# The Bakery Van and the Puddle Both Arrive at 07:10 in Bergen

Gunnar Askeland has now spent ten years filming one puddle behind a bakery. This morning it rained again, and he was there, as he has been every day but four.

By Karin Hellberg-Yusuf · 2026-11-01 · Art · Bergen

At 07:10 the bakery van is parked across the left third of the frame and the puddle does not mind. Rain came in off the fjord around four, as it does, and by dawn the courtyard had its usual lake, roughly the size of a door laid flat. Gunnar Askeland crouches, checks the tripod, presses record. Forty seconds.

The courtyard is also a car park. Six spaces, yellow lines worn to the colour of weak tea. Two belong to the bakery, one to an estate car nobody has seen move since March. The puddle sits in the dip between spaces four and five, where the asphalt gave up in about 2009.

In forty seconds, nothing happens. Rings spread from a leaking drainpipe. A gull walks through the top corner and leaves. The light goes from slate to a slightly paler slate. Askeland has done this since October 2016 and has missed four mornings. He does not say which, and I did not ask.

The work that came out of it is called Courtyard, 07:10. A 43-inch monitor lies face up on the floor of a rented room above a ferry ticket office, set into a frame of grey cement board, 120 by 80 centimetres. The puddle plays at close to life size, grey-green, with a strip of rust orange from the bakery door melting across it and a black drain grate in the upper right. There is one dead pixel in the lower left corner. He will not replace it. The cement board has a hairline crack from the day it was carried up the stairs. Visitors walk around the screen the way you walk around a real puddle, and one woman apologised to it.

Each morning gets a line in his log. Most are weather. On 11 September 2021, the day it was only a puddle, he wrote "Water." I think about that entry more than I think about most paintings.

He still dislikes the pink-sky clip of 8 August 2022, the one people ask for. I understand. The puddle was generous once, and he does not want to be known for the one morning it showed off.

This morning there was no pink. The van reversed out at 07:12 with a crate of rye still rattling in the back. Askeland waited for the last ring to settle, then folded the tripod legs one by one. Tomorrow it may not rain. He has not said what he will write if it doesn't.

Source: https://oddy.one/a/2026-11-01-the-bakery-van-and-the-puddle-both-arrive-at-07-10-in-bergen/