii were not red but yellow. Through exposure to the hot gas from the volcano, the pigment may have been baked and changed colour from yellow ocher to red.

As with the plaster casts, Gleditsch reads this elusive colour as a hybrid between a chemical and a social construction – a phenomenon at the intersection between being made by man and of nature. The colours from the ruin city manifest as ambivalent historical membranes through which the photographs are viewed. In On the Whispering Wind, Gleditsch juxtaposes the plaster casts and the colours as two unintentional phenomena conjured up by the ash.

In the project mmmMarbles, Espen Gleditsch photographed a specific group of works from the British Museum with a very specific provenance. His interest in how narratives about historical and contemporary events are established, conveyed, and legitimised, as well as his interest in classical sculpture, modernist architecture, museum spaces, and, not least, in colours and surfaces, come together in the series of works and the exhibition. The focal point is the Parthenon-frieze, photographed by Gleditsch at the British Museum. He continues his artistic exploration of a recurring misconception, dating back to the sixteenth century and the Renaissance, being that ancient sculpture and architecture were originally executed in pure, white, unpainted marble. Some of the works in the series have been given UV-printed glass in the colours white and blue, pointing to the idea and ideal of the white marble, but also to an original blue that has been found in a cavity on the marble frieze.

The project Faded Remains relates to the intricate relationship between ancient Greek marble sculpture and colour. Despite the sculptures polychrome origin, the white marble surface is intrinsically linked to the reception of sculptures from the period.

The photographs are of canonized, ancient Greek and Roman sculptures from The Glyptothek in Munich and the Vatican Museum in Rome. They are juxtaposed wit marble sculptures commissioned by Mussolini in the 1940s. In an attempt to link artistic ties between the fascist party and the grandeur of the Roman Empire, they invoke one of its most emblematic symbols: white marble sculptures. Even though it was since long known that antique sculpture initially was polychrome.

In the photographic work, the lost colours are re-instated. The framed glass is tinted with colours from conservational research on antique sculpture, like a veil through which the black-and-white photographs are presented.

Parts of the series has been shown at the photo triennial "New Visions" at the Henie Onstad Art Centre (2020) where Gleditsch was one of five Norwegian photographers in the selection of 31 artists in the exhibition.

Part of the series is in the collection of the Henie Onstad Art Centre and KORO.