@@Hordaland Kunstsenter@@

Seminar: Investigating systems of persuasion

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:59:13 +0200

Art education is carried out by many different teachers, with different practices and related pedagogies. Often art academies are distinguished by their professors, whose ‘styles’ or ‘manifestos’ create the profiles of their institutions. Additionally there are governmental directives and international treaties (like the Bologna accord), and other local policies that form the framework that the artist educators operate within. Within this nexus the next generation of artist are being produced. To what degree do they replicate the conditions of their production? How does the system critique itself and re-adjust in relation to the rest of the art world?

Art education is thus contingent on a network of politics, policies, ideologies, and belief systems, including the belief systems we call pedagogy. Education in general is a political, and increasingly economic, battleground and art education is no exception. This means that art education has been put under pressure to become more structured and transparent, so that those outside can have an impression of control and understanding. Nevertheless, every day in art education there are initiatives that disrupt teaching programmes and teachers and/or students that act on their own initiatives outside of regulated schedules.

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The seminar Investigating systems of persuasion is created in collaboration with Hordaland Art Centre and Katrine Hjelde, based on Hjelde’s PhD research titled Constructing a Reflective Site: Practice between art and pedagogy in the art school.

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Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist born in Sweden, living in Tromsø, Norway and in Berlin, Germany. Sonjasdotter's artistic engagement often takes place over time, following the conditions of the involved participants and investigated subjects. In the long term project Potatoes’ Perspective Sonjasdotter investigates the relation between humans and plants as manifested in cultivated plants, where she especially looks into the role of potatoes during the development of Modernity. Sonjasdotter is professor at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in Tromsø, Norway, an institution she took part of establishing in 2007. Selected projects and exhibitions include: Adretta’s Eye, Christine’s Hand (Kunstverein und Stiftung Springhornhof, Germany, 2013); The Way Potatoes Go (Green Acres: Artists Farming Fields, Greenhouses and Abandoned Lots, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, USA, 2012), Hungry City (Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany, 2012), The Order of Potatoes (The Worldly House, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, 2012. From 1996 to 2006 she has been a founding member of Women Down the Pub, a feminist art- and action group that operates within the current debate on gender.

Samuel Sztern will present how Instituto Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (IENBA), as the only formal art education in Uruguay, through student induced reforms and political coups today is a place for radical pedagogy. He was himself a student at IENBA in the 50s and was instrumental in the changes that followed a study trip to the Biennale Saõ Paolo, where the students realised how out of synch their own education was with current practices. During the 60s the staff resigned after heavy criticism from the students, who in turn filled their previous teacher’s positions. The new teachers implemented a new curriculum, universal free access without admission exams or application procedures, and a programme of interventions in the city. This radical pedagogical experiment was cut short when the army closed the School in 1973, in the wake of the military coup. It was the only educational establishment in the country that was kept closed until 1985, when democracy was reinstated and IENBA reopened.

Ana Laura López de la Torre’s (1969, Uruguay) practice is community-based and concerned with the idea of the “common good”, both in terms of what is already common to people – what we are compelled to share, for example a public space – and of what else we might be able to share voluntarily through generosity, collaboration and exchange, by pooling resources and producing communal knowledge. Often using the overlooked and the underrated as a starting point, her work creates visible and unexpected connections between things, people and places. Her commission record includes works and projects for the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Art), Whitechapel Gallery, Gasworks, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, La Casa Encendida (Spain), de kunstbank (Belgium) and Demokratische Kunstwochen (Switzerland). Currently she is completing doctoral studies at Chelsea College of Art & Design, thanks to a studentship from the University of the Arts, London. Her research project Living together: The artist as a neighbour, studies the effects in the life of communities, of the activity of artists who chose to work in their own neighbourhoods of residency.

FLΔG is a project exploring and exploding the ‘educational turn’ through events and actions moving in and out of the art school. FLΔG aims to critically build on the ‘educational turn’ as it is found in the contemporary art world, bringing this enquiry back into the discursive arena and physical space of the art school - exploring how art students and others can claim and investigate forms of pedagogic engagement as part of their practice.

Hannah Rose Clayden (born 1990) completed her BA Fine Art (hons) at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2012. Since 2009 she has worked as part of cross-disciplinary collective and publication SALT, and with research group FLAG. In 2012 she exhibited in Glasgow and Leeds, acted as a Special Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design and Leeds College of Art, and completed a residency with Oval House Theatre. With FLAG, Hannah spoke at Tate conference 'Reflections on the Art School' in 2011, in addition to helping to organise two day symposium 'FLAG: Returning the Educational Turn' at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Hannah also works with collective group ARK, and in 2011 organised multidisciplinary night 'A Forest of Signs and Things' at the ICA.

Kiki Claxton, recently graduated with s MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths 2012 after a BA Fine Art from Chelsea College of And Design, 2010. Kiki is currently working as a gallery assistant at Peckham Space where she is involved in setting up the Social Practice Network. Kiki has special interest in education, social change and the future of our community. As an artist Kiki works collaboratively as part of Claxton Major collective and FLAG. Kiki has also worked as works as a Learning assistant at Tate and Tate Modern, Education assistant at Gasworks Gallery, artist educator at Hackney Pirates as well as Visiting Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

Mario D’Agostino (born 1990) graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design in 2012, and works collaboratively under the name of SALT with fellow graduates Hannah Clayden, Simon Bramley and Jake Caleb, exploring and working within DIY cultures such as self-publishing and stand-up comedy, as well as hosting discursive events and performances. He also works in a separate collaboration with Jake Caleb, making short films and videos, which attempt to construct social commentary through absurd science fiction narratives with a heavy debt to genre cinema.

Katrine Hjelde is an artist, lecturer and researcher living and working in London. Teaching BA and MA Fine Art since 1997, she is currently an Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design where she has completed a Studentship funded PhD on the contemporary interrelationship between art practice and teaching practice in the art academy in 2012. She exhibits in Great Britain and Europe, and have received artist awards and grants like Norwegian State Work Stipend for Young Artists and London Arts Board Awards to Individual Artists. Since 2000 her practice includes a collaboration with Oslo based b+r architects, outputs include the permanent Holocaust Exhibition at Villa Grande, Oslo.

Michaela Ross is an artist and lecturer and recently completed her PHD at Chelsea College of Art and Design. In 2005 she was awarded an AHRC studentship to research the relationship between the artist and the institution and the ‘educational turn’ in contemporary arts practice.She has collaborated with museums and galleries including Tate, the Serpentine Gallery and Nottingham Contemporary and has worked on international projects as part of Critical Practice, a cluster of artists, academics and researchers based at the University of the Arts London.

B-open seminar: Art as an actor in society

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:18:43 +0200

Art often questions or criticises aspects of society - and the public often accepts art as a sort of correcting voice in our society. From an ideal point of view. Does the artist contribute with a specific competence into our society, and if so, do they have a voice?

B-open has given the challenge to reflect on this question to Jeanne van Heesvijk (Netherland) and Frans Jacobi (Denmark/Norway), along with four artists who will present one of their art projects and reflections on this theme. Presentations will be given both in norwegian and english.

Programme
12.30     Jeanne van Heesvijk: www.jeanneworks.net .
13:30     Selfpresentation from artists: Katrine Meisfjord and Gitte Sætre
14:00     Screening of a documentary "Strategy and negotiations" by Stine Gonsholt and Åse Løvgren. Artists from different generations reflects on their participation in social and political aspects of society.

15:00     Food – soup, 50 NOK

15:30     Frans Jacobi: www.fransjacobi.net
16:30     Discussion and possible conclusions
17:30     End

Please let us know if you want to attend, by mailing to styret@b-open.no before Tuesday May 21st.

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About B-open

B-open is an organisation which initiates and coordinates the bi-annual event of open artist studios in Bergen and Hordaland, and annually organises a seminar, thus creating a forum for a diverse discussion on contemporary art. B-open organises monthly Study Circles in collaboration with artists in Bergen.

B-open wants to take part in the debate and reflection surrounding the artist as contributor to society at large, and aim to organise challenging, interesting and memorable events for both art professionals and the general public.

B-open was initiated and is run jointly by the two artist unions Bildende Kunstneres Forening Hordaland (BKFH) and Norske Kunsthåndverkere Vest-Norge (NKVN), in collaboration with Hordaland Art Centre.

Self-Organised

Thu, 02 May 2013 13:03:53 +0200

It follows the two best sellers Curating Subjects (Paul O'Neill ed.) and Curating and the Educational Turn (Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson Eds.) in the same series.

In this anthology artists, curators, critics and academics respond to and re-orient our understanding of how we self-organise within the field of contemporary art today.

If labels such as ‘alternative’, ‘non-profit’ and ‘artist-run’ dominated the self-organised art scene that emerged in the late 1990s, the separatist position implied by the use of these terms has been moderated during the intervening years. This new anthology of accounts from the front line includes contributions that provide a fascinating account of the art world as matrix of interconnected positions where the balance of power and productivity constantly shifts.

Text contributions by: Julie Ault, Maibritt Borgen, Céline Condorelli & Johan Frederik Hartle, Anthony Davies, Stephan Dillemuth & Jakob Jakobsen, Ekaterina Degot, Charles Esche & David Riff, Barnaby Drabble, Jonas Ekeberg, Linus Elmes, Juan A Gaitán, Abdellah Karroum, Livia Pancu, Jan Verwoert, What, How & For Whom/WHW

For book orders in Norway:
email: hks@kunstsenter.no

For book orders in the UK and worldwide:
www.openeditions.com
email: orders@openeditions.com

Supported by: Arts Council Norway, Association of the Freedom of Expression Foundation, Danish Arts Council, Bergen City, Culture Point North

Retrospective Catalogue 2012

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 16:28:45 +0200

Retrospective Catalogue 2012 is the fourth annual presentation of the programme of Hordaland Art Centre. In 2012 we have discussed different ideas of responsibility through our programme; ecological, aesthetic, architectural, historical, social and material. Every exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned piece of writing, which introduces, mediates or explores the exhibition programme.

In addition you can read the texts Recovering lost voices - On Maysia Lewandowska's Tender Museum by Magdalena Ziółkowska and Productive confusion and the collaboratieve educational situation by Anne Szefer Karlsen and Arne Skaug Olsen.

In 2012 author Rolf Enger has been our witness, and his witness report is titled THE OIDS (Meditations over the Robot Seal Paro).

Book launch: Self-Organised

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 15:05:55 +0200

Open Editions (London) and Hordaland Art Centre (Bergen) publish the third book in the Occasional Table series: Self-organised, edited by Stine Hebert and Anne Szefer Karlsen, following the two best sellers Curating Subjects (Paul O'Neill ed.) and Curating and the Educational Turn (Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson Eds.).

In this anthology artists, curators, critics and academics respond to and re-orient our understanding of how we self-organise within the field of contemporary art today.

For book orders in Norway:
email: hks@kunstsenter.no

For book orders in the UK and worldwide:
www.openeditions.com
email: orders@openeditions.com

Supported by: Arts Council Norway, Association of the Freedom of Expression Foundation, Danish Arts Council, Bergen City, Culture Point North

Presentation: Performancebad - STAGING SUBJECTS AND OBJECTS

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:07:59 +0200

Kelly is artist in residence at USF this spring. End of May she will show a new production at Rom 8, the space for artistic reseach at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, in collaborating with Marhaug. Carpenter is in Bergen to collaborate with Terese Longva. Together they create Longva+Carpenter, and during the Bergen International Festival they will showcase their new performance.

The conversation between the residents and Marhuag is titled Staging subjects and objects, and the focus will be to present important parts of their preformative practices in the intersection between staging and the everyday.

Carpenter is currently on a sabbatical from Alfred University, NY, where she is deputy professor.

Kelly lives and works as an artist in Nottingham.

Åsa Noor Bjørkum will provide artistic expressions during the event. She is a pupil at Bergen City Culture School.

Rita Marhaug is at the end of her contract as professor at Bergen Academy of Art and Design. She is co-founder of PAB and has her studio at C. Sundts gate 55 in Bergen.

This is the first of many of PAB's Performancebad, and is this time in collaboration with Hordaland Art Centre and Bergen Academy of Art and Design.

Reading group: IF...

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 09:25:26 +0200

IF ... promts conversation, review and comment. Taking place in a different venue each meeting, topics or prompts for discussion are invited from artist, curators, publishers, writers and others.

For April IF... will take place internationally, between London (UK), Tokyo (Japan) and Bergen (Norway). The prompt is the text Art and literacy by Luis Camnitzer which questions how we learn art, selected by Anne Szefer Karlsen, director of Hordaland Art Centre linking the meeting with the current exhibition, Jens.

IF… is open for all to come along, discuss, join in and listen.

The text Art and literacy is available in English and Norwegian, and we will focus on the sections Indoctrinating Subversion and Coding and Decoding How and What.

Art and Literacy - Luis Camnitzer

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 09:35:17 +0200

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

—George W. Bush, in a speech given in Townsend, Tennessee, February 21, 2001

Interestingly, at least in the languages I know, when one talks about alphabetization there is always the mention of reading and writing, in that order. Ideologically speaking, this prioritized order not only reflects the division between production and consumption, but subliminally emphasizes the latter: ignorance is shown more by the inability to read than by the inability to write. Further, this order suggests that alphabetization is more important for the reception of orders than for their emission.

Of course, this theory—that if one wants to be able to write something, one should know how it is written—has some logic to it. It forces one first to read, then to copy what one reads—to understand somebody else’s presentation in order to then re-present it. In art terms, however, this is similar to saying that one has to first look at the model in order to then copy it. Now the logical construction becomes much less persuasive. This is not necessarily wrong, insofar as one really wants to copy the model, or the need to copy the model is well grounded. In essence, if there is no proven need, the logical construction ceases to be one—it becomes a dogma disguised as logic.

This theory establishes first that the model deserves to be copied, second that there is a merit in making a reasonably faithful copy, and third that this process is useful to prepare the artist to produce art. This idea is a leftover from the nineteenth century, and its relevance today is highly questionable. An artist then has to ask whether the problems posed today by alphabetization might not be in need of new and more contemporary approaches. Is there an analysis of these problems informed by the attitudes that removed art from the nineteenth century and brought it into the twentieth? In other words, is alphabetization a tool to help presentation or re-presentation? Where is power located? Is it granted to the literate-to-be or to be found in the system that wants him or her to be literate?

One tends to speak of art as a language. In some cases it is even described as a universal language, a kind of Esperanto capable of transcending all national borderlines. As a universal language, stressing universal, art serves the interests of colonization and the expansion of an art market. The notion of art as a plain language, however, underlines a notion of it as a form of communication. In this case, power is not granted to the market, but to those who are communicating.

Educational institutions expect everybody to be able to learn how to read and write. It would follow that, if everybody has the potential to use reading and writing for expression, everybody should also have the potential to be an artist. Yet in art the assumption is different. Everybody may be able to appreciate art, but only a few are expected to produce it—not all readers are writers. Such inconsistent expectations overlook the fact that, just as alphabetization should not aim for Nobel Prizes in literature, art education should not aim for museum retrospectives. Nobel Prizes and retrospectives are more indicative of a kind of triumphal competitiveness than of good education. Put simply, good education exists to develop the ability to express and communicate. This is the importance of the concept of “language” here, the implication being that both art and alphabetization can be linked to nurture each other.

Reading, Writing, and the Rest

At this moment, we are in the precise middle of the decade that the United Nations has designated as the Decade for Alphabetization (alphabetization here used in the sense of education for literacy). UNESCO estimates that there are 39 million illiterates in Latin America and the Caribbean, roughly 11% of whom are adults.¹ 16 million of them are in Brazil. These statistics only include people who do not know how to read or write. If we add those who are functionally illiterate—people who have the techniques, but are not able to use them to understand or to develop ideas—these figures grow astronomically. In developing countries, one out of every five people older than 15 is considered illiterate. Among developed countries, nearly 5% of the population of Germany, for example, is functionally illiterate. And among literate students in the US, it is estimated that 75% of those finishing high school do not have the reading skills required for college.

The teaching of reading and writing has been a major part of the schooling mission for over two centuries. It has also been on the minds of countless specialists who ponder gaps in formal education in both expected and unexpected sectors of the public. That everybody should know how to read and write is taken for granted. However, beyond vague truisms regarding its function, there is little discussion about how those abilities are used. And yet the problem of illiteracy persists even in countries claiming to have eradicated it.

Art has dealt with illiteracy on amazingly rare occasions, and when it did, it did so mostly of its own accord, keeping within its disciplinary identity and confusions, among them an idea that appreciating art is for everyone while making art is for the few. This means that art’s main strengths—speculation, imagination, and its questions of “what if?”—have not really been explored on those occasions. Supposedly art is art and the rest is the rest. Art, however, happens to be the rest, too.

My Imperialism

Forty years ago, I was invited to organize the art department in a US university. I refused on the grounds that art is not really “art,” but a method to acquire and expand knowledge. Consequently, art should shape all academic activities within a university and not be confined to a discipline. I recognize that my position reflected a form of art-imperialism, and this is something I still adhere to. As in all imperialisms, my position was not necessarily based on solid information and I used aggression as a tool for persuasion. Predictably, I was defeated, and shortly after was condemned to solitary confinement in the art department I had so proudly rejected. Yet I am unrepentant: I continue to operate with poorly informed opinions, I continue to be aggressive, and, to be sure, I will continue to be defeated.

My imperialism is based on a generalist view of art in which everything (including the “rest”) can be seen as art. I also believe that the social structures that divide us into producers and consumers—those that ensure that our lives conform to the laws of the market instead of seeking a collective well-being—should be demolished. These were the views we developed as students during the late 1950s while I was in art school in Uruguay. These views took for granted that such a broad definition of art, in which everybody could be a creator, would become a tool for improving society. We were defeated then, and today these beliefs are considered anachronistic and out of place.

Regardless of their feasibility, these perspectives had some importance because they introduced an awareness of the role and distribution of power in matters of art and education that should not be ignored. They clarified claims surrounding the ownership of knowledge, how that ownership is distributed, and who benefits from it. Even if these issues are normally considered to be outside the scope of art, it is on their account that the use of language and the means of engaging illiteracy become interesting to art.

Indoctrinating Subversion

Both art education and alphabetization have in common the dual and often contradictory mission of facilitating individual and collective cultural affirmation and expression on the one hand, and of being necessary tools to cement and expand forms of consumption on the other. Consequently, education is not only an ideologically fractured field, but one in which each of its ideologies assumes its own particular pedagogical approach to apply to all fields of knowledge, overcoming all irresolvable contradictions. When reasonably progressive, such pedagogies assume that one can ensure the stability and smoothness of the existing society while at the same time forming critically questioning, non-submissive, creative individuals. This approach takes for granted that education will create good, accepting citizens who play by the rules, but who will also be subversive individuals attempting to change that society. In a conservative pedagogical approach, the latter part of the mission will simply be ignored.

As it is, the educational system emphasizes good citizenship during the early stages of formation and postpones any potential subversion until the postgraduate level. Speculation and imagination are allowed only after becoming a good citizen. In order for actual subversion to take place, it would first have to address the earlier parts of the educational process. This explains why alphabetization takes place at the beginning of the educational voyage while true art-making is placed at its end, or is indeed postponed until after formal education is over.

The tension that emerges from this built-in stability/instability contradiction creates two main divisions in how education is approached: between “integralism” and “fragmentalism,” on the one hand; and between tutorial education and massive education, on the other. Although the two divisions are not necessarily aligned with each other, in traditional education, fragmentation tends to be coupled with massive education. Here information is reified, classified into disciplines, and simultaneously transmitted to large groups of people with the aim of achieving an efficient conformist stability. Knowledge travels from the outside to the inside. The elements are distinct, and their classification and order are presumed to be good and unchangeable. Power lies in the hands of somebody other than the student.

The second alignment is different. In more progressive education practices, integralism tends to be associated with a tutorial style of instruction in which there is more room for interdisciplinary research, encouragement of discovery, and an emphasis on individual processing. While not necessarily seeking either a flexible society or a critical analysis of one’s connections to it, there is at the very least this emphasis on individuation. And inasmuch as it includes the possibility of a permanent critique, there is an empowerment of the individual in the form of an encouraged, self-aware perception of the world.

It is this notion of empowerment that creates ideological differences between the two alignments. As soon as empowerment is introduced, the politics around the distribution of power becomes an indissoluble part of the educational process. This can explain why the most paradigmatic pedagogical figures in Latin America sought to develop not only the basic process of alphabetization within the field of education, but also self- and social awareness. Both the Venezuelan Simón Rodríguez (1769–1854) and the Brazilian Paulo Freire (1921–1997) saw education as a form of building a progressive and just social community. In the 1820s, Rodríguez declared that education had to deal “first with things, and second with those who own them.”² In the 1960s, Freire wrote that “before learning how to read words, one should learn how to read the world.”³ Both educators underlined the importance of decoding the social situation prior to decoding the disciplines of reading and writing.

It is not surprising that this form of social decoding is easier to achieve through individual exchanges rather than collective ones. Individual tutoring seems to be ideal. When the teacher can focus all his or her energy and attention on one person, it allows for immediate calibration and response to the most minimal signs of incomprehension. Done well, it takes the Socratic method to the level of extreme psychological therapy, making for a tailor-made education for each individual. If the teacher is a good one, this makes for perfection. Seen in terms of efficiency, however, individual tutoring is the least economical strategy. It is no coincidence that having a personal tutor is a symbol of wealth reserved for the upper classes, so it becomes paradoxical to expect this highly elitist mechanism to also be the most appropriate means of achieving a just and classless society.

On the other hand, massive education remains seductive for its apparent economic efficiency as well as its populist appeal. A teacher can form tens or hundreds of individuals with the same investment of time and energy that a tutor makes for one. As far as the empowerment of the individual is concerned, however, massive education has the tendency to disseminate information and indoctrinate rather than to promote investigation and self-consciousness. In other words, striving for efficiency favors cheap output at the expense of qualitative evaluation. Quality becomes assessed within an economic frame of reference. Alarmingly, this distortion is accepted as the norm. Of course, there are tutors who inform and indoctrinate their students, just as there are teachers educating the masses who are able to raise awareness and empower them. In the first case, however, the tutor is betraying the teaching mission; in the second, the ideals are only reached by overcoming built-in obstacles.

Coding and Decoding How and What

Sixty-five years ago, when I was learning how to write, I was forced to fill pages with the same letter, repeating it over and over again. I had to copy single letters before I was allowed to write words. I was given words before I could express other people’s ideas, before I could express my own ideas, before I could even explore what my own ideas might be. It only occurred to me as an adult that, if I know how to write with a pencil, I also know how to draw with that pencil.⁴

For my mother, educated in the Germany of World War I, matters were even worse. She had to use a pen designed specially—not for writing—but for learning how to write. The pen looked as if it had been designed for torture. Oval pieces of sharp tin forced the placement of the fingers into one particular position. If the fingers were not in the required position, they would be hurt. One could speculate that these pens were instrumental in preparing for Nazi Germany’s ethos of obedience.

Art education has always been faced with a confusion between art and craft: in teaching how to do things, one often neglects the more important question of what to do with them. The conventional way of teaching how to write concentrates on readability and spelling, which only addresses the how of writing without regard to the what. Exemplified by the practice of teaching someone how to write by concentrating on a frozen aesthetic feature such as calligraphy, this approach fails to first identify the need for a message, which would then open an approach to writing that concerns the structure and clarity of what is being written.

In an exaggerated form, the pen synthesizes everything I hated about my education: the fragmentation of knowledge into airtight compartments, the confusion between how-to-do and what-to-do, the development of communication without first establishing the need for it. It was like learning how to cook without first being hungry—without even identifying what hunger is. After all, education is less about being hungry than about awakening appetite to create the need for consumption. In fact, I believe that this is how cooking is taught.

Why can’t one first identify and explore the need to communicate in order to then find a proper way of communicating? Languages themselves are generated in this manner, and this is how they evolve. Words are created to designate things that had hitherto been either unknown or unnamable. Today’s spelling errors determine tomorrow’s writing. Many of those errors are the simple product of an oral decoding that overlays written coding. Of course, errors should be acknowledged—but they should also be subject to critical evaluation. As a derogatory term, “error” reflects a particular code-centrism typical of our culture. Illiteracy is, after all, only a problem within a literacy-based culture. In general, codes are created by a need to translate a message into signs, and then decoded by a need to decipher the message. Through this coding and decoding, there is a process of feedback in which “improper” or misplaced codings produce evocations that change or enrich the message.

Finding Discovery

When the reason to read and write is primarily to receive and give orders, it is understandable that the need for learning should not be identified by the person to be alphabetized, but by the same power structure that produces those needs. Knowledge becomes predetermined and closed when both definition and identification are performed within this restricted functional field, while a more open field would stimulate questioning and creation. In essence, one cannot educate properly without revealing the power structure within which education takes place. Without an awareness of this structure and the way it distributes power, indoctrination necessarily usurps the place of education.

While this is true for education in general, it becomes more insidious when applied to the teaching of reading and writing. In this case, indoctrination is not necessarily visible in the content, but instead seeps heavily into the process of transmission: if one is taught to repeat like a parrot, it doesn’t really matter what is actually being repeated; only the desired automatic, internalized act of repetition will remain. If we only teach to recognize things by their forms without addressing concepts, it won’t matter what generates these forms. Only the recognition of the packaging will remain, and worse, the acquisition of knowledge will stop there.

A real education for an artist consists of preparation for a pure research of the unknown. In a strong art education, this starts at the very beginning. But as institutional education in other areas is organized to convey only known information and to perpetuate conventional habits, these are two pedagogies in fundamental conflict. Where, then, should the fight against illiteracy be placed? Should alphabetization be handled as a subject for training or as a tool for discovery?

The question may be too schematic. In art, pure discovery leads to amateurism, while pure training leads to empty professionalism—good preparation ultimately seeks a balance between them. The question does not concern which activity should be eliminated, but rather which one should inform the other. Those in favor of training often defend it with the need to supply good scaffolding for the student. Yet if one ultimately hopes that discovery will be the main purpose of a student’s life, whether for self-realization or for collective enrichment, it is clear that the student should not just learn to build scaffolds.

We now find ourselves in an age when the amount of available knowledge far exceeds our capabilities for codification. The imbalance is such that we must speculate on whether the concept of restricted alphabetization based on the re-presentation of known things may be an unforgivable anachronism. We may have arrived at a point where we need an education that goes far beyond all this: one that first makes the subject aware of the personal need for literacy and then identifies the coding systems already in use, so that they may be used as a reference; one that proceeds to activate translation processes as a primary tool for entering new codes; one that, from the very beginning, fosters the ability to reorder knowledge, to make unexpected connections that present rather than re-present. In other words, we need a pedagogy that includes speculation, analysis, and subversion of conventions, one that addresses literacy in the same way any good art education addresses art. This means putting literacy into the context of art. By forcing art to focus on these things, in turn, the art empire itself will also be enriched.

This essay began as a paper presented at the 1st International Meeting on Education, Art and Functional Illiteracy, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, December 1–3, 2008. The meeting was sponsored by Daros Latin America and co-organized by Eugenio Valdés, Director of Casa Daros in Rio de Janeiro, and myself as Pedagogical Curator of the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre. After the meeting it was decided that we would pursue several objectives within a continuing project we named Art-phabetization: a) to study institutional dynamics in existing organizations like the Samba schools to fight illiteracy among their members; b) to blur the borderlines between schools and their neighborhoods and between schoolwork and leisure; c) to study the role of errors in the generation of metaphors and new knowledge; d) to create a literacy or alphabetization laboratory to explore methodologies to be tested in institutional settings; e) to study the possibility of the creation of mobile laboratories; f) to create a blog and an interactive databank of exercises and games that connects the laboratory with literacy teachers.

"Art and Literacy" was first published in e-flux journal issue #03, March 2009. Thank you to e-flux journal for letting Hordaland Art Centre re-publish the text in relation to the exhibition “Jens”, April 5^th – June 2^nd 2013.

Presentation: A Report from Life at School IV - Ane Hjort Guttu

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 13:12:55 +0200

In 2011 Ane Hjort Guttu conducted a workshop at the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art titled Life at School IV. This was part Life at School, a five part educational project. The main question throughout this project was: What pedagogical strategies can best express and fulfil the goals of freedom and equality in art education? Life at School IV focused on the tutorial, the meeting between student and teacher.

Ane Hjort Guttu, b. 1971, is an artist and curator based in Oslo. During the last years she has been working with issues of power and freedom through videos, picture collections, sculpture and photography. Guttu also writes analytical as well as poetical texts, and she has created several works dealing with historical arts. Latest projects and exhibitions include: The Rich Should be Richer, Kunsthall Oslo 2012; West of the East, Y Gallery, Minsk 2012; Multiple Choices, KARST Projects, Plymouth 2012; Learning for Life, Henie Onstad kunstsenter 2012-2013; Society without Qualities, Tensta Konsthall 2013. Projects in 2013 include Den nya modellen, Tensta konsthall/Tate Liverpool; Does Europe matter?, The Pavillion - Vitamin Creative Space, Beijing. Guttu is currently finishing her fellowship at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Film screening and talk: Angela Serino - Outside and Inside a Body

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:05:12 +0100

As a way of introducing her curatorial practice and current projects, curator Angela Serino will present a selection of artists' films and video works, including excerpts from works by Lea Porsager and Paola Anziché. "This selection of moving images is a pretext to see what goes through the skin, to look closer at gestures and actions that artists develop to strengthen bonds among people, to inhabit a domestic space differently, or even to let other meanings slip into the world of language and words."

Angela Serino is an Italian curator and writer based in Amsterdam (NL), currently in residence at Hordaland Art Centre. She is member of the Programming Committee of Kunsthuis SYB since 2010. As an independent curator she has curated several group exhibitions and public events for institutions (such as SMBA Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam, TENT. Rotterdam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, European Cultural Foundation Amsterdam) as well as independent and artists' run spaces (PSWAR Public Space with a Roof, Kunsthuis SYB). On the occasion of such projects, she has worked with and produced new works by artists Mounira Al Solh, Francesca Grilli, Ahmet Ögüt, Meiro Koizumi, Egle Budvytyte, Rory Pilgrim, Paola Anziché, Maja Bekan, a.o. Serino has a degree in Mass Communication from the University of Siena (IT), and attended the Curatorial Programme at de Appel art centre, Amsterdam (NL) in 2005/06.

Seminar: Remnants of Tomorrow

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 08:39:08 +0100

Maarten Vanden Eynde is a visual artist who worked for five years on the realisation of a monumental sculpture made up of plastic debris coming from the five ocean gyres, locations where plastic is accumulating because of the existing ocean currents. The sculpture Plastic Reef (2008-2012) has the characteristics of a coral reef, with all its nooks and crannies. However, more than hinting at what could be lost as a result of all the plastic in our oceans, it is a possible physical but surrealistic solution to the threat that plastic in the oceans pose to the marine environment.

The importance of marine environments to living beings, as well as land environments, is frequently under communicated. In light of this, we can see Plastic Reef as tangible proof of what scientists and ecologists are trying to make known through research and publication.

In this seminar we will look at the influence of plastic pollution from a future perspective. As plastic will create the fossils of the future, we are interested in short and long term effects, as well as mapping what is currently happening with the plastics that are floating in the world oceans. What are the global effects and implications of plastic presence in our environment? What is the possible threat for us, as the initial creators of this new material? And what will be our legacy? What will be our 'Remnants of Tomorrow'?

As is poetically, yet matter-of-factly, described in Nav Haq’s text The Age of Plastic and After, published on the occasion of Maarten Vanden Eynde’s exhibition Plastic Reef, the proliferation of plastic in our world will lead to long-term damages. The text is concluded with this sentence: And the return of plastic into the ocean was eventually seen as symbolic of a cycle of failure, and, with it, of the delusion of the modern era.

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Day programme:

13:00: Welcome by Maria Lyngstad Willassen, Hordaland Art Centre

13:10: Introduction by Maarten Vanden Eynde, artist

13:30: Kevin Thomas, Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA), Oslo, Norway:

Plastics in the marine environment and the potential risks they pose - with a focus on Norway

14:15: Chris Carroll, Seas at Risk, Brussels, Belgium:

Possible legislative solutions and needed actions

15:00: Break

15:30: Marcus Eriksen, 5 Gyres Institute, Los Angeles, USA:

Saving Our Synthetic Seas – about the work of the 5 Gyres Institute to document the global distribution of plastic marine pollution in the five subtropical gyres

16:15: Maarten Vanden Eynde, Future situations

16:30: Rounding up, group discussion

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The seminar will be held in English. Participation is free and open to all. To secure a seat, please notify us of your participation before Wednesday 6^th of March by e-mail: hks [at] kunstsenter.no.

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Maarten Vanden Eynde is an artist who has devoted his life to exploring the mysteries of our future past by investigating the concept of Genetology, a self-invented ‘Science of First Things’ (www.genetology.net). His work is situated exactly on the borderline between the past and the future; sometimes looking forward to the future of yesterday, sometimes looking back to the history of tomorrow. He studied Free Media at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His postgraduate studies have included a year at the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles, USA, and two years at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. In 2005 he founded the organisation Enough Room for Space, a mobile platform for site-specific projects, together with Marjolijn Dijkman.

Kevin Thomas is an environmental scientist who for the past 8 years has worked at the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) as Research Manager for Ecotoxicology and Risk Assessment. His expertise lies in understanding the fate, behaviour, effects and risks of man-made substances in the environment and provides advice to national authorities and the EU. He is a highly cited author of over 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers that include reports on how particles behave and impact the aquatic environment. Kevin will coordinate a recently funded Research Council of Norway project ´Microplastic impacts on the marine environment (MIME)´that is due to start in late spring 2013.

Chris Carroll has been working on the issue of marine litter for the past three years for Seas At Risk, the European association of NGOs working to protect and restore to health the marine environment of European seas. Its members include Friends of the Earth Norway. During his time at Seas At Risk Chris has been involved in, and presented several submissions to EU and UN bodies that have looked at the problem of marine litter, and he is one of the co-authors in a recent EU publication ‘Marine litter: Technical Recommendations for the Implementation of MSFD Requirements’. At present Chris is co-ordinating two studies being carried out by Seas At Risk, that aim to evaluate the potential of legislation to tackle the problem of marine litter. Chris has often been quoted in the media regarding the topic of marine litter and at Seas At Risk. He is also responsible for communications activities.

Marcus Eriksen is currently the Executive Director and co-founder of the 5 Gyres Institute. He studies the global distribution and ecological impacts of plastic marine pollution, which has included expeditions sailing 35,000 miles through all 5 subtropical gyres to discover new garbage patches of plastic pollution in the Southern Hemisphere. In 2000 he travelled to Midway Atoll, finding hundreds of Laysan Albatross with plastic pouring out of their stomachs, and that experience narrowed his focus to plastics. He received his Ph.D. in Science Education from University of Southern California in 2003, months before embarking on a 2000-mile, 5-month journey down the Mississippi River on a homemade raft of plastic bottles to bring attention to this issue. Again in 2008, he rafted across the Pacific Ocean from California to Hawaii on JUNK, floating on 15,000 plastic bottles and a Cessina airplane fuselage as a cabin (junkraft.com). The journey, 2,600 miles in 88 days, brought attention to the work of the 5 Gyres Institute, the organization he co-founded with his wife Anna Cummins. The 5 Gyres Institute is committed to marine conservation through continued research, education and adventure, studying and lecturing about the plague of plastic waste in our watersheds and global ocean.

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Recovering an Art School relates to questions of the role of artists and their knowledge in formal and institutional education, as well as informal and non-institutional education. The programme also relates to other organised educational spaces, such as the studio visit or a workshop, as well as the informal knowledge that the artists possess. This is in other words a forum for discussion and debate, more than a strict thematic.

Asier Mendizabal, curated by Pablo Lafuente

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 11:00:32 +0100

Eszter Szakacs (HU)

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:25:38 +0100

During her residency, Eszter Szakács will be working on developing further frameworks and directions to proceed with the ongoing research project Curatorial Dictionary. In its present phase, the dictionary, on the one hand, looks at the contextualizing understandings and the systematic connections of concepts within international curatorial practice and discourse. On the other hand, the bilingual (currently English-Hungarian) project also examines the linguistic-cultural equivalences and differentiations of these very concepts within specific, local contexts.

Eszter Szakács (1983, Hungary) is a curator and researcher based in Budapest. She currently works at the contemporary art organization tranzit. hu in Budapest, where, since 2011, she curated the project of The Pseudo Race Group Liberagility (2012), and is the editor of the ongoing collaborative research project Curatorial Dictionary. Previously, she worked at Műcsarnok / Kunsthalle, Budapest as an assistant curator (2008–2010). Her main fields of interest include the histories of curating, the analysis of curatorial discourse, and the political in art.

Angela Serino (IT/NL)

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:24:01 +0100

Kim Einarsson and Marius Dybwad Brandrud (SE)

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 16:22:02 +0100

The conversation in Bergen will focus on these issues, they say: "Collaboration and collective processes are usualy hailed as something positive in the art context, at the same time as the social, economic and institutional structures have been constructed to cater for the individual artist.

Based on aseries of texts and their own experinces from a variety of collaborations and collective processes (in art, theatre and political projects) we willdiscuss how the conditions of production appears. What methods for collaboration are used within the different art fields? To what extend and in what moments are these processes collective? Is collaboration conditioned by a collective and in that case what is this community based on in the arts? What kind of communities can be generated from collaborations? And how can the collective create political opposition?"

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Marius Dybwad Brandrud, filmmaker, based in Stockholm. Has made a couple of shorts and several collaborations both within the field of art and film. Premiered with the full-length feature "After You" in 2013.

Kim Einarsso, curator, based in Stockholm and Berlin. Methods important to her work are collaboration, discussions and asking questions. She is currently part of three collaborations with artists: Vad hände med strejkkonsten? (What happened to the art of strike?), a book about artists' supportive actions during the great mining strike i Mamfälten 1969-1970together withartist Ingela Johansson and poet Martin Högström; Den Nordiska Modellen® (The Nordic Model®), an exhibition about the collection of Malmö Art Museum together with curators Cecilia Widenheim and Stine Hebert; and Shaking the Habitual Show, a concert show based on a durational collectiveprocess with dancers, choreographers, musicians and stage technicians. Together with filmmaker Marius Dybwad Brandrudandartist Petra Bauer she made the film and exhibition En ömsesidig sak (Mutual Matters) in 2011. Previously she has workedfor several institutions in Stockholm, such as
eater Scenario, Marabouparken, Tensta Konsthall and latest Konsthall C.

Annette Kierulf and Caroline Kierulf

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:45:59 +0100

Imre Bukta

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:33:22 +0100

The exhibition is supported by City of Bergen.

JENS - Ane Hjort Guttu, Adelita Husni-Bey, Guy Rombouts

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:30:11 +0100

Education is one of many battlefields in society, which always will be governed by current ideologies. The encounter with established systems – be they public education, an alphabet or the demands and expectations of a community – challenge the individual.

The exhibition Jens is named after the school boy by the same name, appearing in Ane Hjort Guttu’s video work Freedom Requires Free People from 2011. In this film, he discusses his experience of being forced to follow the rules given at Nøklevann primary school, and at the same time how he attempts to free himself from these rules. The exhibition also shows Adelita Husni-Bey’s work The Living House (2012) and Guy Rombouts’ work X of Y (1985).

In 1984, artist Guy Rombouts invented the alphabet named AZART together with Monica Droste (1958-1998). This alphabet consists of 27 characters: 26 letters and one space. AZART is an interpretation of the Latin alphabet, and every letter not only has a new shape but also a specific colour. These letters are the building blocks of rebus-like installations and constructions, and when a word is written in this alphabet it creates a closed circuit. Throughout many years, the artist has made use of this alphabet in his making of complex sculptures within galleries as well as public spaces. In this exhibition we are proud to present an early version of Rombouts’ alphabet. The name AZART alludes to “the A to Z of art”, but also to the French word “hazard”. Rombouts’ interest for how we communicate creates the foundation for this long term project, still continued today.

Along with her long lasting interest for radical pedagogies, Adelita Husni-Bey has created several artworks dealing with how the school is a crucial building block of society. Her slides- and sound work The Living House is based on archive material from the Ferrer Colony and The Modern School in Stelton, New Jersey, established in 1915. The school was originally founded in New York in 1911, implementing the thoughts of Catalan free-thinker Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia (1859–1909). Husni-Beys work is an exploration of how to revive one of the first anarchist free schools through a collaboration with the experimental theatre group The Living Theatre from New York.

Every full hour, it’s possible to view the documentary video work Freedom Requires Free People by Ane Hjort Guttu, and take part in Jens’s thoughts on the restrictions of his own freedom facing the Norwegian primary school. Through this work, the artist poses important questions about the possibility for critical thinking within the educational institution in particular, but also within society in general.

Together the works Freedom Requires Free People and The Living House create a cycle of one hour. Thus the exhibition has a durational aspect of one hour.

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Many thanks to M HKA in Antwerp for the loan of Guy Rombouts’ work X of Y (1985).

The exhibition is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen.

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Adelita Husni-Bey is an artist and experimental ethnographer. Born to an Italian journalist and a Libyan architect in 1985, Adelita has studied Fine Art at Chelsea school of Arts and Photography & Sociology at Goldsmiths University in London. Her current research involves autonomy, pirate-utopias, the 'Land Issue', collective memory (the production of), dissent and control. Between 2009 and 2012 she developed an archive with ex-residents of Clays Lane, a housing cooperative knocked down to make way for the 2012 Olympics in London. Her recent solo-show at Gasworks (2012) focused on pedagogical and ideological differences between anarcho-collectivist schools and public institutions advanced by the Lib-con coalition in the UK. She has participated in TRACK- A Contemporary City Conversation, S.M.A.K museum, Ghent (2012), Right to Refusal, Magazin4/Kunstverein Bregenz, Bregenz (2012) and American Mountains, The Nunnery, London (2010). She is currently attending the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York.

Guy Rombouts (1949, Belgium) started as a printer with the print shop his family owned, but has since 1975 practiced as an artist. In 1994 he created the pedestrian and cycle bridges Letterbruggen at Java-eiland in Amsterdam together with Monica Droste (1958-1998). In 2006 the out-door work Lettertuin, consisting of sculptural ”concrete letters”, was restored. Several of his works are in the collection of M HKA.

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The 2013 programme at Hordaland Art Centre is titled Recovering an Art School. Through all of our exhibitions, lectures and seminars we will investigate how the “artist as teacher” creates an educational space around their works and through their practice. This space cannot be positioned neatly in categories and is not traceable or necessarily possible to repeat, which makes the artist as teacher less than compliant. Her knowledge relates to individual interests and her society. It is predefined by a collection of elements that are interchangeable, sometimes even improvised, and it cannot be organised in a formal curriculum.
Recovering an Art School relates to questions of the role of artists and their knowledge in formal and institutional education, as well as informal and non-institutional education. The programme also relates to other organised educational spaces, such as the studio visit or a workshop, as well as the informal knowledge that the artists possess. This is in other words a forum for discussion and debate, more than a strict thematic.

Recovering Lost Voices – On Marysia Lewandowska’s Tender Museum by Magdalena Ziółkowska

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 16:28:11 +0100

‘Blowing up photographs, selecting their fragments, is an activity that is only seemingly banal. In fact, it is a sifting through a torrent of information for a single motif, which bears an affinity to the process of endlessly moving towards a vital detail, one which captures the whole essence.’

Urszula Czartoryska¹

‘The relevance of the artistic proposal, rather that its encoding, is revealed in the emotional response. Rather than spectacular manifestations, I am interested in modest means and parasitic activities situated “in between” the existing norms, which are often imposed by institutional practice.’

Marysia Lewandowska²

In recent years, museums, especially museums with multiple departments, as highly structured institutions, have taken up the challenge of addressing their own, often complex, history with the aid of discourses that move beyond universalist and essentialist perspectives. They focus on individual micro-narratives, parallel or adjacent histories instead, which inform each other and take the shape of a diverse collection. This essay looks at the project Tender Museum by Marysia Lewandowska, a Polish-born artist based in London, commissioned by, and later partially acquired for the collection of Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, as an attempt at writing a female-centred history of the institution.³ The model of reflecting on the past proposed by her shifts away from an interpretation of systems of power towards an analysis of the work of affect, i.e. that of feeling and emotions. It seeks to abandon the general and universal judgements for the sake of ‘retrieving’ lost identities and intimate narratives, empowering them, in order to eventually challenge stereotypical collective representations of the institution. In this case, the female-centred reading of an institution’s history is not a one-way act of re-membering the forgotten figures, but it is based on individual perspectives presented by singular subjects for which operations on single narratives serve as the point of departure.

By means of critical transformative acts of the subject of the narrative, Lewandowska has highlighted the historical absences in the art historical canon and has thus empowered these women, granting them a voice. The artist’s approach goes a step beyond the dominant Foucauldian understanding of power as the fundamental basis of an institution’s activity. Even history itself, seen as essentially heteronomous, riddled with gaps and discontinuities instead of being a continuous and linear narrative, is intrinsically connected with the discourse of power.⁴ What is more, the venal and servile history is willing to play into the hands of the authorities as a useful instrument based on the procedures of selection, acknowledgement and exclusion. In contrast to this understanding as outlined by Michel Foucault, the affective approach gives particular emphasis to emotions and the role of notions such as care, attention, and tenderness in private, semi-private, and public spaces: in the history of a family who spent their lives in the Muzeum, and the history of the museum, shaped by the family that inhabited it. Writing a history of institutions from a feminist perspective involves not only claiming a place for absent characters (such as the art historian and curator Urszula Czartoryska) in the museum discourse and making them visible as fully-fledged public intellectuals, it is also founded on that which is singular in relation to an institution structured as a collection (of works, people, and narratives). In this case especially, such writing is, in fact, a double act of emancipation, in which Lewandowska recovers her own voice in the artistic practice – one that marks the beginning of her own individual creative practice. In Tender Museum she takes the role of an artist as detective, tracking through the museum’s history, its gender implications and conditionings. Investigating archives, browsing found press clippings, photographs and conversations, she combines ambiguous, somewhat hazy narratives to compose a new picture bordering on fantasy or fiction. At the heart of the project is one of Europe’s oldest museums of modern art – Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. Once inside, she carefully examined all fading traces, misplaced fragments and presences that had been ignored and restrained from having their own place in the history of this institution.

The concepts of the gift, hospitality, and mutual giving found in the work of affect serve as the point of departure for Lewandowska’s investigation into the gender and social aspects of museum practices and the role of affect itself in these processes – seen as ‘real-time somatic experience, no longer framed as representation.⁵ Much like the pre-war master of photomontage Hanna Höch, Lewandowska could be aptly described as ‘a whimsical observer of social conventions’, as she chose to operate in a space between the official mythologies and (semi-)private memories that hover about the Muzeum.⁶ Her project is a meticulously crafted theoretical-aesthetic-historical structure, which invites multiple interpretations and does not require a linear reading. It is possible because she works in a ‘space of continuity’, that is, a space in which narratives, characters and their fates, overlap, thus creating an archive collection. Firstly, this space emerges with the use of the photographic technique of blowing up details, which the artist deploys to direct our attention to a specific point and to draw out that which has been hidden in the shot. Secondly, the artist creates a ‘field of conflict’, in which questions of marginalisation, eviction, and the Muzeum’s patriarchal policy, are exposed from an ahistorical perspective.⁷ This finely crafted structure is woven together by the artist from those elements that seem most fleeting, immaterial and elude documentation: sounds, human voices, shadows.

The archive is not a storage from which we can draw for our own pleasure. Rather, it is marked by a lack, which, paradoxically, juxtaposes a mysterious presence of that which is not present with the excess of documents.⁸ Moreover, it should be added that the Muzeum’s archive is usually marked by a different kind of unwelcoming atmosphere, where the visitors (curators, researchers, artists) are referred to as the Other. They are often confronted with limited access to documents, unwillingness of the staff, or fictitious stories that are meant to keep them away from the materials. This is why the protagonist of Lewandowska’s project, the first project in the history of Muzeum Sztuki directly related to its archive and documentation, and our guide through the world of ‘museum tenderness’, is Urszula Czartoryska (1934–98), Poland’s first female critic and historian of photography, as well as curator (the Photography Department founded by her was the first of its kind in Polish museums) and the wife of museum director Ryszard Stanisławski (1921–2000). With her help, the artist not only liberated the narratives which remained imprisoned in the archive, she also used recordings from Łódź Radio and Television, as well as photographs from the private archive of the couple’s daughter, Olga, to reveal the unknown, ‘domestic’ face of the Muzeum – as the home of the Stanisławski family. The artist not only creates the ‘non-public’ history of the Muzeum by making it public, but also highlights the lack that characterises the public and the private image of the institution. In Latin the word privacy indicates a state of being deprived of something and is directly connected with the notion of lack. As a result, Lewandowska links the private character of living in the Muzeum with the gender marginalisation that existed in its public policy. ‘I was attempting,’ said the artist, ‘to interrogate a space where certain contributions remained unacknowledged, as there were no structures, or systems through which they could enter public consciousness’.⁹It should be stressed, however, that apart from the official state policy, the Muzeum had its own image of hospitality. It can be found in the memories of former employees recalling the generosity, warmth, and cordiality expressed by Czartoryska and Stanisławski, which challenged the sharp distinction between the private and the public and made the institution a place of concern for others.

I would like to propose a reading of each of the six rooms of the Tender Museum project (which were all together conceived as a sensory space of co-existence that invites visitors to linger, rather than didactic display), as a ‘meeting’ made possible by means of ‘in between’ activities. In this space, subtle interventions into the found archive material (photographs, footage), were combined with elements of exhibition display used in the Muzeum from the late 1960s up until today (such as pedestals, lamps, armchairs and benches for the audience), as well as with present-day materials from the Department of Documentation. Lewandowska’s strategy of ‘critical framing’ falls within key strategies of the feminist movement for which, as art critic Katy Deepwell argues, ‘the notion of an intervention as a political protest, a disruption, a provocation, a “jamming” of the system, the norm, the status quo have all been important at different times’.¹⁰ In the four following sections, I will analyse Lewandowska’s blow ups, which, in my opinion, offer a particularly interesting attempt at a social-political contextualisation of the presence and intellectual labour of women in the history of the Muzeum Sztuki.

Meeting One – ‘Photography as Communication’¹¹

A photograph is a meeting that has at its foundation a reciprocal gift of the gaze. Often an amorous meeting begins with a gaze. It heralds an erotic event that is to take place. The gaze reveals the two people looking at each other. The act of looking not only draws out the observed reality, but also awakens it. In the black-and-white postcard, published on the occasion of the Tender Museum, the gazes of the two depicted characters do not meet. Rather than presenting themselves as being together, they present themselves to us – the viewers. The woman looks ahead with confidence, her eyes fixed on the photographer; she seems lost in thoughts, as if absent.¹² The man’s head is slightly tilted, but his gaze is also steady, fixed on the camera lens, and directly on the viewer. Although the photograph depicts the two next to each other, it is not a double portrait. Two images are joined together by a hybrid shadow running across the middle of the photograph. Appearing between the characters, it emerges as the third shape in the shot – a shadow without a subject of its own. Although the woman and the man seem to be standing hand in hand (she is slightly closer to the edge of the frame), it is he who captures our attention. Lewandowska’s postcard, however, tells even more about that which is not visible, that which was left outside of the frame of the historical narrative. Who are these mysterious characters we ‘encounter’ in the photomontage? The woman is Urszula Czartoryska; she is the author of a groundbreaking book entitled Artistic Adventures of Photography (1965), which mapped the areas of interest for avant-garde artists. Since 1977 she worked as the head of Muzeum Sztuki’s Photography Department. The man is Ryszard Stanisławski, the Muzeum’s long-serving director from 1966 until 1990. The man and the woman not only shared their professional lives, they were married, and lived in the Muzeum.

Lewandowska’s postcard constitutes a welcoming gesture. One that is neither an act of production nor of enactment, but of undertaking, supporting and opening the sphere of ethos as the most fitting sphere of the human.¹³ The way in which the artist employs this fiction-come-true refers to a fascination with the ambiguous character of memories of that which fades away into the past. Such ambiguity is inescapably related to the nature of photographs. The postcard’s theatrical form, along with its subtle staging, makes it the first frame of a new reading of the museum’s institutional forms of presentation, representation, and reception, and the writing of its narrative with the use of tools derived from gender analysis. Seen by Lewandowska, Czartoryska is both a founder of this method and a model subject of Lewandowska‘s project.

Meeting Two – The Announcer

On the wall facing the entrance, painted in vertical stripes of the television test signal, Lewandowska mounted two identical monitors displaying black-and-white archive footage.¹⁴ The first presents a recording of an audition for the position of news announcer in which young girls vie for the job at the local television station. Perhaps the most intriguing part of this generally humorous material comes when we see the third candidate who is not asked to read the provided news. Unlike her predecessors, she speaks in her own voice telling her own story (about walking her favourite dog). The second monitor presents a silent recording from the preparations for the ‘first colour television broadcast’, which was to take place in the Muzeum’s exhibition rooms in 1972.¹⁵ The script for the four-episode programme was co-written by Ryszard Stanisławski. While the local press brought news of the museum ‘filled with cables, ladders, and cameras’, the director greeted the viewers on the television screen. Lewandowska thus restored Stanisławski to the position of the Muzeum’s host, a role he had played for almost forty years. In Tender Museum he takes his post once again, greeting the visitors upon entering the first room.

‘The culture of a contemporary society, its popular ways of thinking, all have a “pictorial’ character”,’ wrote Czartoryska in a 1964 essay, ‘The Role of Photographic Image in Mass Culture’. While analysing the gradual intellectual homogenisation of the society, she noticed: ‘[…] the level of news and entertainment is “mediocre” and essentially fictitious, as it cannot be measured, and it is addressed to those with average intelligence and banal sensitivity and perspicacity.’¹⁶ This mediocrity is embodied in the figure of the previously mentioned female announcer, who operates under a conventional code of modest conduct, is expected to represent a universal yet not distracting type of beauty, and master non-expressive expressions and subtle gestures. Therefore, the female announcer is a medium, a mannequin, with a superimposed voice: she presents opinions which are not her own. The voice of an announcer resounds in the first room of the Tender Museum. We are confronted with an all-encompassing combination of auditory and visual stimuli, which in turn characterises each space of the exhibition. The interiors of the former Poznański Palace, which has been home to the Muzeum since 1948, have been arranged by Lewandowska into a sequence of interlocking cells, or nodes, with screenings that expose the patriarchal structure and negotiate a new space devoted to the voice of women.

What does this constructed meeting between the announcer and Stanisławski reveal against the backdrop of writing the Muzeum’s history? The first association that comes to mind is the juxtaposition of media images and popular clichés concerning young girls dreaming of a brilliant television career as well as art institutions in the People’s Republic of Poland. In the mid-1960s, which saw a rapid expansion of mass media alongside a rise in the popularity of news broadcasts, museums were still perceived as timeless temples of aesthetics. They were the antithesis of television, which was reigned by technology and offering scripted entertainment dumbed down to the level of mediocrity. Another association leads us to the female announcer ‘speaking words that are not hers in a voice that is not her own’.¹⁷ The answer to the question of whom – Lewandowska or Czartoryska – we should identify as the alter ego of the announcer, is neither obvious nor easy to determine. ‘The stolen narrative never belonged to the person whom it was assigned to.’¹⁸ Perhaps the announcer is a phantom, able to accommodate a well-known and inconspicuous form, but beneath its trappings of rationality hides an inherent contradiction.

Meeting Three – A Recovered Conversation

The second room of the exhibition, transformed into a radio studio from the late 1960s, is the setting of the central meeting of the Tender Museum. In the room with soundproofed walls, Lewandowska placed two armchairs and a microphone between them. Common sense dictates that we approach this scene with caution. This sensory environment is in fact a meticulously arranged stage set rather than historical reconstruction. The space, filled with the gentle light of electric lamps, padded with soft material such as carpet and soundproofing, evokes an atmosphere of intimacy and closeness.¹⁹ As if we were anticipating a visit of a special and long-awaited guest. This impression is further enhanced by the colours of the interior (green, carmine, violet, brown), which trigger unconscious associations with the feminine, emotionality, and the cosiness of the home. Communication theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out the return to preliterate oral culture, and the illusion of reality created by radio dramas or programmes leaves no room for speculation, just as the rich audio-visual experience offered by television removes all ambiguities and individual interpretations.²⁰ Their framework is always given – which is also the case here.

The conversation we are invited to listen to, but not participate in, is a meeting of two personalities, each of whom is an astute observer of issues related to art and artistic production. Czartoryska and Lewandowska are not so much conversing as

presenting each other with remarks on critical perspectives. They also touch on the issue of public institutions, such as museums, which provide value judgements of the artistic production and expose their preferences, e.g., by acquiring works for their collections. The recording reveals a temporal gap separating the two: Czartoryska formulates her opinions from the perspective of 1991, while the artist’s statements date from two decades later. We should note, however, that contrary to the postcard, the Recovered Conversation 2009–1991 not only ‘blows up’ a fragment of the recording, but also subjects it to editing in the course of which she inscribes herself into the narrative. She noted: ‘[…] by editing myself into the script I am performing the gesture of re-vision, shifting emphasis from simply presenting the archival sources, to intervening into their potential meaning.’²¹ As far as Czartoryska plays the role of a character sensitising the audience to a different, ‘tender’ dimension of institutional practices, their interpersonal aspect and the work of emotions, Lewandowska, in this particular piece, inscribes herself into the history of the Muzeum. In this way, similarly to the question of the practice of women artists, the question of the role and impact of woman researchers, critics, and art historians on the discipline comes full circle: ‘How does the museum empower an artist, and how does the artist negotiate a space for herself in the existing narratives of the museum and its history? […] by re-inserting the voice of Urszula Czartoryska, I authorise the presence of a person.’²²

Meeting Four – Seeing her in the Garden, in the Kitchen, in the Library

One of the three screenings in the last room presents Urszula Czartoryska at work, yet the scenery of these encounters can be quite surprising. This selection corresponds to the basic feminine roles in the socialist society, exposing the position of women in its structure. Firstly, Czartoryska grew her own garden, planting herbs and growing hydrangeas. The garden itself was a small lot at the back of the institution, a ‘semi-private, semi-public sphere’, accessible only to the Stanisławski family and Muzeum workers.²³Secondly, we see Czartoryska at work by the kitchen table, in the apartment situated on the first floor of the palace, directly above the director’s office. In two almost identical photographs, combined by Lewandowska into a mirroring pair, the critic is typing up a hand-written note. Bent over the typewriter, focused, she seems to be deciding on the final corrections. ‘The typewriter had an unexpected impact on literature,’ wrote Czartoryska in 1971, ‘it introduced a new agent; by writing on a typewriter the authors felt an unprecedented connection between poetic creation and labour, understanding the influence of the layout of a poem on a sheet of paper.’²⁴ Writing in the kitchen, Czartoryska does not necessarily seem to evoke the image of an independent, self-sufficient researcher working to expand her output. Rather, she resembles a typist, or a secretary – yet another ‘agent’ of the technological revolution – mechanically correcting a text written by someone else in her free time.²⁵ At this point Lewandowska’s project involves a certain intriguing shift. Whenever Czartoryska appears in the project as a historian of photography, curator, or scholar, the visitors are only confronted with her voice. The calm, even tone in which she expresses her opinions as an expert belongs to the discourse of knowledge and its production. While all other images of the critic ‘at work’, used by Lewandowska in the three-channel projection in the last room of the exhibition, capture her while performing household chores, family duties, and other activities that can be subsumed under the term of unpaid labour of women.

The contrast between the auditory and visual representation of work and labour is further enhanced by a photograph taken on the occasion of Women’s Day. Among the women workers of the museum sitting at a large library table, Czartoryska is the only one who looks directly into the eye of the camera. It is evident that the photographer chose to focus on her figure, while a low aperture makes her face stand out from the blurry foreground with potted crocuses. Unlike the regular professional meetings of the museum’s employees and press conferences, which took place in the same setting, Women’s Day was traditionally celebrated with flowers. It was a holiday of political slogans praising the female heroes of socialist labour, as well as an occasion to stock up on rare goods (such as tights, soap, or coffee) presented by male co-workers and superiors.

It should be noted, however, that Tender Museum never promised a synthesis in the process of writing a history of an institution. Although Lewandowska’s project is constructed based on the aesthetic affect and the binary distinction between the woman and the man, the feminine and the masculine, the voice and the image, instead of creating an exhibition as an ‘argument, claim, or a polemical space’, a characteristic feature of exhibitions of women artists since the early 1960s, the artist developed a multifaceted statement that is replete with meaning.²⁶ In this sense, her project marks a paradigm shift, in which the dominant museum policy of establishing an art history canon could be replaced by a policy of mediation and negotiation, in which the subject takes the form of an individualised agent that speaks in its own voice. But, is it true that the voice of an individual could be heard beyond the museum’s walls or that it could successfully speculate about the lacks in the museum’s representation? At the heart of Tender Museum lies a key question: not so much about what a museum is (about its critical role and duties towards the society which it fulfilled both in the past decades and now) as about who a museum is. Or, who speaks with the voice of the museum? By this I do not mean the directors of institutions whose personalities are typically associated with the exhibition policy. This is rather a question, or a call for the institutional agency, the ways in which the work of feelings and emotions can serve as an imperative or active stimulus for the reassessment of the existing canons of representation and the history of the Museum – both public as well as that which is made public. The fleeting nature of a meeting makes the end of the experiencing of the Tender Museum unavoidable… Czartoryska’s voice has to fall silent in order to, according to the logic of production that governs this space, make room for another exhibition. However, is there anything of concern left of this experience, in and for the Muzeum Sztuki, that makes one want to return to it again?

1 Urszula Czartoryska, ‘Fotografia jako porozumienie’, in Leszek Brogowski , ed., Fotografia – mowa ludzka. Perspektywy teoretyczne, Vol. 2, 2005, p. 45.

2 Marysia Lewandowska, ‘A Recovered Conversation 2009–1991’, in Andrzej Leśniak, Magdalena Ziółkowska, eds., Working Title: Archive #2, Museum Sztuki, Lódz,2009, p.49.

3 The symbolic origins of the Muzeum Sztuki date back to the year 1931, which saw the public opening of the International Collection of Modern Art created by the ‘a.r.’ group. The Collection was deposited at the Julian and Kazimierz Bartoszewicz Municipal Museum of History and Art in Łódź on 15 February 1931.

4 See Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 8, No. 4, Summer 1982, pp. 777–95.

5 Quoted from Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Trauma, Affect, and Contemporary Art, Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 23.

6 This is how Höch’s practice was described by Manuela Hoelterhoff who, as Maud Lanvin notes, inaccurately deprived her photomontages of ideological impact and political engagement. See Maud Lavin, Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., ‘Hannah Höch’s From An Ethnographic Museum’, Women in dada. Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, MIT Press, p. 330.

7 Both expressions are used by the artist, see Marysia Lewandowska, ‘A Recovered Conversation 2009–1991’, op. cit., p. 47

8 Arlette Farge, Le goût de l'archive, Éditions du Seuil, 1997, pp. 69–81.

9 Marysia Lewandowska, ‘Mise-en-scène of Gender Politics’, interview by Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, Art Always Has Its Consequences, Budapest, Łódź, Novi Sad, Zagreb, 2008–2010, tranzit, 2010, p. 32.

10 Katy Deepwell, ‘Feminist Models: Now and in the Future’, in Heike Munder, ed., It’s Time for Action (There’s No Option). About Feminism, Migros Museum für angewandte Kunst, 2006, p. 208.

11 The title is a quote from a text by Urszula Czartoryska first published in Projekt, No. 4, 1976.

12 I would like to acknowledge an article by Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, which offers an in-depth analysis of the way both characters are represented. Thus far, the text is the only attempt at interpreting Lewandowska’s project from a gender perspective. See Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, ‘Miłośniczki. Poszukiwania feministycznych narracji kuratorskich’, Ha!art, Nos. 1–2, 2008, pp. 28–9. Also available online at: http://www.obieg.pl/teksty/15461 [accessed on 25 January 2012].

13 Giorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Gesture’, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, translated by Liz Heron, Verso, 1993, p. 140.

14 Both videos are available on the artist’s website: http://www.marysialewandowska.com/?p=62 [accessed 30 January 30 2012].

15 ‘“Kolorowe” plany łódzkiej TV’, Dziennik Łódzki, No. 278, 1972.

16 Both quotes Urszula Czartoryska, ‘Rola obrazu fotograficznego w kulturze masowej’, Fotografia – mowa ludzka…, op. cit. p. 72 and 74.

17 Quoted from Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, op. cit, p. 115.

18 Ibid.

19 On the construction of spatial experiences of the exhibition see Jennifer Fisher, ‘Exhibitionary Affect‘, n.paradoxa, Vol. 18, July 2006, pp. 27–33.

20 McLuhan is a deliberate reference here. Czartoryska was among the first art historians in Poland to discuss the views of the Canadian scholar in professional magazines. Already in 1971 she wrote about ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media. See Urszula Czartoryska, ‘Marshall McLuhan o masowych środkach przekazu’, Fotografia, No. 2, 1971. The first Polish edition of McLuhan’s selected writings was published in 1975.

21 Marysia Lewandowska, ‘Mise-en-scène of Gender Politics’, see note 9, p. 34.

22 Ibid, p. 36.

23 Olga Stanisławska, interview by Marzena Bomanowska. Available online at http://lodz.gazeta.pl/lodz/1,35135,6323181.html [accessed 30 January 2012].

24 Quoted from Urszula Czartoryska, ‘Marshall McLuhan o masowych środkach przekazu’, in Urszula Czartoryska, Fotografia – mowa ludzka…, op. cit., p. 98.

25 Unfortunately, I cannot elaborate further on the interesting analysis of light reflected above Czertoryska’s head offered by Tatar: ‘[…] this shadow formed a spindle-like shape that resembled an embryo, which I immediately associated with feminist interpretations of maternity and, more importantly, the notion of bringing to life through any kind of creative act.’ Quoted from Ewa Małgorzata Tatar, op. cit.

26 Quote in this sentence from Kate Deepwell, ‘Feminist Curatorial Strategies and practices since 1970s’, in Jean Marstine, ed., New museum theory and practice: an introduction, Blackwell, 2006, p. 75.

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Magdalena Ziolkowska has worked in the Department of Modern Art in Muzeum Sztuki since January 2008. She has an MA in Art History from Warsaw University and is a graduate of the Curatorial Training Programme at de Appel arts centre, Amsterdam. She is currently a PhD graduate at the School of Social Research and Institute of Art History (University of Warsaw) where the focus of her research is the idea of Museum of Current Art (1966) by Jerzy Ludwinski. Since June 2006 she has been a guest curator at Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.

Conversation and calendar launch: tegn NEARFAR – Vestlandsutstillingen 2013

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 17:03:30 +0100

“The open call for the exhibition tegnNEARFAR asked for works that speaks of the state of the soul and the intellect in 2013. What is the view from the coastline in the west? Has the Norwegian landscape shifted? How do we perceive the current global crisis and the enormous upheavals in our world? Can anyone see us? The exhibition consists of responses from 25 artists.”

Tour schedule for tegn NEARFAR:

Haugesund Kunstforening 08.02.13 - 03.03.13

Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum 09.03.13 - 02.04.13

Stavanger Kunstforening 11.04.13 - 01.05.13

Kunsthuset KABUSO 11.05.13 - 02.06.13

Kunstmuseet KUBE 08.06.13 - 30.06.13

Vestlandsutstillingen is supported by: Rogaland Fylkeskommune, Hordaland Fylkeskommune, Sogn og Fjordane Fylkeskommune, Møre og Romsdal Fylkeskommune

Witness Report 2012: The Oids (Meditations over the Robot Seal Paro) by Rolf Enger

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:19:23 +0100

Everything can, of course, theoretically, ideologically and culturally speaking, be traced back to among other things the Jewish myth about Golem, and Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The robot seal Paro was, at the beginning of the millennium, placed in a series of Welfare Centres for the Elderly in Japan and Europe. It was a great success, and the concept ‘welfare technology’ had been given a new meaning.

Nevertheless, much suggests that a conclusive break-through arrived in connection with an art exhibition on the West Coast, or to be precise, in Bergen, some time in the thirties, where the theme was artificial intelligence. Two young Germans, Karin Meineke and Florian Töpferkopf, who have now sunk into oblivion as artists, drew attention to themselves at this exhibition. A few years later, they moved on to other, more ‘community oriented’ occupations, within finance. Their art had just been a hobby. The whole thing had been a ‘youthful infatuation’.

Their contribution to the exhibition was an interactive doll, a kind of android, hung in threads, or cords, like a marionette from the ceiling, which could be operated from a touchscreen, and was receptive to orders via a microphone. Games of chance lead to a small group of Norwegian programmers and automation technicians who at that time took part in a seminar in Bergen, popping by the exhibition. It was Sunday, and a break in the seminar. They were out walking. The heavens opened, they had neither umbrellas nor raincoats and had to seek shelter. The nearest place of refuge was an art centre. It was bucketing down outside and while they were waiting for it to clear up so they could get back to the hotel reasonably dry-shod, they thought they may as well visit the exhibition. They allowed themselves, as so many other visitors, to be fascinated by Töpferkopf’s and Meineke’s work. The two young artists had, without being fully aware of it, implemented something startlingly new within the field of artificial intelligence with this doll – called Klara. The seminar participants stole the idea and continued to work on it, the software was an open source code. A couple of years later, they had established Sintech at Myre in Vesterålen, which at that time, thanks to the opening of the oilfields in Lofoten and Vesterålen and the ensuing haulage plants, had developed a thriving environment for trade and new business activities. Bio-technicians were incorporated in the project.

II.

You have to get pretty close, or have spent a fair bit of time with them, before you realise that they are not like you and me.

True, they are wearing these simple, martial-art-inspired suits. However, were they dressed like one of us, and you met one of them, let’s say at an airport or in a hotel lobby, you would have to walk pretty close to see that their skin seemed different, too perfect and smooth, without dirty pores, pimples, growth of beard. And if you had the chance to touch their skin, you would notice that it is stiffer and more elastic than genuine human skin.

Of course, we could have perfumed them, put in small bubbles of fragrance with the scent of a human being beneath their skin. If the aim was to make them resemble us as closely as possible, that is; but that may well not be the point, even if that is what the management and the sponsors would wish.

Still, in the longer term, we envision that we will dress them with genuine skin, cultivated from stem cells in the laboratory, with perspiration- and tallow-glands, pores, everything. The bio-technicians work to capacity with that part; they, too, must have their challenging tasks.

But for the present, body and skin and outer shell were not our first priority. As far as appearance goes, they looked pretty good. Now it was all about further developing the software, ‘the brain’, make them function to capacity socially and in a work environment.

III.

The relief was huge when someone from the emergency service found them after eleven days, more or less intact.

True, Edil had great slashes in her suit and her skin, all the way into the skeleton some places. She had torn herself on the wire fence. It is interesting Omin didn’t have the same injuries. Had she quite simply helped him? Had they developed such a large degree of interaction that she, when they had escaped, had held the wire apart so that he could walk unharmed through the rip in the fence? The code master, Akhnatin, thought it was possible, and, if so, that it meant a big step forward when it came to developing the difficult part ‘empathy’. The now self-educating software, had made considerable progress the last few months. It was impossible to get a perspective on what this implies.

We got them back after eleven days. There was no major damage. The project was not in danger. Still, the alarm bells should have started to sound.

IV.

When we scrutinised the serious anomaly, after having interviewed all of those who worked on the project, including the security guards and the unskilled orderlies, we were able to outline the following: they had, more or less, just wandered out, in the middle of the night. The question was why and how they had come out of their hibernation, which corresponds to our ‘sleep’, or sleep mode in a good old-fashioned laptop. Akhnatin, the project manager for the programming, seemed dead certain that the incident, the anomaly, was dues to a small defect in the programming. He used the description “code weakness in the GPS boundary line.” We understood what “code weakness” meant. But boundary line involved that there was nothing beyond the defined boundary. Something beyond was simply inconceivable to them. How could they possibly want to go somewhere they couldn’t even imagine? It would be as if we humans should want to go somewhere beyond the universe. Had the oids developed imagination? I asked Akhnatin this question, and he admitted that this was one of the many philosophical paradoxes they had encountered.

“But the code weakness is very simply corrected,” he assured us in his Russian accent.

The alternative was to upgrade buildings and fences, strengthen security, etc. But that would blow the budget. In practical terms, we had no choice but to trust Akhnatin.

They had got out through the kitchen and then through an imperfection in the outer wire fence, which, of course, should have been live, we thought in hindsight. It wasn’t discovered until the next morning. The search was immediately put into effect, helicopters were engaged as well, but it still took eleven days to find them. They were in hibernation modus, almost discharged, a bit apart from each other in the forest, seven kilometres south of the outer barriers. ‘The woman’ – Edil – sat leaning against a tree trunk, as if she had sat down to ‘rest’. ‘The man’ – Omin – looked as if he had been active until he collapsed, he was found lying on his stomach with his head hidden under a bush.

Escapes like this should not happen. They had forced their way through the outer fence; however, unless they found a means of transport, or a way of charging themselves, they could not, because of the limited battery capacity, have got too far.

Regardless, this must not happen again, there were too many conceivable horror scenarios, all of which would endanger the whole project. That would be a tragedy, now that we felt we were about to out-perform Japan.

Yes, they would endure all forms of extreme weather; hurricanes, ice, frost, immersion in ice-cold water, a fall from relatively great heights. But they might, for instance, have walked into a high-voltage cable and sustained grave injuries as a result of short-circuiting. They might have found themselves down on the motorway and been run over. Someone might have found them, kidnapped them and demanded a ransom.

The week before, we had had a visit from a female journalist from the French scientific journal Monde Science, although this is unrelated to the event. I still mention it in these notes. Her name was Nicole Tobret. They are planning a series of articles about different kinds of oids. The ones we try to develop here and in Japan, the more mechanical robot-oids they are working on in Germany/Austria/Switzerland. Plus the totally biological ones, based on a biological processor and programmable stem cells, which Brazilian scientists have begun to work with. They haven’t got very far, at present, they are merely primitively thinking lumps of meat of sorts, we just call them ‘the chickens’.

I was assigned the task of catering for the French journalist, show her around, let her meet the oids. We got on well.

She asked if a child would be able to see the difference between an ordinary human being and one of our newest models. And in that case, how old the child would have to be before it noticed.

I answered that we had carried out several experiments in just that area; among other things, we had brought Edil and Omin to a pre-school. A small child, up to the age of six or seven, would not be able to see the difference, but it would notice that something — for instance the smell — would not be as it should, and would therefore not have the same confidence in an oid as in a genuine human being. Children oriented themselves in their world through intuition. A small child would perceive them as humans and talk about them as humans, but unconsciously be a tiny bit on guard, as if meeting a somewhat sinister stranger.

The psychologists estimated that a child between the ages of eight and twelve would perceive the difference and perhaps talk about them as a ‘doll’, a robot, or an artificial human being.

With Generation Five, we could maybe move these ‘age-limits’ two or three years forward, thus one would have to reach teenage to be able to perceive the difference.

“From Generation Seven, we will dress them with genuine skin, and then it may be difficult even for some adults,” I said.

“So you are close to creating a convincing replacement for a human being?” the journalist wondered.

That was the obvious, the fundamental question.

“We never use that concept, because it has so many negative connotations, which has followed us ever since Ridley Scott’s almost seventy-year old film,” I answered.

She nodded meaningfully.

I explained that, within a perspective of five to ten years, we estimated that it was within reach that our oids could be put to use in a great number of areas, among others, as therapists and counsellors, play mates to lonely people, and adult role models for ‘problem children’.

“Someone to hold them firmly, resolutely and unswervingly in a temper tantrum,” I said.

The journalist laughed. I didn’t quite understand why.

“But we’d never have a residence exclusively manned by oids?”

“Ne jamais dire jamais,” I answered in Nicole’s own language. “Never say never.”

But I had to admit that qualities such as social intelligence and empathy, the ability to plan, see the needs of others, all these, the essence of human characteristics, are among the most difficult things to develop, and that this lies well into the future. “But we’re on the way,” I emphasised.

VI.

The robot seal Paro reacted to physical contact. It could distinguish between different words and recognised its own name. The elderly claimed, without exception, that they had the feeling of patting a living creature. They cared for it as they would a pet. It lowered their blood pressure, the seal created a sense of well-being. Dementia patients livened up, and the use of medicines decreased.

Welfare technology. There was no reason that the Japanese should be the only ones doing it and that the development should stop with Paro. It continued with a dog and a cat, a small bear, a chimpanzee.

VII.

Usually, we didn’t let journalists meet the oids. For that, they still had too many defects. Some of them could seem frightening and lead to negative press. To be with them could sometimes come to seem like a bad dream. They could suddenly carry out meaningless, strange and ‘evil’ acts. Morality couldn’t be encoded, so all the programming had to be situation-oriented. It was when something unforseen happened, or that the situation went a little out of control, that they could carry out things which for us humans might seem totally irrational.

But for Nicole we had to make an exception. The journal she worked for had, at one stage in the project, when it was about to come to a standstill and we needed it most, given us essential publicity, something that again helped us to get sponsors. So we were in their debt and not in a position to say no when they asked us to welcome a journalist. Nicole Tobret would be the first outsider who got to meet and spend time with a Gen 5 oid.

“Are you excited?” I asked when we were walking along the corridor.

“I’ve been both on a space station and a deep-water station in the Atlantic trench. Both totally unreal and fascinating, but this is something completely different. Of course I’m excited, it’s these kinds of assignments which make my job so fantastic,” she answered.

“It’s exciting and completely safe. I can promise you that,” I answered.

I put my right eye up to the scanner, and the door through the inner glass wall opened. We walked into the observation room, from there I escorted Nicole into the living area itself.

Edil and Omin sat next to each other on the sofa. When we stood like that in the hall and observed them, from a distance of eight to ten metres, we would not be able to decide whether they were ordinary human beings. They looked like a content, young, childless couple. They gazed around them, their expressions changed. Now and then a smile lit up their faces, seemingly for no reason at all.

“What are they doing? Are they practising something just now?” the journalist asked.

“No. They are in a form of light hibernation. As soon as you speak to one of them, it will come out of the hibernation.”

“Do they understand French?” she asked.

“So far we have only put in an English language module. French will come the day we may get a contract to deliver to a French-speaking institution.”

“L’anglais, c’est bon,” the journalist answered.

When Edil and Omin caught sight of us, they stood up and came towards us. Their gait was just a tiny bit stiff, the swing of their arms a touch exaggerated, small details which the section for motor function and automation continuously worked to perfect.

They recognised me immediately. They nodded briefly, smiled and said hi. Edil walked over to the journalist and put out her right hand.

“Edil Genfive. Nice to meet you?” Edil said.

The journalist said her name and thanks the same.

The same procedure was repeated with Omin.

Nicole just stood there, she didn’t want to be the one to lead off, obviously waiting for the oids to take the initiative.

“Won’t you come in. Please sit down,” Edil said.

Nicole and I sat down in an armchair each. From then on, everything went almost like programmed. Edil offered us coffee or tea. Nicole chose tea. Omin went into the kitchen to prepare it, while Edil remained in the living room talking to us. Then Omin came in with tea and biscuits and cupcakes, which he arranged neatly across the table. He poured the tea and said, please, help yourselves.

The oids commented on the weather and the latest news, such as the calving of the gigantic iceberg in The Ross Sea in the Antarctic, but didn’t ask any questions.

There were long pauses, which didn’t seem to worry the oids the slightest. Nicole picked her nose demonstratively, obviously to test our reaction. Neither Edil nor Omin changed expression, from the neutral, friendly, interested.

“Can you and I talk about them without that being perceived as bad manners,” Nicole asked.

“Yes, as much as we like. They only respond when you address them by name, or look them straight in the face at the same time as you speak. Test it.”

Nicole thought for a moment. Then she said:
“Edil, you remind me of an actor … Those old films from around the turn of the century … Natalie Portman … a blond version of her.”

“Thank you, that’s nice. More tea?” Edil said and moved her hand as if she was going lift the teapot to pour.

“No thanks,” Nicole answered, who, absorbed as she was, had only sipped at her tea.

There was a short pause.

“You’re terribly ugly,” Nicole said while looking Edil straight in the face.

“Oh no, you really think so? I’m sorry to hear that,” Edil answered.

The tic at the corners of her mouth formed her mouth into a slight pout. It looked like a kind of emotional reaction, but it was clumsy and primitive, and not at all credible.

“Sorry, I just wanted to test the reaction. It feels so strange, this, it almost gives me goosebumps,” she said.

It struck me that in this meeting, it was the real human being, the journalist Nicole Tobret, who behaved bizarrely, irrationally, childishly. I was about to mention it, to make her see the point, but was afraid she would be offended, or hurt.

Instead I said, “That’s how I reacted in the beginning, too. It helps to think about them as advanced dolls.”

“I try to do that all the time, but it’s much more difficult than I’d have thought.”

Nicole looked over at Omin. His gaze, his eyes, which were perfect, were following something on the table. It was a spider, a so-called ’good luck’ symbol, or a daddy-long-legs. Its tiny ball-shaped body on the long, thread-like legs tottered across the table top. Omin bent over the table, tried to grab it, and caught it. A feat of fine-motor skills. He held the daddy-long-legs up in front of his eyes, studying it.

“I’ve found a spider,” he said.

“What are you going to do with it?” Nicole asked.

“I want to examine it. And then we’ll play,” he said, expressionlessly.

He let it lie in his palm for a short time while he gazed at it. It was really as if he was pondering what to do.

Another time I had seen him pull the legs off a spider. Then dropping the body down on the table like a grain of whole pepper. But that was when he was Gen 4. Edil had never done anything like that. Now he just put the spider nicely down on the table and let it run away to hide.

“What happens if I touch him … it?” Nicole asked.

“Try.”

She stretched out her hand, it trembled just a tad, and her cheeks were red from fascination, excitement. She touched Omin’s underarm, stroked her fingertips slowly back and forth over his skin.

He turned his head towards her and smiled, almost tenderly.

“Ca donne l’impression …” she said, but couldn’t find the words, not even in her mother tongue.

I decided the séance was over for this time. She had seen enough, and it had gone well.

Nicole Tobret was, all in all, impressed over what she had seen and experienced and wrote a very positive article in Monde Science.

But then came the second escape.

VIII.

The second escape took place two months after Nicole Tobret’s article about us was published. To be precise, the night before the 10^th of November. Just before, Akhnatin claimed that they had made so much headway that they were ripe to be categorised as Gen 6, but that might have been premature. I am still struggling to find out how it was possible. Akhnatin said it wasn’t the GPS boundary line this time, that there was a lot more conscious willpower behind it.

“As if they don’t want to be here with us any longer?” I asked.

“Yes, as if they are mature teenagers and want to get out to discover the world,” he answered.

Winter had arrived here up north. A severe snowfall and powerful winds for three days in a row after the escape made the search difficult, not to say impossible.

We only found one of them, we only found Omin. Edil was lost. Perhaps for ever, and with her, half of a research project which had cost billions and which offered challenging and well paid work to more than seventy employees. Without her, half our reputation and Sintech’s whole future was at stake. We had invested everything. Maybe the Japanese — or a fortune hunter who would later sell her to the Japanese? — got their dirty hands on her?

We should have strengthened the security. I even made up stories about Akhnatin being a mole who was in league with the Japanese, that we shouldn’t have trusted him when he said the first escape was due to a programming mistake. I talked to my mentor about it. He thought it showed tendencies towards paranoid delusions due to disappointment and/or stress. I didn’t disagree.

IX.

I stand up from my desk, look at myself in the mirror. I have bags under my eyes, and the number of grey hairs in my temples have without doubt significantly increased.

I cannot bear to write anymore in this note, which is intended for me and no one else, as an effort to clear my thoughts.

I look forward to the conversation with — or should we say the interrogation of? — Omin when he has been repaired and brought out of the artificial coma. Can he give us clues, and thus a hope to find Edil? I have no idea when it can take place. She can survive until spring beneath the snow, no problem, but that means a long wait, a nerve-rackingly long wait.

I dread the hearing with the institution management, the sponsors and the board. All the questions to which I have no answer. They keep me awake at night. I am about to become addicted to sleeping pills. All this because of a couple of extremely proficient, but naïve young artists, who cared little about what they were doing and had no idea what they had put into action, some time in the thirties.

Translated from the English by May-Brit Akerholt.

the foetus factory by Alexander Bertin

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 09:49:46 +0100

the remaining sperm cells have finally arrived at the fallopian tube. millions have succumbed on their way through the orifice of the uterus, still more in the uterus itself. exhausted, the small group crowds together, resting on the soft membrane above the floor muscle. they know they can survive here a day or two. no one sleeps. except for the sporadic involuntary twitches of their slim tails, they rest quietly for a while. at any given time they are keeping an eye on the others, making sure no one gets a head start if the egg appears. they know this is a fight to the death, that their time is short. they know it must come soon. where is it where is it where is it where is it? they chant rhythmically in the pink shaft of circular anatomy.
           they swim around restlessly in the hollow of the body. the heightened temperature is the only indication that they are in the right place. suddenly they note a faint scent emanating from a shaft in the distance as a glistening, crimson egg descends through anemone-like cilia. they rush towards it, pressing forward, hastening towards that ultimate goal. there is no telling who will get there first. they crash against the shell. summoning their last energies in a desperate attempt to break through the resistance. suddenly one of them can feel the wall giving way. it wiggles through the fissure between the outer and inner egg shell. penetrates the soft membrane around the egg’s nucleus and unites its genetic material with that of the egg. a slight tremor in the stoic cell walls indicate that the fertilisation is complete. dying, the surviving sperms sink to the bottom of the fallopian tube. tiny oval faces trained on the faintly glowing egg in the gradually increasing distance. they can see the victor's spastic tail protruding from the round shape as a snug darkness envelops them.
          the newly created zygote rests quietly for a while, before it is slowly helped along by gentle, muscular movements. as it approaches the uterus, the egg puts on weight. the two original cells divide, becoming four, becoming eight, becoming sixteen. three days later the egg is pushed gently through the cilia at the mouth of the ovary. the pounding uterus opens before it.
           on the floor clusters of tiny creatures float about wearing colourful wool sweaters, harlequin hats and a serious expressions. they break loose from each other, forming a semicircle in front of the newly arrived egg. solemnly, they welcome the new resident to the foetus factory. the small creatures pat their pot-bellies, before gently clasping hands with their neighbours. linked together they begin constructing a living bridge from the egg to the wall of the uterus on the other side. one link at a time they forge themselves into a long biological structure. the last creature burrows into the thick mucous membrane above the wall, anchoring the bridge with its own body. concentrating, the crowd starts the process of guiding the egg to its final destination.
           they position themselves horizontally in the hollow of the body, facing the vaginal vault. the creatures that touch the egg, fold their bodies protectively about it, taking turns ballooning their pot-bellies in one smooth motion. slowly, pushed forward by one pot-belly at a time, the egg is led across the newly formed bridge. tension quivers throughout the uterus as it is constantly filled with clear amniotic fluid from a crimson geyser in the floor muscle.
           the egg has reached the wall of the uterus. its only support is the powerful pot-belly of the uppermost creature and the wall it is being pressed against. the muscular walls tremble with anticipation.
           another creature emerges from the slimy depths of the uterus. equipped with a golden harlequin hat and wool sweater covering a massive belly, it swims rapidly across to where the bridge begins and grabs hold. the creature uses its kinsmen – still chained to each other – as biological ladders. it pulls itself up the gently sloping bridge, places its small feet on the uppermost pot-belly, which by now is shaking with effort. gently it begins to push the egg through the thick womb lining. despite the seriousness of the situation the gold-clad one does not bat an eye. the egg halfway inside, the creature's arms stretch towards the uterine lining, gathering large clumps of mucus in both hands. with circular gestures it spins a transparent thread, coiling it around one hand. with the other hand it pulls out a gold pin from its harlequin’s hat and fastens the thread to it. with sure movements the creature begins fastening the egg with little stitches. the pulsating womb shows no sign of discomfort as it is pierced. the uppermost bridge-builder trembles with exhaustion. its round body is racked by uncontrollable twitching, but it does not let the egg slip from its belly. it fights on doggedly. there is a reason why this particular creature has been given the task of mooring the egg.
            when the gold-clad one is convinced the egg is safely secured, it pats its pot-belly three times. in unison, the creatures release their grip on each other, descending to the core of the uterus. all except the moorer, who lies burned out on the womb’s floor, gather in a ring around the gold-clad one. they look at each other gravely, adjust their hats and stroke their pot-bellies. together the creatures turn towards the egg, filling the room with a silent tone before disappearing into the slime above the floor muscle.
            trembling, the egg faces the power.

Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Fredheim.

The Age of Plastic and After by Nav Haq

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 09:49:34 +0100

It is the first magical substance which consents to be prosaic. But it is precisely because this prosaic character is a triumphant reason for its existence: for the first time, artifice aims at something common, not rare. And as an immediate consequence, the age-old function of nature is modified: it is no longer the Idea, the pure Substance to be regained or imitated: an artificial Matter, more bountiful than all the natural deposits, is about to replace her, and to determine the very invention of forms. A luxurious object is still of this earth, it still recalls, albeit in a precious mode, its mineral or animal origin, the natural theme of which it is but one actualization. Plastic is wholly swallowed up in the fact of being used: ultimately, objects will be invented for the sole pleasure of using them. The hierarchy of substances is abolished: a single one replaces them all: the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.

– Roland Barthes, from ‘Plastics’, in Mythologies, 1957

There was little regards for the lifecycle of plastic, as the zenith of the Plastic Era occurred in the period known as the twentieth century – after the era of objects fashioned directly out of natural materials, and before the era of objects designed to be a Spime. Plastic seemed to have embodied the modern egalitarian dream by transforming something taken from nature into a myriad of possible objects for the everyday. Its invention proffered a sort of alchemy, forming infinite derivatives to match the aspirations of the twentieth century, with its technological advancements and its diversification of lifestyles. Its profound rise meant the uses of plastic entered every aspect of life in a celebration of its own prosaic, mechanically-reproduced abundance. The very idea of its own artifice was embraced somewhat reflexively in culture, and even the term ‘plastic arts’ was adopted simultaneously as a moniker for the art of the day.

The question remains as to why exactly human subjects returned plastic to the sea. At that time the material did not degrade and remained permanently in the ocean, creating a toxic floating landmass. Born of the petroleum that was formed from the plankton that emerged in the Earth’s primordial sea, the return of plastic polymers to the ocean was nothing other than an aberration. This ‘return’ to the ocean was ultimately an act against the idea of a lifecycle, as there was nothing to digest or transform it into something organic. It was as if simply removing it out of the sight of culture, and into the realms of the unknown, was enough. It was only after this point that the lifecycle of manufactured objects became a design issue. The Spime was conceptualised at the beginning of the twenty-first century by the renowned science-fiction writer and design theorist Bruce Sterling. It comprised a progressive vision towards the kind of object that can be tracked throughout its whole life and through space and time. [1] Objects could be traced from the point of their first virtual representation, to their manufacture, their subsequent ownership history, their physical location, right through to their eventual obsolescence and decomposition to raw material, ready to be used for making a new object. Objects were created to be recorded and archived in real time, thus being traceable at any given moment. ‘Things’ were never the same again.

The development of the Spime marked the acknowledgement of the new Human-Centred approach to design, and the new status given to objects in term of their use, meaning and value that followed brought us into the next age. From then on, all items were classified into two grand categories: 1) Human-Centred, those objects within the frame of human design and reference, and 2) Object-Centred, those objects that had their own existence outside of human acknowledgement or legitimation, within the realm of nature and the universe. [2] The Human-Centred acknowledgement of the existence of objects became an evolutionary design understanding. It was a revolutionary paradigm shift that required us to move away from the disregard of total object lifecycles towards the design of total object lifecycles. Human-Centric design would be tested against its effects on the Non-Human-Centric sphere.

Yet in the timeline of humanity it was the age of plastic that had the biggest effect on the Non-Human object world. The over-abundance of plastic objects was created in a context of non-acknowledgement towards the world outside of the human sphere. The oceans in particular being the ultimate place, furthest away from civilisation, that became the dark abyss for everything humanity wanted to discard. Giant concentrated masses of marine litter outweighing natural plankton many times over. Through a cruel irony, its molecular structure meant its brittleness would cause it to photo-degrade into fine grain-like pieces, much of them sinking, much of them floating, entering the food chain by being unwittingly digested by sea life. There were only rare instances in which this existing plastic would get collected and reused, such as by modest but well-meaning eco initiatives or businesses, and even by investigative artists – literally for ‘plastic art’.

The great paradigm shift, in its essence, was verbalised in an accord that stated that for a truly symbiotic existence between humanity and the universe, it was essential that things needed to exist and flourish outside of human knowledge and interference. It was also clear at this point of transition that this new era of design would cause a wholesale reassessment of the conditions created by Late Capitalism. Commodities would be only one stage in a complex cycle of materiality and non-materiality for objects, without further requirement for anything to be discarded. The economy shifted from being driven by the deliberate short lifespan of commodities, to being driven by the sustainment of the cyclicality of commodities. And the return of plastic into the ocean was eventually seen as symbolic of a cycle of failure, and, with it, of the delusion of the modern era.

[1] For Bruce Sterling’s compelling thesis on the Spime and its place in the future of design, read: Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, MIT Press, 2005.
[2] This takes directly from the idea of ‘Object Oriented Theory’ that was outlined by the philosopher Graham Harman in his book Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Open Court, 2002. This theory describes itself as a metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human existence and anthropocentrism over the existence of non-human objects. It is also worth reading entries related to this subject on his blog: http://doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/.

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Nav Haq is Curator at MuHKA, Antwerp.

Book launch: Submerged by Kjetil Kausland

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 19:10:45 +0100

Submerged is a photography- and book project exploring the performative aspects of Mixed Martial Arts. This form of martial arts exists outside of the regulated sport. On the one side it is seemingly violent, on the other it isstrictlyregulated and strict its self-policing. In this book Kjetil Kausland introduces us to photographs from Mixed Martial Arts fights. By taking part and contributing to this sport Kausland has been able to capture images no one else would.

“The object of this book is to explore the limits of performativity and the dialogue between the directed and spontaneous in photographic art.” Kausland says. “The starting point of this project is my own participation, in the scene surrounding the sport as well as one of its fighters.”

The book presents three projects No Holds Barred (2004-2007), No Màs (2008) and Submerged (2008-2010), and four comissioned texts by Tomas Espedal, Tommy Olsson, Joakim Borda and Susanne Christensen. Submerged by Kjetil Kausland is published by Teknisk Industri AS.

Maarten Vanden Eynde - Plastic Reef

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 09:49:27 +0100

Just below the surface of world’s oceans there is a floating layer of plastic debris, not detectable by overhead satellites, as it is translucent, but visible to the naked eye up close. This is only 30% of all the plastic that is dumped in the oceans as the other 70% sinks to the bottom. The last five years the artist Maarten Vanden Eynde has travelled the world to collect plastic trash from the five major ocean gyres; North and South Atlantic, North and South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, accompanying oceanographers. From the floating debris the artist has created Plastic Reef; a long term project that started in 2008 and which is being finalised for this exhibition at Hordaland Art Centre.

The sculpture has the characteristics of a coral reef, with all its nooks and crannies. However, more than hinting at what could be lost as a result of all the plastic in our oceans, it is a physical solution to the threat that plastic in the oceans pose to the marine environment.

With this work we are additionally given an opportunity to discuss topics closer to contemporary art. Plastic Reef is a futile attempt at creating a natural phenomena dictated by temperature, ocean depths and currents. Nevertheless, this recreation can be firmly rooted in discussions relating to aesthetics as well as issues of artistic processes. First exhibited in the size of a football at The Glendale College Art Gallery, Glendale California in 2009, it has later been shown in several exhibitions throughout the following years in Belgium and The Netherlands, such as last summer at Manifesta 9 - The Deep of the Modern. Plastic Reef is finalised in Bergen for this exhibition, where debris from all the five gyres finally come together to make the piece complete.

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Maarten Vanden Eynde (1977) is an artist who has devoted his life to exploring the mysteries of our future past by investigating the concept of Genetology, a self-invented ‘Science of First Things’ (www.genetology.net). His work is situated exactly on the borderline between the past and the future; sometimes looking forward to the future of yesterday, sometimes looking back to the history of tomorrow. He studied Free Media at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. His postgraduate studies have included a year at the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles, USA, and two years at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium. In 2005 he founded the organisation Enough Room for Space, a mobile platform for site-specific projects, together with Marjolijn Dijkman.

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Launch: Kunstjournalen B-Post 2012

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 13:09:17 +0100

At the launch you can of course hear some really nice audio clips and works that are discussed in the magazine will be presented. Anne Marthe Dyvi, Brandon LaBelle and Eirik Kydland brings along some samples. Moreover, the editors of the 2012 edition; Sissel Lillebostad and Maia Urstad, will talk about sound art. This is also an excellent chance to take home a copy of Kunstjournalen B-Post.

Contributers are: Anne Marthe Dyvi, Espen Sommer Eide, Mahlet Ogbe Habte, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Brandon LaBelle, Jørgen Larsson, Sissel Lillebostad, Trond Lossius, Nicholas Møllerhaug, Anne Hilde Neset, María Andueza Olmedo, Finnbogi Petursson, Carsten Seiffarth, Karen Skog, Roar Sletteland, Maia Urstad and Jana Winderen.

On the day of the launc an online version of the magazine will be published on teh web pages of Kunstjournalen B-Post.

Doors open at 19:00 and we finish at approx. 21.00. The bar will be open.

Conversing, converging, crafting by Catalina Lozano

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 18:14:49 +0100

Since early on in her practice, artist Carolina Caycedo’s has found a strong base in dialogue and exchange. In the late 1990s and early 2000s as part of Cambalache, a Bogotá-based artist collective that used bartering as a principle for interaction with the city, its material waste and its inhabitants. And subsequently with the long-term project Day 2 Day in which the artist continued to use non-monetary forms of exchange in order to obtain and offer services and objects which not only fulfilled material needs, but also offered opportunities for meeting new people and learning skills outside the channels of regular education. More than as ‘works’ and ‘projects’ Cambalache and Day 2 Day were set up to generate and experiment with alternative forms of life in societies with dominant forms of exchange and dialogue, mediated by money and classist social conventions. Both shaped Caycedo’s work deeply, even though these alternative transactions started mutating and taking place in other spheres, transitioning towards questions of spirituality, everyday resistance, feminism, etc.

This can be said of many artists, but in the case of Carolina Caycedo it rings especially true: life experiences directly influence her work in an intense way. Personal experiences bleed into how she thinks and formally develops her projects, bypassing any methodological paradigm in the pursuit of reaching out and establishing temporary, unconventional communities brought together with a certain degree of randomness and collective intelligence. Whether it is a passion for hip-hop or reggaeton, intense engagements with motherhood, Sufism, or knitting, they all inform Caycedo’s practice at the core. What is more, the work transcends this personal attachment in its desire to reach out and become relevant beyond the mere individual experience.

So, in that sense, the materiality of the work is never determined at the start, but instead always negotiated, the result of a process of transformation of ideas that happens in conversation. But it is always present: the immateriality of dialogue finds a material match – which is not to say this will be shown as an artwork in the end, but that the material world sits very close to Caycedo’s preoccupations.

This is even more the case in Humane Materiale (2012), an installation and series of workshops in Hordaland Art Centre, where the making of things becomes the very vehicle to engage in conversation. Escaping from the pattern of site-specificity, this work does not seek to describe or expose an experience in a particular city, highlighting its particularities and history, but instead wants to engage in a process of getting to know people through the manual work they do. This effectively implies a change of perspective in Caycedo’s practice. Thus far, the artist engaged with people to get to know the ‘locality’ through a series of experiences of site-specific work facilitated by residencies and commissions. Now the focus is placed on people, regardless of an idea of their identity connected to the place. Giorgio Agamben says that the identifiable is that which can be represented – and through representation, silenced. This goes against the idea of singularity in which one is not identified by any particular affiliation (national, sexual, political, social, etc.) but through which one is able to create a community in which the connections between people, a space between them, is the only thing holding it together. This quality in every one of them, an added something that makes this connection possible, is what Agamben calls halo. [1] The conversations established by Caycedo rely more on that halo and the space in between people it generates, than on the idea that they represent a place, are identified with it, or can represent it.

There is a humble intention embedded in the work: to get to know people through the manual work they perform, either as a hobby or as a main activity. Caycedo held conversations with nine citizens of Bergen of different nationalities, ages, political and spiritual convictions and genders, the only thing in common the fact that they use their hands to make things. The results of these activities are varied and diverse in the character of their materiality: from making bread to dying or embroidering fabrics, from costume making, to music, to knitting. Each one of the nine people Caycedo interviewed uses their hands in different ways, with different purposes and motivations. They have learnt their skill through different channels, but each one of them also possesses a certain ‘muscle memory’ as Caycedo calls it. [2] A certain way of doing things becomes somewhat embedded in our hands and is subject to constant change, dictated by the material culture we were brought up in, but also by shifts in technology, situations in life and the will to train our hands to perform certain tasks.

Humane Materiale is about the hands and things they produce. But between them a mental process is embedded that feeds to and from the moving hands, completely connected. Consciousness is not just a mental quality: it is exercised by the whole body, from head to toe. With the advances of computer technology and the increasingly sedentary lives we live, it feels like we have lost some of this holistic consciousness, reducing our ability to know the world to only a few senses. Although this may only be partly true, the body and the brain are not really separated, they are part of the same construction, completely interconnected and dependent on each other. So if we cause atrophy in one part of our body because we underuse it, we are somehow affecting our way of learning from the material world around us, which in turn is the vehicle that allows us to think also in abstract terms.

As Richard Sennett has pointed out, following many scientific studies developed since the nineteenth century, the human ability to grip things is one of the main qualities that allowed us a more complex relationship with the material world. [3] Gripping implies an obvious connection between the brain and the hand as it is a conscious act, as conscious as the realisation of the need to let go. Tactile experience is the first, most immediate way of knowing the world as it is distributed around the body at different levels and activates different forms of reflection: ‘Stored information about holding a ball, for instance, helps the brain make sense of a two-dimensional photograph of a ball: the curve of the hand and the hand’s sense of the ball’s weight help the brain think in three dimensions, seeing a flat object on paper in the round.’ [4]

Manual work, and the muscle memory it creates and from which it feeds itself, is embedded in the culture of a place, in the ways people have built up a know-how that is not conservative but ever-changing, perfected and adapted in the constant loop of intellectual and manual work which is implied in the craftsman’s activity. By this, I do not mean to create an idea of identity in relation to place, but more simply, an idea of material culture that is active, permeable and open. This material culture and popular know-how transmitted through this cultural and personal manual memory has also been modified by technological alterations and in many cases threatened by social changes that have affected the relationships between generations or genders. As Caycedo points out after her inquiries in Bergen, for instance, retirement homes for the elderly have estranged the relationships between grand parents and grand children, thus breaking a bond of knowledge transmission, which ensured the continuity of this dynamic material culture. That is why, in a way, a vindication of manual work is political: because it claims a space of activity that is very often geared towards non-monetary rewards, creating forms of exchange that are not necessarily based on profit, but on generosity, an idea that has been close to Caycedo’s practice from the start.

The videos that make up the installation were recorded from above and focus on the hands of each individual. The conversations unfold while each person is engaged in their manual work, highlighting the movement of the hands and how it reflects the dialogue taking place. A moment of reflection, for instance, may mean a pause in the movement of the hands, silence and sound, movement and stillness reflecting the process of making as a bodily process (the brain included). The conversation about these activities incorporates the notion of desire, a politics of desire that unfolds as the bread dough is kneaded, the thread is plunged into the cochineal-dye infused water, the flute is played, the knitting grows or the wool is carded. It would be misleading to think that a ‘hobby’ is something we do to put our minds away from our daily worries. On the contrary, manual work is a form of engagement with the world, a process of doing that leads to a process of thinking. Furthermore, one should not think that a hobby as a secondary, less important human activity, but as an equally important form of relating and taking part in a society and a culture than the work we do and are recognised for. In this sense, western (formal) education has played a part in making us believe that we need to specialise in something, become the one who knows all about something, while perhaps losing the ability to connect what we already know to other forms of knowledge that are equally valid, although not legitimated or deemed unreliable by a Eurocentric understanding of knowledge. But we may also lose the ability to engage more integrally with every aspect of life, estranging us from parts of ourselves that need caring for and that are nourished by these forms of manual work.

The human hand, connected to the brain (not necessarily in a ‘rational’ way), can make very sophisticated products: that is beyond question. But over time the craftsmen and the learning method they established have lost their space in those societies in which the tertiary, somewhat immaterial sector has taken up most of the employment – coincidentally in societies that tend to be considered more ‘advanced’. What the craftsman produces has become a luxury item available to only a few, changing the way in which every individual relates to the material culture that surrounds them. As more is produced and consumed to last, the less the material information we receive tells us that things should be worth something or nothing in terms that are far removed from considerations of time spent, skill or love.

Caycedo’s conversations, recorded in Bergen, use a sense of craftsmanship and an economy of producing and distributing that subvert the logic of production we have become immersed in. They are projected onto a big table, which also functions as a screen, a place for work and eating and a showcase. The workshops devised for adults seek to engage in a similar process of making and dialogue that leaves a material trace in the space, hopefully providing situations that foster and reproduce the open, un-prescribed experience the work implied for the artist herself.

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Catalina Lozano is an independent curator and researcher based in México City. Her research interests and curatorial practice have been increasingly engaged in the unveiling of minor narratives and the revision of dominant historical narratives. She is co-founder of de_sitio, a curatorial platform in Mexico City.

[1] See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

[2] All references to Caycedo are derived from a Skype conversations held in October 2012.

[3] This reflection of the links between the hand and the brain comes from Richard Sennett, The Craftsman, Yale University Press, 2008. See chapter 5, ‘The Hand’, pp. 149-178.

[4] Ibid., p. 153.

Conversation: Art and Everyday Crisis - Radhika Subramaniam and Pedro Gómez-Egaña

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 00:49:20 +0100

As artist professionals, we frequently find ourselves in projects that deal, or exist in tension with catastrophic historical events like the 9-11 attacks in New York, or the 22 July, 2011 attacks in Oslo and Utøya. The historical indexicality of these events suggests a concrete reference to a site and a time, but this may also reduce the potential that one event may have within a broader critical context. How can art enter and challenge the representation and referentiality of catastrophe? Can art be part of coping with and understanding such events?

In this conversation artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña will ask Radhika Subramaniam about her experience as researcher and curator approaching these issues, and will look to understand how notions, like that of “sensory urbanism”, open up perspectives in the way art can coexist with the logic of threat, catastrophe and repair present in our cities and culture.

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Radhika Subramaniam is Director/Chief Curator of the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center (SJDC) at Parsons The New School for Design where she is also an assistant professor of art and design history and theory. Her research interests are in sensory urbanism, South Asian urban modernities, and cultures of catastrophe. Her curatorial practice is cross-disciplinary and dialogic, committed to public pedagogy, critical urbanism, and political and social justice. She previously served as director of cultural programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), where she commissioned several public art projects in downtown Manhattan and oversaw a program of art and ideas. She was also the founding and executive editor of Connect: art.politics.theory.practice,an interdisciplinary art journal published by Arts International. She has a PhD in Performance Studies and an MA in Anthropology.

Supported by The Royal Norwegian Consulate General in New York

MA-WEEEKND: Stacy Brafield and Lona Hansen - 3300 m

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 09:25:50 +0200

Stacy Brafield and Lona Hansen have independently investigated different gallery rooms through installations and spatial drawings. Using materials such as thread and magnetic tape their works are activated by the audience moving through and around them. Their interest in each other’s practices started when they met in their MA class this year, and they have already started a process related investigation together. 3300 m is a site specific installation created with quite ordinary scotch tape. They reference the optical phenomenon triboluminescens, where light is generated in certain materials when they are pulled apart, ripped, scratched, crushed, or rubbed. Scotch tape has this quality, but the phenomenon can also be seen as a parallel to what happens in artistic collaborations.

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Stacy Brafield holds a BA (Hons) Embroidery, First Class Honours from Manchester Metropolitan University (2007-2010) and is currently an MA student at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. She has previously showed works in Collect, Saatchi, London, 2012 and at The National Centre of Craft and Design, Sleaford, 2011.

Lona Hansen holds a BA Fine arts from the Art Academy of Trondheim, NTNU (2009-2012) and is currently an MA student at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Her work has previously been featured in the solo exhibition It’s hip to be square at One night only, UKS, Oslo, 2012 and shown works in exhibitions at, amongst other, Galleri KIT, Trondheim, 2012 and Trøndelagsutstillingen, Trondheim, 2011.

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The MA-weekend is collaboration between Hordaland Art Centre and Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Twice a year the MA-students at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design are invited to submit proposals for an exhibition to be realised at Hordaland Art Centre, and a professional jury selects one of the proposals.

Skrivekunstakademiets temakveld: Tone Gellein - I BEG

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 12:53:10 +0200

Recovering an art school

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:01:37 +0200

Lecture: Criticism and fiction

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 17:44:05 +0200

The short story Transatlantic Travels was written during the course of a larger examination of the claimed crisis of today’s art criticism. She uses the text as a starting point for a discussion of how different methods of writing, considered experimental within the criticism of art, fictional or performative, bring new things to the table. The short story can be read as a part of this exploration, and also as an independent literary piece.

During her time as assistant curator at Henie Onstad Art Centre, Norby Wernø was given a small office with an ocean view. Through her sidetracks from her office to the archive and library, her daily work at the art centre and folders of old newspaper clippings that she borrowed after work, she got to know the story of Sonja Henie and Niels Onstad. Henie was a glamorous world champion ice skater, and Onstad was a shipping magnate as well as Henie’s third husband. The art collector couple and the institution which they created, soon became the base of the first half of her short story which, in its second half, connects to a particular work from the exhibition at the art centre at that time: Per-Oskar Leu’s Americka (If it wasn ́t for you, we ́d all speak German) from 2007.

Americka evokes the same route the California based couple Henie/Onstad so often traveled by air: USA - Norway. Americka is a first edition of Franz Kafka’s novel America (1927), which the artist Leu mailed to the protagonist of Kafka’s novel. It later returned to its sender in Norway. In the space between Sonja Henie and Americka, a set of common dilemmas crystallised, relating to the individual within society: about the risk and vulnerability involved in daring to turn to other people, and to respond affirmatively when one is approached by others. Some condensed gestures were made visible: Giving a gift which you do not know if receiver wishes to receive; to reject being addressed by a stranger.

Johanne Nordby Wernø (b. 1980 in Oslo) is a writer and curator currently working as a critic for the daily paper Dagbladet and for Artforum and Artreview. She serves on the board of Kunstkritikk, the Nordic art review. In 2009, she graduated with an MFA in Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice from Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Nordby Wernø lives and works in Oslo.

In collaboration with The Writer's Academy in Hordaland

Material Information: Humane Materiale by Carolina Caycedo

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:06:44 +0200

While the video component is an instructional documentation of the craft making, the accompanying audio score is a poetic portrait of the artisan, exploring the relation of hand labor with intellectual activity, the potential of healing and self-understanding behind manual activity, and the building of community through the transmission of skills. The exhibition space will be activated by a series of workshops hosted by the portrayed crafts makers, and open to the general public. The resulting crafts will become part of the exhibition. Tvebandstrikk, nålebinding, wool spinning, and lefse and potetkake baking are amongst the surveyed crafts.

Included in the history of arts and crafts is a tradition of resistance to the alienation of labour and commodity fetishism. This resistance has been traditionally expressed through the affirmation of craftsmanship and the development of skilled, sensible manual labour. Born out of the industrial era, the arts and crafts movement wished to establish (or re-establish) a form of production in which the producer’s mind was fully engaged with the task itself, so as to counteract the mindless, repetitious labour associated with factory work. Today, however, the industrial realities that at the turn of the 20^th century were so visible in cities like London and Paris, have become but diffuse rumours of faraway places (Malaysia, India, China, Mexico, and so on) that are well known but which have very little or no visibility in the places where the tradition of arts and crafts still continues (mainly the United Kingdom, Canada, and Scandinavia).

Material Information brings a set of contemporary practices together in order to present a multiple meditation on the new and old objects of industry. Hordaland Art Centre is one of the host institutions for this exhibition. The exhibition is also hosted by Permanenten (September 28th 2012 – January 27th 2013) and Galleri Format (September 27th – October 29th 2012).

As a way of pointing at the peculiar character of the Permanenten, the exhibition’s main site, and taking into account the museum’s original name, Kunstindustrimuseum, the aim of the artistic interventions at the Permanenten is to open new relationships between the objects that are normally displayed through a series of questions: How is a collection brought together? How does it enter a museum? How are the objects displayed? Likewise, the exhibition wishes to explore how the ideas of the world that emerge from these collections may help us better articulate a critique that attends to the scattered realities that take part in today’s globalized industrial networks.

For Galleri Format, a diverse program of short and feature-length films that deal with the relationship between the subject and the environment will be screened daily. Like the exhibition as a whole, this video and film program is structured around the pivotal film Reassemblage (1982) by the Vietnamese-American filmmaker Trinh-T. Minh-ha, which will be shown twice in its original 16mm format. The critical explorations around representation and the ethnographic gaze, as well as the emphasis on showing the act of making (rather than the finished object) are the main thread that runs through the different films and videos that the visitor will be invited to experience. The program changes every day.

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Material Information – Norske kunsthåndverkeres Temautstilling 2012, curated by Juan A. Gaitán, will take place in three different venues and around the city of Bergen. The main exhibition will take place at The Art Museums of Bergen, Permanenten between September 28^th and January 31^st. A film program will be screened at Galleri Format between September 27^th and October 29^th and a commissioned project by artist Carolina Caycedo will take place at Hordaland Art Centre between November 16^th and December 16^th.

Every Sunday a city walk will start at Permanenten 3 PM and take the audience through Bergen with a new guide every week. The city walk programme is conceived by Arne Skaug Olsen.

Material Information – Norske Kunsthåndverkeres Temautstilling 2012 is produced by Petra Rahm, and is supported generously by: The Norwegian Association for Arts and Craft, The Norwegian Arts Council, Bergen kommune and Office for Contemporary Art Norway.

Screening: The Autumn Exhibition's video programme 2012

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 10:31:04 +0200

The programme of the evening is:

Frode Fjerdingstad
Irene in the Poconos, 2011
1 min.

Oscar Qvale
Escape Velocity, 2009
5 min.

Crispin Gurholt
Ved Ekebergåsen, 2011
3 min.

Kaja Leijon
Screening, 2011
9 min.

Kari Klyve-Gulbrandsen/Odveig Klyve
Between, 2012
A Feather
Embarace
Loneliness
Video
6 min.

Thomas A. Østbye
Take #2, 2012
7 min.

Dimitri Lurie
Refraksjon, 2012
3´30 min.

Anders Eiebakke
Proporsjonal, Integral, Derivativ: Registrering av
et ekspanderende parameter rundt Kunstnernes Hus, 2012
7´33 min.

The National Jury 2012 has been Nils Olav Bøe, Gunvor Nervold Antonsen, Stefan Schröder, Schwan Dler Qaradaki, Kjetil Kausland and Giske Sigmundstad.
In collaboration with KinoKino Stavanger, Galleri Svalbard, Trondheim Kunstmuseum Gråmølna, Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and Kunsthall Oslo.

Conversation: Ana Vujanović & Bojana Cvejić

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 21:25:05 +0200

“If the body I dance with and the body I work and walk with are one and the same, I must necessarily entertain the suspicion that all of my body’s movements are, to a greater or lesser extent, choreographed”. This would be a concise statement of the social choreography thesis, as Andrew Hewitt develops it in Social Choreography: Ideology as Performance in Dance and Everyday Movement (2005). Social drama, as developed in social anthropology by Victor Turner in the 1970s serves as a complementary counterpart to social choreography, which analyses conflictual social processes, focusing on organisation of public performances that take place in the frame of social dramas. Social choreography and social drama then become interpretative tools for exploring the performances in the public on the basis of their claim that social order isn’t just reflected but is enacted and rehearsed as an aesthetic order. The two models focalize bodily gestures and movements, organization of bodies in time and space, mise-en-scène and dramaturgy of public gatherings and mass social events and thus discuss the functions of “communitas” in shaping social community between the public and the private spheres.

In this phase of the research, Vujanović and Cvejić examine state performances as well as performances of the public and its citizens informed by two different contexts, socialist Yugoslavia and contemporary Western neoliberal capitalism.

They have previously presented the research project through open days in Het Veem Theatre in Amsterdam, Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers in Paris and Tanzfabrik Berlin/Uferstudios in Berlin and two presentations, talks in Per.Art /Gallery Matica Srpska in Novi Sad, Serbia. The final presentation will be in Paris in the form of open studio in Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers in December 2012.

Apart from working in different ways in the course of the research - from theoretical research and research in video archives, over workshops and working sessions to public programs like open days - the project will result in the book "Performance and the Public", Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić (published by Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Paris & b_books, Berlin) and the documentary film "Yugoslavia, how ideology moved our collective body" by Marta Popivoda (produced by Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, Paris; Tkh, Beograd & Berlin University of the Arts which both will be launched in December 2012.

Ana Vujanović and Bojana Cvejić are co-founding members and editors of TkH (Walking Theory). TkH (Walking Theory) is an independent (institutionally non-aligned, extra-academic) platform for performing theoretical-artistic activism. It is initiated and run by the editorial collective TkH whose members are eight theorists, artists and producers coming from performance theory and practice, theater, cinema, and visual arts.

Ana Vujanović is a freelance worker – theorist, researcher, writer, lecturer, curator, dramaturge – in contemporary performing arts and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in Theatre Studies. She is a co-founding member of editorial collective of TkH (Walking Theory), theoretical-artistic platform, Belgrade, and editor of TkH journal for performing arts theory. Her particular commitment is empowering the independent scenes in Belgrade and Yugoslavia (Druga scena). She has lectured or given workshops at various universities (University of Arts in Belgrade, University of Amsterdam, etc.) and numerous independent educational programmes. She engages in artworks in the fields of performance, theatre, dance and video, as dramaturge, co-author and collaborator. She publishes regularly in journals (TkH, Maska, Frakcija, Teatron, Performance Research among others) and collections; and is author of three books, most recently "An Introduction to Performance Studies" with A. Jovićević (2007). She is currently running the research project “Escenas discursivas” with Marta Popivoda (Matadero / El Ranchito, Madrid). From October 2012 she will be teaching performance studies and dramaturgy subjects at the MA in performance studies at University of Hamburg.

Bojana Cvejić is performance theorist and maker, working in contemporary dance and performance also as dramaturg and performer. She has studied musicology and philosophy and published in magazines and journals (TkH, Maska, Frakcija, Radical Philosophy, Performance Research) and book collections and is author of three books, most recently "Beyond the Musical Work: Performative practice" (IKZS, Belgrade, 2007) and "A Choreographer's Score: Fase, Rosas danst Rosas, Elena's Aria, Bartôk" (co-authored with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Mercatorfonds, Brussels, 2012).

With Jan Ritsema she has developed a theater practice in a number of performances since 1999 (a.o. "TODAYulysses", 2000), and has collaborated with X. Le Roy, E. Salamon, M. Ingvartsen, C. De Smedt and others in numerous performances. Her own performance work includes directing five experimental opera performances, most recently Mozart’s Don Giovanni (BITEF, Belgrade, 2009). She has been active in teaching in a number of European educational programmes (e.g. P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels, SNDO in Amsterdam), as well as organizing independent platforms for theory and practice in performance: PAF (performingARTSforum in St. Erme, France) and 6MONTHS1LOCATION (CCN in Montpellier). She is currently completing her PhD (“Choreographing Problems: Expressive Concepts in European Contemporary Dance”) at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University. Since September 2009, she is teaching contemporary dance and performance subjects at the Utrecht University, Department of Media and Culture Studies.

The conversation in Bergen is funded by City of Bergen and Arts Council Norway. It is part of B-open 2012 and in collaboration with Hordaland Art Centre.

Conditions of a Moment

Fri, 24 Aug 2012 18:57:37 +0200

It can take but a moment for something to change: That which may take years, even centuries, to be built can vanish in a heartbeat. Opinions can be challenged by surprising incidents. Ideas can come to us in the least expected situation and provoke actions.

Moments feed moments, but cannot be accumulated. They are just as easily defined by definitives and answers, as by questions. This ”duality of the moment” is the entry point to this exhibition and its works.

Art works are often referred to as open-ended questions, more than as answers. In Conditions of a Moment the works are suggested as answers; answers to questions that have been provoked by other disciplines such as economy, ecology, history, physics and urbanism. At the same time the exhibition is proposed as a question of how we keep searching for experiences to create continuations to our perpetual moments.

Thus, the exhibition makes use of a transdiciplinary approach to how we relate to art: The works offers answers to questions that have originated in other disciplines, but that cannot be answered within the discipline in question. What is time? and What is change? are among the questions that are answered by the works in Conditions of a Moment. However, the answers are not conclusive. You have to be cautious not to draw conclusions too soon. This is how the exhibition poses the question: How do we create knowledge?

This exhibition is, just like any other exhibition, a moment, as it is an event in time. It opens and closes, and in between we can experience the moment of exhibition. The works in the exhibition, and the relation between them, lives on in our imagination and memory, and can affect future moments. Just like any other moment, this exhibition can change coming moments.

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The exhibition is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen, and has been made possible by RiddoDuottarMuseat – De Samiske Samlinger in Karasjok and L’appartement 22 in Rabat.

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Yto Barrada (b. 1971) has previously exhibited at Göteborgs Konsthall (2009), the MoMA, San Francisco (2009) and the Venice Biennale (2007, 2011). She was awarded Deutsche Guggenheim artist of the year (2011), the first Ellen Auerbach Award (2006) and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2006). She is the artistic director and co-founder of Cinematheque de Tanger, Morocco. She lives and works in Tanger, Morocco.

Toril Johannessen (b. 1978) has had solo exhibitions at Bergen Kunsthall NO.5 (2010) and the Oslo Fine Art Society (2009), and participated in group exhibitions such as at Witte de With, Rotterdam (2011), and most recently dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (2012). Through the organisations B-Open and Flaggfabrikken, Johannessen has initiated and organised seminars, reading groups and residencies. She lives and works in Bergen, Norway.

Talleiv Taro Manum (b. 1968) has exhibited works in venues such as Ars Baltica Photographic Triennial (2007-2008), Høstutstillingen and Grimstad Short Film Festival (2008), and a solo exhibition at Sound of MU, Oslo (2009, 2010). Last spring Manum exhibited the installation and movie Greetings from RINGNES, Skotbu; art and music festival on private property, at UKS, Oslo. Manum is continuously working on his project Greetings from RINGNES, Skotbu 2012. He lives and works in Ringnes, Skotbu in Norway.

Britta Marakatt-Labba (b. 1951) is a teacher, writer and artist. She established herself on the Norwegian side of Sápmi, belonged to the Masi group, and took part in establishing the Sami Artist Association (SDS) in 1979. She has been project leader of Ájtte Museum in Jokkmokk – the Sami centre (2003-2007). Marakatt-Labba participates in The Stitch Project (2012) and will participate in an exhibition in Kung Ming, China later in October 2012. She has published Broderade Berättelse (2011), which consists of more than 80 illustrations from her body of work. She lives and works in Norrbotten/Övre Soppero, Sweden.

LeRoy Stevens (b. 1984) has recently exhibited From the Bird's Mouth at Linnagalerii, Tallinn, Estonia (2011) and Underground Sculpture at the Center for Land Use Interpretation: Desert Research Station (2012). His work has been written about in The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph, and he has appeared on various radio shows including World Service: BBC, All Things Considered: NPR and Something Else: WLUW. In 2009 he started the publishing company Small World, which focuses on projects that relate to geography and networks. Upcoming releases include a collection of audio recordings by performance artist Barbara T. Smith and an LP of recordings made by Stevens titled OutOut Houses. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

Ane Lan - PERSONA

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 12:28:05 +0200

A female dancer goes through different emotional and psychological stages revealing a complex relationship to the audience and her six male accompanies. PERSONA invites to a contemporary reading of Freuds Narcissism complex through references to early 20th century feminist performance strategies by women artists as Valerie de Saint-Point, Mary Wigman, Vera Fokina and others, and the exploration of the psyche in 1968 Ingmar Bergman film PERSONA.

PERSONA by Ane Lan is part of Oktoberdans 2012and has previously been performed in Germany, Italy and the USA.
Duration: 30-40 min.

Ane Lan (1972, Oslo), graduated from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2002, and works with live performances, music, video/film and photography. Ane Lan is the project name of the Norwegian artist Eivind Reierstad and his performance company. Ane Lan has participated in numerous international exhibitions and festivals, such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Paco das Artes, São Paolo; 51. Biennale di Venezia; the 10. Istanbul Biennale and The Barbican, London. Ane Lan has also participated in numerous international film- and video festivals.

Performers: Beata Kretovicova Iden (Iceland), Eivind Reierstad (Norway)
Figurants: 5 local performance artists/actors/students/ theater amateurs
Artistic direction & art work: Ane Lan
Photography: Ane Lan
Music and text: Ane Lan
Costumes and Scenography: Ane Lan & Synnøve Mo
Production: DADA –prod (www.dadaprod.net)
Co-production: BIT-teatergarasjen ( www.bit-teatergarasjen.no), SANTARCANGELO dei Teatri ( www.santarcangelofestival.com), Hordaland Art Centre (www.kunstsenter.no), Defibrillator Performance Gallery (www.dfbrl8r.org)
Supported by: Norwegian Arts Council, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim (GHA/UK)

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 10:37:16 +0200

The book, which combines the forms of fiction, travel writing and the cultural historical essay, focus on questions of place and identity and how these have shifted in the 21st Century. The film looks at how Ghana, in the aftermath of the discovery of around 800 billion barrels of oil in 2007, and In light of the potentially damaging effects seen elsewhere, is taking Norway as a kind of model, and will explore to what extent economic management can lead to a sense of wellbeing and happiness.

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Nana Oforiatta-Ayim is a writer, filmmaker and cultural historian, who lives and works in Accra and London. Her works deal with the construction of narratives and identity, as well as language and the play of power. She has presented it across various platforms: She has created books and films for exhibitions at The New Museum, New York; Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, Berlin and The Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco; has written for publications, like African Metropolitan Architecture, The National Geographic, frieze, and The Statesman; has presented her scholarship at the Universities of Legon, Oxford, Cambridge and London; curated exhibitions and events at museums and institutions, like The Victoria and Albert Museum, Royal Festival Hall and Liverpool Biennial; and has broadcast for HBO and VoxAfrica.

The Midsummer Night Session

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:10:51 +0200

By applying yet another method for the 2012 residency programme Hordaland Art Centre continues to emphasise discussion, rather than production. By giving priority to sharing of knowledge and ideas this model is supplementing our Collaborative Research Residency. The invited participants have an articulated interest in communicating the ideas of contemporary art through education, text, curating and web radio. Discussions on current and future projects will take place in a site-specific framework in Bergen, the Bergen city mountain plateau, the island of Lygra and Fløen allotment gardens between June 29th and July 2nd in collaboration with several artists residing in Bergen.

Several of the participants have been residents in Bergen before, and some have ongoing projects involving artists and curators from Bergen. Artists Frøydis Lindén, Aleksander Stav and Knud Young Lunde, Anja Ulset and others will be hosting different programmes in this session.

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Juan Gáitan was curator at Witte de With, Rotterdam until December 2011. He trained as an art historian and aesthetic theorist at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver. Recent exhibitions outside of Witte de With include Models for Taking Part (2011) and Exponential Future (2008), Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver. His most recent essays have been published in Afterall, The Exhibitionist, and as part of the series Ten Fundamental Questions of Curating in Mousse Magazine. He lives and works between Colombia, Canada, the US, Europe and Africa.

Dóra Hegyi is an art historian and curator. She acted as curator in the Ludwig Museum Budapest between 1996 and 2003, since 2005 she has been the director of tranzit.hu. Within this framework the Free School for Art Theory and Practice, was started as well as research and publication activity. She has organised numerous exhibitions, in 2008 she acted as curator of Periferic 8 Biennial in Iasi and in 2010, as a member of tranzit.org, she curated Manifesta 8 in Murcia.

Abdellah Karroum is an art critic, curator and founder of L’appartement 22 in Rabat. He was curator of the 7^th Dakar Biennial in 2006. He is also board member of SUD, Salon Urbain de Douala, and the association Doual’art. He set up R22, webradio for art in 2007 and was curator of the exhibition Expedition 7: relating Homelands for the 7^th Gwangju Biennial directed by Okwui Enwezor. Karroum is the founder and artistic director of L’appartement 22 in Rabat since 2002, les Expéditions Le Bout Du Monde and the publishing house hors’champ in Bordeaux and Fez. He is currently associate curator for La Triennale 2012 at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Frøydis Lindén has studied ceramics at Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld, Germany, and at The Danish Design School, Bornholm, Denmark, and holds a BA in ceramics (2006) and an MA of Fine Arts (2011) from Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Lindén has also studied at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, from where she holds an MA of agroecology (2002), still influencing her artistic work. Lindén has been involved in several collaborative projects, such as Cupola, with the artist collective Ytter at USF Visningsrommet, Bergen (2010), Rasteplass Nytorget at Rogaland Kunstsenter (2010), the art in landscape project Eksperiment SUS 2 at Prosjekt Alvøen, Bergen (2010) and Eksperiment SUS 3 at Fron-fjellet (2010).

Nana Oforiatta-Ayim is a writer, filmmaker and cultural historian, who grew up in Ghana, Germany and the UK. After studying Russian Literature and Politics, she worked for the Eastern European Section of United Nations in New York. She returned to the UK to do an MA in African Art History and received an AHRC award for doctoral research into historical aesthetic and philosophical concepts of the Akan in Ghana. Her works deal with the construction of narratives and identity, as well as language and the play of power. She has presented it across various platforms: She has created books and films for exhibitions, written for publications and curated exhibitions and events at museums and institutions.

Arne Skaug Olsen, art critic, curator, publisher and artist. He holds an MA in Photography and MA in Curating from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. He regularly writes for the Nordic online journal for art criticism Kunstkritikk and Camera Austria. His work generally deals with questions of politics and its relation to art and contemporary culture. Skaug Olsen is a founding member of Flaggfabrikken - Centre for Photography and Contemporary Art, and a founding editor of Ctrl+Z Publishing.

Aleksander Stav trained in Bournemouth, England, and completed his MA at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2009. He has participated in a number of exhibitions in Norway, as well as showing works in Brazil and the UK. Together with Knud Young Lunde he has created the art cooperative Ministry of Transport and Communications.

Knud Young Lunde graduated MA from Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2009. He has exhibited in Berlin, Warsaw and New York and several times in Bergen; is first solo exhibition was with Entrée, 2010 and he participated in BGO1 at the Bergen Art Museum, 2010. September 2012 he will hold his next solo exhibition with NoPlace in Oslo. Together with Aleksander Stav he has created the art cooperative Ministry of Transport and Communications.

Anja Ulset graduated MA from Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2010. She has an explicit interest in publications and fanzines, and has been the co-editor for the fanzines such as Ikke til hjemlån #1-13, 2006-2008 and Distribusjon # 1-24, 2008-2010. In 2011 she published Bergen Art Guide, Ctrl+Z Publishing and was featured in the solo exhibition Spring Collection at Knipsu, Bergen.

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Failure, in particular by Daniela Castro

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 18:26:15 +0200

I need you to bear in mind three examples of Renata Lucas’ artistic practice before I begin this discussion. Because it is not going to be easy to write about one particular work in this short essay, given the complexity of her work. It would be much easier to talk to you about her practice, for reasons you should know soon. We can perhaps talk about it in the café of Hordaland Art Centre or at a picnic in the parking lot outside another time? Meanwhile, I will rely on the images that illustrate these examples to take your hand and help me guide you through it.

In Atlas (2006), Renata Lucas temporarily erased the Galeria Milan from the cartography of the city of São Paulo. The domestic residence that is neighbour to the art gallery on the left hand side was extended half way into the building, taking over the courtyard and part of the exhibition space. The dwellers profited from a larger and greener backyard for the duration of the exhibition. The other half of the gallery underwent renovations so as to mirror the garage from across the street, which took over the remaining exhibition space. Throughout the show, this part of the gallery serviced city drivers with a parking facility in the busy neighbourhood of Vila Madalena. What remained from the original building was the gallerist’s office in the back, which gave collectors and art visitors a hard time finding the gallery.

For the 27^th São Paulo Biennial, Renata Lucas doubled the sidewalk of Rua Brigadeiro Galvão, a street located in a former industrialist district, in Matemática Rápida (Quick Mathematics, 2006). The “new” sidewalk ran parallel to the existing one, duplicating along with it the also existing lampposts and flowerbeds. Not at all an art neighbourhood, but definitely a bohemian destination for the art crowd [1], the working class residents of the street who noticed the intervention felt privileged, thinking that the City had finally paid attention to their environment and improved it.

And in kunst-werke, 2010 (cabeça e cauda de cavalo; head and tail of a horse) for the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Lucas drew an imaginary circumference onto the floor of the façade and actually shifted the entranceway a few degrees to the right, as if subtly disorienting the regular geometry of the building from its axis with the street. To the continuous line of the sidewalk were added almost imperceptible jagged steps and discontinued sidewalk patterns as a result of the shift, albeit inaugurating a vertiginous rhythmic metric to the whole ensemble in Berlin Mitte, which seemed to have always been there. Inside the exhibition space, a large circle on the floor was rotated by the visitors’ steps, bringing the grass from the outside in, the room’s concrete floor out and back again, conforming to that rhythm of vertigo.

By now, I hope you will agree with me that when art writers and curators say that Renata Lucas’ work intervenes with architecture and urban spaces, they are right. But I have to say that this is not the whole story. As the artist says, “in fact I am a lay person when it comes to architecture. My interest has always been in ‘revolving spaces’, which was employed in some drawings and sculptures I used to make. My difficulty with scale made my sculptures look like models or studies for larger projects, which then were photographed so that the details suggested an alteration in scale. In my drawings, that difficulty didn’t occur due to the virtuality of the paper. The paper is a cut out of a broader visual field, thus no sense of scale is inherent to it. On the other hand, an object on a table suggests a sense of scale. I didn’t want to work with this relationship. My interest was in the juxtaposition of exteriors: that the background brought to the foreground, or ‘architecture’ if you want, became the ‘thing’. But I have to say that this came later… Also, architecture is something that artists always come across in their work, in how it is supposed to be installed, displayed; it’s the framework of the work. Architecture is a field of circumscription; a field delimited by quotation marks.” [2]

That’s my lead for the point I will try to make: quotation marks are from the field of language, of writing. The heavy construction that most of Renata Lucas’ works demand does not contrast with the subtlety with which her works operate. I would argue that the nature of this heavy construction pertains to the world of poetry, where each word or sign is brought to an extreme exercise of synthesis in order to render a subtly stunning imageless picture. In particular to concrete poetry, a movement initiated by Brazilian poets Décio Pignatari and brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in the 1960’s, where the blank of the page doesn’t merely circumscribe the poem but functions as its delimitating quotation marks, as part of the text.

The reader has to trust me that what is left out from the brief descriptions of the three works that begin this essay – stories about the tea and cake with Galeria Milan’s neighbour on endless afternoons, the continual bureaucratic negotiations with City Hall for the construction of sidewalks and lampposts, the incessant institutional quarrels due to the permanent transformation of a state-of-the-arts architectural structure of a museum façade, and so forth – are not details of the making of the work, but a constitutive part of the prose that composes the work itself. I would not do justice to these stories if I were to recount them in writing. They have to be told, heard, absorbed through the interjections, laughter, angst, body gestures. That which would be considered the background to the making of the works is brought to the foreground and architect the ‘thing’ of Lucas’ artistic practice. Storytelling and architecture as part of the same narrative is a difficult pair to marry.

Falha (Failure) is a bed of hinged together plywood sheets that cover the ground of the exhibition space. Handles are placed on the edge of some of them as an invitation for the viewers to manipulate their ground at their will. The work is a surface ground that literally slips under one’s feet as another layer of plywood sticks upward on the other end of the room: ugly, clumsily, defiantly, as a failed attempt of edification, an anti-monument that struggles to stand right. Falha is the accidental geography of the under nettings that contaminate the art institution with an ambiguous autonomy: though it “fits” virtually in any space, it carries a discomfort of form, of origin and of meaning wherever it goes.[3] The blind spot, that space of a-perspectivism, which Foucault elected as the intellectual’s point of failure, slides beneath one’s foot. The discomfort is that the blind spot – as the place from where one stands on to proffer an argument while missing precisely the point of observation that lies beneath their footprint – cries out. Falha exposes the fragility built in in any formal exercise of construing discourse, be that through bricks, plywood or words.

I paraphrase Haroldo de Campos’ verses to say that Renata Lucas’ interventions function as acupuncture with specially sharpened silver needles that penetrate the discourse’s conjunctive tissue. One doesn’t immediately notice the subcutaneous presence of the needles, but they exist, and they establish a sympathetic system of lymph and nymphs that long for perpetration by a simple contamination on the slippery phonetic surface of signified and signifiers.[4] That is to say that Lucas’ work operates in a system of transfer. Architecture and urban spaces are not given structures for her to intervene on. Rather, she exploits them as signs that compose a given narrative, a given text – the slippery phonetic surface of signified and signifiers – which she rewrites, bringing to light what may have been hidden in between the lines, or recovering the poetry that was always there but that had been undermined. And both in the construction and in writing, though it entails heavy work, the end result in Lucas’ practice seems to be done in one stroke through a sharply contaminating editing mark. Falha hardly configures a proper image, but it exists, as the silver needle applied on the human body hardly configures pain, but it hurts.

The piercing discomfort in the work is the letter “h” in Portuguese language. An auxiliary mute consonant that complicates spelling, as in a “stupid habit of seeing the world always as a badly rephrased version of itself”, hábito, in Portuguese, can easily go without the “h” and get restarted with the first letter of the alphabet; and in fact it does in oral speech. The “h” is also a phoneme that minimally changes pronunciation and discerns “falha” (failure) from “fala” (speak). Falha gives you a place of perspectivism, of splitting with the rhyme of stupid habits. And gives you the chance of moving your perspective around, pulling down and sliding up; and choosing again should you lose the reason.

[1] I feel obliged to provide the reader with a little update: six years ago, one of the best bars in the whole of São Paulo – a 14 million people city – was Casa CB, located on the street where the work took place, which sadly no longer exists. In 2008, Fortes Vilaça Gallery, one of the most important in the country, opened its second venue in this neighbourhood, and others are following the successful enterprise. Four years after Lucas’ project, the area turned to the opposite from what took the artist’s interests to realize Matemática Rápida.
[2] Interview with Renata Lucas by Adriano Pedrosa on the occasion of her exhibition at REDCAT, Los Angeles, in 2007. This excerpt was extracted from the Appendix of her doctorate thesis, Viewed from the inside, Viewed from the outside, defended in 2008 at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo, ECA-USP. The italics are my emphasis.
[3] Renata Lucas, Viewed from the inside, Viewed from the outside, doctorate thesis defended in 2008 at the School of Communication and Arts of the University of São Paulo ECA-USP, 2008. p. 100. Falha was originally conceived for and installed at Paço das Artes in São Paulo (2003). It was reconstructed for installation at the REDCAT, Los Angeles, in 2007. It belongs to the Inhotim Collection (Brumadinho, Minas Gerais), whose installation is scheduled for this upcoming September.
[4] Free paraphrased translation of “tudo tem que ver com isso” by Haroldo de Campos’ audio book poem Galáxias (1963-1976).

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Daniela Castro, writer and curator based in São Paulo.

Screening: When the Pepper Blossoms - a story about the swedish emigration to Brazil (2011) by Anna Wessman and Nilsmagnus Sköld

Mon, 28 May 2012 16:59:19 +0200

Both documents from their time and their decendants tells a story of lies, deception, dreams, hope and loyalty. One might draw parallels to today's migration flows, but most of all, this is a film about history, memory and forgetting.

Running time 57 minutes, English subtitles.

Voices: Fredrik Gunnarsson, Terje Östling, Viktoria Flodström. Music: Sofia Härdig. Post Production Sound: Anders Wall

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Wessman&Sköld (Anna Wessman and Nilsmagnus Sköld) are both graduates of the Malmö Art Academy (2001/2000), and have separately exhibited widely. When the Pepper Blossoms - a story about the swedish emigration to Brazil is their second collaboation, which has been screened sevaral palaces in Sweden; Galleri Signal and the People’s Cinema in Luleå. In 2003 they initiated the organisation Institutet för Konstnärer och Konstförmedlare (Institute for Artists and Art Professionals) together with Emma Reichert.

Renata Lucas - Falha (Failure)

Mon, 14 May 2012 11:05:20 +0200

Falha (Failure) is a mobile floor that theoretically can be packed and shipped in order to create a familiar environment in a foreign place. However, it needs constant re-creation, as it must be fitted precisely to each location, thus exposed to subtleties relating to available materials and local building traditions. Every module of the floor is like letters in a language that can easily be translated to create new meanings.

Lucas’ works are often negotiating architecture and the surrounding society. The first time Falha (Failure) was constructed was in Paço das Artes, São Paulo, Brazil in 2003. It was re-constructed in Rio de Janeiro later that same year. It was a time of upheaval and optimism in Brazil. Promises of improvement were fresh, and the ground to walk on was perhaps not as unsteady as before. Yet, the artists still had to create their own contexts for production and display, something this work poetically pointed out. In 2007 the work was installed in the gallery of the interdisciplinary contemporary arts centre REDCAT in Los Angeles – a city of constant possibility of earthquakes and close to artificial surroundings created by a constant supply of water. As a nomadic structure the work was given an additional meaning, again created by the artist herself. This was her first solo-exhibition in the US, and since it turned out not to be possible to go through with the original plans for the exhibition due to strict American regulations for how public spaces can be used she brought her own foundation. Last year, the work was once again installed in an earthquake-ridden region, as contribution to the Istanbul biennial titled Untitled.

Throughout the summer the audience can manipulate the work as it is installed in Bergen. The city is not geologically prone to earthquakes, but our ground might not be so steady as we might think. During the time this work has existed our foundations have become unstable, as a result of political and financial changes. However, it is important to remember that this not only creates basis for disasters, but also undreamt-of possibilities. Just like this floor we can recreate the ground we every day walk on. The installation of this work at Hordaland Art Centre can also be inscribed in a micro-local context, as there is a proposition that the surrounding parking lot in the neighbourhood of Klosteret should be recreated as a versatile park.

For this exhibition Hordaland Art Centre has commissioned a new text on Lucas’ works by writer and curator Daniela Castro, titled ”Failure, in particular”, available to read on our web pages www.kunstsenter.no.

The exhibition is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen, in dialogue with Daniela Castro.

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Renata Lucas (1971, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil) lives in Rio de Janeiro. Her solo exhibitions include kunst-werke, 2010 (cabeça e cauda de cavalo), KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2010; The Resident, Gasworks, London, 2007 and Mau Gênio, the Museu de Arte de Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, 2002. She has participated in dOCUMENAT (13), Kassel, 2012; the Biennale di Venezia in 2009 titled Making Worlds and Como Viver Junto, 27th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil in 2006. In 2008 she received her PhD from the Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA-USP), São Paulo, Brazil and in 2009 she received the Ernst Schering Foundation Art Award.

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The exhibition is supported by the City of Bergen.

Like Smoke by Matt Packer

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 22:50:51 +0200

A canister was thrown, rolled to a stop on the ground, and then emitted - first thin, then quickly thicker - streams of smoke, until the streams disappeared and a more general fog took over.

The canister must have been thrown from a nearby office window. The arc of its travel in the air would suggest it was thrown, with some force, from the upper floors of a four, five storey block; a 19th century warehouse, converted at some point in the 1970s into a burrow of small offices rented by organisations and companies such as the Matrix Regional Cultural Development Counsel, Nobus Independent Maritime Law Consultants, and Target Media, who seem to have the monopoly on the graphic identity and promotional work of every large-scale travelling live music production that takes place up and down the country.

It is Bank Holiday Monday, and whoever threw the canister must have had keys to open the front door. They must have climbed the stairs or taken the lift - whatever they preferred to do, no different on this day than any other day -, then entered the room to access a window that overlooked the junction of empty streets; a window that could be swung open, wide enough to create a generous aperture through which a canister, the size of a can of lager, could be forcibly thrown. This individual may be the owner or director of one of the many organisations and small companies in the block, in a position to come and go from the office freely, choosing their own hours and making it possible to spend more time with family and concentrate on independent ventures. A fortunate individual in other words, that most people would consider unfortunate for having to travel to this otherwise deserted and unwelcoming commercial district on a Bank Holiday Monday, and commit to the task of throwing a canister of smoke from an upper floor window, down into the street below.

The canister was thrown without a witness. There may have been one or two people in the area at this time, photography students testing their flash equipment in a safe and open environment, learner drivers looking to practice their turns, but there was little cause for anyone other than these people seeking an absent but resemblant place, no reason for anyone at all, to walk these streets. None of the shops were open. Not even the endlessly energetic coffee shops and juice bars that seem to run all day and all night monday to friday. There were a few black men that sit at the reception desks of the glassy fronted larger office complexes, but these men keep themselves hidden behind computer screens and cctv monitoring systems. They would allow themselves to take a few personal calls and check email, and they would expect nothing of their day in professional terms. There was no-one that saw the canister being thrown, or its arc in the air which is rather falsely described, but there may have been one or two people that heard the canister land scrappily on the road. There was a second or two before the smoke started to emit from it, and anyone in these intervening seconds that turned their head to register the sound of a metal canister hitting tarmac at force, could have easily mistaken it for any other kind of projectile aimed at no- one in particular, no-one at all: clearly having caused no harm to anybody.

The smoke that emitted from the canister, that within 10, 20 seconds was now much more like a fog that covered a radius of 20, 30 metres, was brighter and whiter than the burning smoke that often occurs at this time of year, high on the hill. Here, in the belly of the valley, in this district of what some call a city, others a town, there was nothing burning in order to cultivate crops, stem the contagion of diseased vegetation, or sicker still: cull infected animal life. Here, there was nothing burning at all. No crackling and consuming flame at the centre of it all, only a canister on the ground, swallowed by the smoke of its own contents; a compressed micro environment, let loose and spilling thinklessly into another atmosphere.

Minutes passed and it was not long before the surrounding buildings lost all shape and distinction, with a thick smoke radius that had enlarged to 200, 300 metres. The vernacular integrations of architecture that were a crucial design aspect of many nearby buildings – the native materials used in cladding, the light coloured stone, the reddish timber – would be difficult to recognise for anyone not already familiar with how this new architecture responded to the local history and colour. The office buildings nearby, and the buildings beyond - public libraries, university departments, whatever these buildings may be - built in the good public spirits of the last decade certainly, were held back behind the smoke; either behind it or in its midst, whatever is more correct. It was impossible to know, but easy to imagine how this smoke swept its way through poor ventilation systems or windows carelessly left open by carefree employees or reckless cleaners; the smoke making its way down corridors, into stationery cupboards, communal areas, dedicated wifi zones.

More minutes passed, turned to hours, and the radius of the dense smoke further swarmed and developed, until it was recognised that there couldn’t have been any part of the city that wasn’t touched and affected. There must have been a point, out there somewhere, where the smoke edged upon clean, clear air, and dissipated, just as smoke does. For a brief period of time, that exact point may have been the estate of large and faceless warehouse units at the far northern reaches of the city’s outskirts, apparently used as a distribution centre for frozen food; or else the freakish assembly of old military buildings at the far south, more recently conducted together as an Institute of Technology. Those edges dissolved, of course; they could hardly be called edges to begin with; overtaken and erased by the smoke’s silent and indiscriminate advance.

Everything on the cusp of obliterating into a bright white and seemingly depthless space, thoughts turned to those black and gestureless ‘... By Night’ postcards for sale in tourist shops on the South European coast. The black of Cadiz is the black of Palermo is the black of Marseille is the black of anywhere and everywhere as night falls: the logic that humourously disappoints the expected, called-for, sunny character of these places more-often represented in postcards. The black postcard image is neither the black of Cadiz, Palermo, Marseille. The black is no image at all; not even an underexposed, poorly developed, crumb of an image, taken pointing to the misty sea on a starless night, away from the lights of the city and promenade. The black is a solid tone. 100% gradation on the computer grayscale slider. At 0%, Cadiz, Palermo, Marseille, obliterated in bright white smoke or snow. At 50%, Cadiz, Palermo, Marseille, a medium grey.

The canister was thrown and landed uncertainly as a call to arms, an indictment of violence, the further hiding of whatever was hidden in the underworld, creating more room for it to grow, fester and manoeuvre in the open and adjusted air. No, this canister was thrown in retreat. A retreat because the strength of the opposition was so great, much greater than anticipated; the opposition, more organised, better resourced; their uniforms smarter, their camouflage more effective, their weapons etcetera. Or a retreat because a general exhaustion set in like a rot, contaminating the foreground, middleground, and background of all operations. Or a retreat because all soldiers and non-soldiers, in and out of military metonyms come and gone, would prefer to be elsewhere and focus on other things.

B-open conversation: The Invisible Hand

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:17:39 +0200

As an extension to the B-open workshop B-open and Hordaland Art Centre welcomes you you to an open discission of economy, the invisible structures in society and our capability to make visible and act upon the seemingly hidden or non-existing. Below you can read more about the participants.

The event and free and open to all.

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Charles Esche is a curator and writer. Since 2004, he has been Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. He is co-founder and co- editor of Afterall Journal and Afterall Books with Mark Lewis.

Dr. Oecon. Ove Jakobsen is professor in ecological economics at Bodø Graduate School of Business (HHB). He is co-founder and leader of Centre for Ecological Economics and Ethics at HHB.

Richard Sheldon is Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the Bristol University in the United Kingdom. His research interest is British history 1700-1860.

This conversation is organised by artists Marjolijn Dijkman and Toril Johannessen.

B-open is supported by Bergen kommune, Stiftelsen Fritt Ord, Norsk kulturråd, Hordland fylkeskommune, Bildende Kunstneres Forening Hordaland, Norske Kunsthåndverkere Vest-Norge and Hordaland Art Centre.

Seminar: Blank Identification

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 20:08:33 +0200

In the exhibition Torgersrud challenges the idea we have of what a photograph is, and what we can expect from it. If we reflect this back onto the capitalist logic we can similarly ask what we expect of contemporary society. This seminar comprises four lectures, and an open discussion with the audience of the ideas put forward by our guests, with all the digressions and associations that come with it.

13:00 – Welcome and introduction by Anne Szefer Karlsen

13:15 – Morten Torgersrud, artist, Kirkenes, Norway/Stockholm, Sweden: The distribution of place: Ellisif Wessel, Jorma Puranen and the space of photography

14:00 – Matt Packer, Curator of Exhibitions & Projects, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland: Grey Area

14.45-15:00 – Break

15:00 – Arne Skaug Olsen, art critic, Bergen: Photography and stupidity – We’ll slide down the surface of things

15:45 – David Cunningham, Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, London, England: Photographing Capitalism: Sequence, Seriality, Narrative
16:30 – Conversation/debate

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The seminar will be held in English. Participation is free, but due to limited avaliable seats we encourage everyone interested to notify us before April 25th to hks [at] kunstsenter.no.
The seminar is supported by Bergen Academy of Art and Design.

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David Cunningham, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster. His major research interests are in the avant-garde, modernism, critical theory, aesthetics, and urban theory. He is currently working on a monograph on late modernism and abstraction. Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, the co-ordinator of the Westminster English Colloquia series, and a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.

Matt Packer is a photographer and artist as well as Curator of Exhibitions & Projects at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland. He holds an MA from the Curatorial Programme at Goldsmiths College, London and has curated numerous exhibitions, including Getting Even: oppositions & dialogues in contemporary art (co-produced with Kunstverein Hanover, 2008), Grin & Bear It: cruel humour in art & life (2009) and School Days (2010). His writings have been featured in magazines such as Source, CIRCA, Journal of Utopian Studies, Photography & Culture, and various exhibition catalogues.

Morten Torgersrud holds his BA in Photography from the University of Brighton (1997) and his MA in Photography from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (2002). His last project Circulating sites was exhibited at Fotogalleriet in Oslo 2011 where it also received the BHK Fotokunst-prize. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as Collective matters (curated by Hilde Methi, Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst, Trondheim, 2010) and Nameless science (curated by Henk Slager, Apexart, New York, 2008), and his works have been acquired by several Norwegian public collections. He has previously published two artist books: Murmanskrovaniemikirkenes (2004) and [untitled] (2009).

Presentation: How to become a public art consultant

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:38:46 +0100

Visp is a resource and a networking organisation for the Visual Arts in the west of Norway, and we work to improve and facilitate conditions for the production and dissemination of Visual Arts in Bergen and the county of Hordaland. Visp represents all of the creative community within the Visual Arts, including artists, galleries, institutions, producers, curators, critics and suppliers of materials and services. We are a membership organisation and membership is free. Visp aims to create a unified network and we encourage our members to contact us if they need practical or professional advice, information or other guidance.

Public Art Norway (KORO) is the government’s professional body for art in public spaces, and the country’s largest art producer. Planning, production, and quality control of art projects are core activities. KORO emphasises diversity and innovation in art productions that reach wide and varied audiences in cities and regions throughout the country. The works of art KORO manages make up Norway’s largest and most visited collection, and KORO endeavours to ensure that the works are managed effectively. Presentation of the art projects and the development of a discourse on public art are prioritised areas.

MA-WEEKEND: Apichaya Wanthiang - Geography of A

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 14:49:39 +0100

Through repetitions and movements, video and sound, two sculptural elements and the presence of the audience in space she is creating an atmospheric landscape based on ideas of dialogues. Her exhibition project discusses how we have the capability to tell stories. Wanthiang points out that we sometimes might experience to lack the story telling ability, while we still continue to communicate through pauses and utterances.

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Apichaya Wanthiang (b. 1987, Thailand). Graduated in 2009 with a BA in Fine Arts from Sint-Lukas Brussels University College of Art and Design and is currently finishing her MA in Fine Arts at Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Her practice consists mostly out of painting, installation and text. Her works have previously been shown in exhibitions such as Canvascollectie at Bozar, Brussels, Belgium (2010) and 17 M.O.H at Bergen Kjøtt, Bergen, Norway (2011), and her first solo exhibition was From X into Minuses at Martin Van Blerk Galerie in Antwerp, Belgium (2009).

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The MA-weekend is collaboration between Hordaland Art Centre and Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Twice a year the MA-students at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts are invited to submit proposals for an exhibition to be realised at Hordaland Art Centre, and a professional jury selects one of the proposals.

Morten Torgersrud - A neutral, flexible structure

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 18:54:09 +0100

The image world Torgersrud creates in this exhibition takes, like his previous works, the north-eastern part of Norway as a starting point, but has few if any specific local markers. Thus also investigating the photographic form itself and its relation to the production of space. This trait makes it impossible to place the images in a particular geography, and it is difficult to claim that the images represent something original or authentic.

Matt Packer, artist and curator, contributes to the exhibition at the invitation by Torgersrud by adjusting, and almost calibrating or camouflaging, the photographs with coloured glass. In addition, Packer has written a short fiction text to coincide with the exhibition. The text serves a continuation the discussion put forward by the images, while also serving as a decoy and distraction to the exhibition as a whole.

The photograph in itself is contradictory; it is both place-bound and non-sited at the same time. While the photograph was taken somewhere, it can - as a money or a commodity – be separated and moved from their original location. In A neutral, flexible structure Torgersrud uses this aspect of photography; namely that it through its specific technological origin always links to place and the distribution of place as an object. The photographs in this exhibition are technological primitive, created by digital technology as they are and not physical until they are transferred to paper, thus inferior in quality to the traditional negative/positive-process so rich in detail. This is a paradoxical parallel to the abstraction and transfers of capitalism. The photograph, like money, has become abstractions even though they clearly represent something in our real world.

The tension between the abstraction in the photographs, and the fact that we clearly see what is represented without being able to trace its origin, is the same tension we find in the world of commodities, the Made in…-culture and the fragmented geography of capitalism. By comparing today’s economic logic and abstraction we can continue: In A neutral, flexible structure we can trace uneasy questions of representation. Even in a work like this, where the artist avoids the hunt for identity and meaning, he is not exempt from the burden of representation.

The abstraction in A neutral, flexible structure is not formal abstraction, but ideological abstraction that appears when what is pictured is not the meaningful element. In cases like this the photograph plays on the same mechanisms that for a long time has been the driving force of economy, and particularly in the finance market with its hedge funds and currency speculation.

Through this series Torgersrud absolutely challenges the idea we have of what a photograph is, and what we can expect from it. If we reflect this back onto the capitalist logic we can similarly ask what we expect of contemporary society.

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Morten Torgersrud (b. 1971, works and lives in Kirkenes, Norway and Stockholm, Sweden) holds his BA in Photography from the University of Brighton (1997) and his MA in Photography from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (2002). Torgersrud's projects appear in the context of contemporary and historical configurations of the northern landscape. His work often considers ontological and conceptual aspects of photography in relation to the political-economic production of space. His last project Circulation sites was exhibited at Fotogalleriet in Oslo 2011 where it also received the BHK Fotokunst-prize. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, such as Collective matters (curated by Hilde Methi, Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst, Trondheim, 2010) and Namelss science (curated by Henk Slager, Apexart, New York, 2008), and his works have been acquired by several Norwegian public collections. He has previously published two artist books: Murmanskrovaniemikirkenes (2004) and [untitled] (2009).

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The exhibition is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen, and supported by BKH-stipend from Hordaland Art Centre and Statens Utstillingsstipend.

B-open workshop: The Invisible Hand

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:53:12 +0100

Through two days of lectures, round table discussions, panel debate and a mountain hike, we will in The Invisible Hand discuss economy, the invisible structures in society and our capability to make visible and act upon the seemingly hidden or non-existing. Below you can read more about the programme and the participants.

Registration by 19 March to toril.johannessen [at] gmail.com
Participation is free of charge.
Please note that there are limited seats avaliable.
The workshop language will be English.
All participants are asked to contribute a 10 minutes presentation with a response to the thematics outlined in the introduction below, either by presenting relevant projects made by yourself or others or by bringing questions and ideas to the table for the group to discuss further.
Please submit a short motivation describing why you would like to participate. In case the number of applications exceeds the number of seats, please note that we will have to make a selection.

There will be a panel discussion open to the public Monday evening. More info soon.

Major contemporary thinkers keep repeating that it is easier to imagine the end of the world then the end of capitalism. Simultaneously, protest movements all over the world are exploring and evaluating the core principles of capitalism, believing there are alternatives. These movements make visible a dismay that has been almost invisible for a long time in the western world. In front of banks and financial institutes people express their discomfort with the way the financial world has control over daily life and politics.

In the workshop The Invisible Hand, we would like to explore the way Adam Smith (the first major theorist of what we commonly call Capitalism) has influenced contemporary rhetoric's around Capitalism. His term 'The Invisible Hand' has been used and appropriated by many speakers, with contradicting points of views, and it became an important metaphor in the discussions on the influence of the free market. Together with a historian and an economist, a group of artists will explore the roots of the capitalist way of thinking by discussing and researching Adam Smith and the way his ideas have influenced other thinkers. The group will be challenged to take a stand in the discussion and develop a response towards these rapidly emerging global issues.

Norway has a very special position in Europe at the moment. Due to its wealth there is not the same urgency to rethink the value system like there is in other European countries or the United States at the moment. Its wealth if not its welfare system seems to be secured for another few generations to come. How does this particular situation affect the way Norwegians think about Norway ́s role in the global economy, not to say the global environment, as the Norwegian economy is heavily dependent on oil as a commodity?

The workshop is an extension of the seminar Visions: Upheavals and Unpractical Ideas, which was organized by B-open and took place 23 October 2011. The seminar took the concept of visions – that of being visionary, foresighted, future thinking – as its point of departure, and set out to discuss to what degree contemporary artists relate to an imagined future. One of the initial ideas we wanted to discuss were whether it in our time, in this historical moment, is possible to make or to think something new and to escape the refrain that everything is already done. The seminar ended on another question, that of the possibility of visualizing the invisible realms of our societies, like the economy and the workings of the Market, which seems to be as ubiquitous as they are abstract. Are there ways for the layman to grasp and to act upon these levels of abstractions? And, taking the discussion to the field of contemporary, are there ways for artists to render such assumed invisible structures visible?
The workshop will be in the form of a seminar group limited to 15 registered participants, plus a panel discussion with historian Richard Sheldon, economist Ove Jakobsen and curator Charles Esche in the afternoon. The panel discussion will be open to the public.

Charles Esche:
Charles Esche (born 1962, England) is a curator and writer. Since 2004, he has been Director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands. He is co-founder and co- editor of Afterall Journal and Afterall Books with Mark Lewis. Afterall is a contemporary art publication which was first launched in 1998 and is based at Central St. Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.
His main work has involved working on the constitution of art institutions, most recently the museum but also the qualities of the art centre or biennial. His writings on institutional possibility and policy are useful aids to rethinking the relation between art and social change.

Ove Jakobsen:
Dr. Oecon. Ove Jakobsen is professor in ecological economics at Bodø Graduate School of Business (HHB). He is co-founder and leader of Centre for Ecological Economics and Ethics at HHB. Ove Jakobsen is Member of the National Committee for Research Ethics in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (NESH). In addition to PhD in Economics from the Norwegian School of Economics, Jakobsen holds three master Degrees; in Philosophy, Marketing and Administration and Leadership.
In the year 2000, Jakobsen received the SAS and the Norwegian Economics Association prize for the best integration of environmental and societal responsibility in lectures at Norwegian Business Schools. His major research interests are ecological economics/circulation economics, Business ethics/CSR, Holistic science and Development based on sustainability, resilience and quality of life. He has published a number of scientific articles and books both nationally and internationally.

Richard Sheldon:
Lecturer in Social and Economic History at the Bristol University in the United Kingdom. Richard will introduce us to the ideas of Adam Smith and the revival of Smith's ideas since the 1970s and the social and political implications of these as well as reflecting on the post 2008 global economy.
Research interests: British history 1700-1860, especially the history of radicalism and protest movements. The comparative study of famines and famine relief c.1700 to the present; the history of social and economic thought.

Organisers:
B-open is an organisation which initiates and coordinates the bi-annual event of open artist studios in Bergen and Hordaland, and annually organises a seminar, thus creating a forum for a diverse discussion on contemporary art. B-open organises monthly Study Circles in collaboration with artists in Bergen.

Marjolijn Dijkman:
Marjolijn Dijkman graduated from the free media department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2001, finished a post graduate course at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2003 and was for two years a researcher at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht until 2008. She is a tutor at the Fine Art Department of the MFA AKV St. Joost since 2009. Her work has been exhibited internationally in independent art spaces, centers for contemporary art and museums of modern art. In 2005 she initiated together with Maarten Vanden Eynde the organisation Enough Room for Space. Often in collaboration with others she co-curated and initiated several events and exhibition projects. Marjolijn Dijkman (b. 1978) lives in Brussels (BE) and Rotterdam (NL) . www.enoughroomforspace.org

Toril Johannessen:
Artist, lives and works in Bergen. Has since 2009 been chairwoman of B-open and co-organised B-openʼs seminars together with Anne Szefer Karlsen. Selected solo exhibitions include Nonlocality at Lautom Contemporary and Volker Bradtke (2011), Transcendental Physics at Bergen Kunsthall No.5 (2010), selected group exhibitions include Run, Comrade, The World is Behind You at Kunsthall Oslo (2011), The End of Money at Witte de With (2011). Johannessen received her MFA in 2008 from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway, and in 2011 she was a student at The Mountain School of Arts, Los Angeles.

Lecture: Germano Celant - Art and Material

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 08:58:28 +0100

Throughout his career Celant has dealt with questions relating to the materiality of art, especially in connection to the Italian Arte Povera movement, as defined in his 1967 manifest Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War.

PLEASE NOTE: Limited seating. Registration to hks [at] kunstsenter.no is required.

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Germano Celant, renowned art historian, critic, and theoretician, has served as the curator of hundreds of exhibitions worldwide and published more than one hundred books and catalogues. The artistic director of the Fondazione Prada, Milan, since 1995, Celant is also the curator of the Fondazione Aldo Rossi in Milan, curator of the Fondazione Emilio e Annabianca Vedova in Venice, and curator of art and architecture at La Triennale di Milano. He was the senior curator of contemporary art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York from 1989 until 2008, the artistic director of the first Biennale di Firenze (1996) and the curator of the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), and artistic supervisor for Genoa’s year as European Cultural Capital in 2004, among many other exhibitions. A longtime contributing editor to Artforum and Interview Magazine, Celant writes regular columns for the Italian magazines L'Espresso and Interni. He received the Frank Jewett Mather Award, honoring exceptional art criticism, in 1987.

Presentation: Immeasurable life in the apple orchard

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 23:21:15 +0100

A myriad of flora, whether invisible underground fungi or apple varieties adapted to the places we live in, is important for our future. Biological and genetic diversity is a source of work for researcher’s and impacting our ability to adapt to climate changes and need for new types of plants. It’s not necessary, however, to be an expert to keep this diversity alive, it might well happen in your private garden.

In his presentation, Asdal will talk about how and why seeds and living plants are collected from older types of plants and kept in Norway. Nes will talk about historical apple varieties from the West of Norway, and how to prepare a twig from an old tree so that it can be grafted onto a rootstock.

Gardeners who has an old tree they wish to renew can register at hks[at]kunstsenter.no. The registered gardeners will receive information on how to find a healthy twig suitable for grafting, to be submitted collectively to Hjeltnes high school in Hardanger. The grafting will cost NOK 350.

Åsmund Asdal is a senior advisor at The Norwegian Forest and Landscape institute, and works with strategies for preserving Norwegian plant diversity at Norsk Genressurssenter in Grimstad and at Plantearven, a website with information on old varieties of different plants.

Asbjørn Børsheim is an experienced gardener, both as fruit farmer at Hakastad Farm in Ulvik and as teacher and former principal of Hjeltnes high school in Hardanger.The school has one of Norway’s largest collections of apple varieties, with over a hundred old and new types.Børsheim has utilised some of these varieties in his own production with Ulvik frukt & cideri.

Frøydis Lindén has studied ceramics at Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld, Germany, and at The Danish Design School, Bornholm, Denmark, and holds a BA in ceramics (2006) and an MA of Fine Arts (2011) from Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Lindén has also studied at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, from where she holds an MA of agroecology (2002), still influencing her artistic work. Lindén has been involved in several collaborative projects, such as Cupola, with the artist collective Ytter at USF Visningsrommet, Bergen (2010), Rasteplass Nytorget at Rogaland Kunstsenter (2010), the art in landscape project Eksperiment SUS 2 at Prosjekt Alvøen, Bergen (2010) and Eksperiment SUS 3 at Fron-fjellet (2010), Present with the group Før/Nu at Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal (2007), and Living tool at Galleri Korea, Berlin (2007).

Back to Basics by Eva Rem Hansen

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:58:00 +0100

The exhibition Back to basics opens on Friday the thirteenth of the first month of 2012 – a year saddled with a multitude of doomsday prophecies, among others based on interpretations of Nostradamus’ mythical predictions, historical arguments such as the end of the Mayan calendar, and pseudo-scientific contributions claiming that changes in the world’s magnetic field will in the near future cause a pole shift. The exhibition is in this regard situated in a landscape where the borders between the rational and mystical are examined, where the future is insecure, and where humankind’s relationship to natural forces is highlighted.

The works in Back to basics are free from direct doomsday symbolism, but nonetheless touch upon a number of the existentialist propositions highlighted by the perception of impending doom. By the artists taking rational categorisations, collective convictions, and individual experiences of natural environment as their point of departure, the works converge in a space between science, faith, and superstition. Further, the works reflect historical and potential relationships between nature and culture, and express concerns about a growing cultural colonisation of our surroundings. This notwithstanding, the exhibition testifies to the possibility of more natural and immediate interactions with the world.

World views

Anngjerd Rustand’s piece Hvelvingen/The Firmament hovers over the little universe created by the exhibition Back to basics. The Firmament installation, consisting of glistening metal roofing sheets, is reminiscent of a reptile’s carapace or a fish’s scales, and thus resonates with the mystical and pre-historical. The title alludes to the Old Testament’s physical cosmology and its accounts of the firmament as a solid, possibly metallic shell, an image which was subsequently adopted by science and dominated the pre-Copernican worldview.

Rustand’s firmament does not, however, encapsulate an outdated worldview, but rather three works that appear to fit within the still reigning modernist scientific paradigm. Tore Reisch’s work entitled The Fat of the Land is an imitation of a stratigraphic layer, a cross-section of soil from Trøndelag, and thus refers to geological dating of organic material, or to the archaeological dating of culture.[1] Inger Wold Lund in her work I wished all stories untold uses the botanist’s system of classification in her presentation of a selection of charts from her collection of herbariums, adorned with factual information such as Latin name, date and place of origin. Further, Frøydis Lindén’s work, Livsmyldring I – II (Immeasurable life I - II), which presents the natural reactions occurring as a result of the artist exposing ceramic apples to various fungal cultures, is an experiment that conjures up associations with the biologist and geneticist’s laboratory work.

Back to basics therefore contains a clash of two seemingly opposed world-views: a pre-scientific, religious, and symbolically determined consciousness, which is juxtaposed with a rational and scientific approach. Hence the mystical, represented by the firmament, may be seen as an oppressive threat weighing upon reason. Conversely, the firmament may also be thought of as a sheltering frame that embraces the scientific, and praises this newer, more modest understanding of the world. The exhibition, though, does not make such extreme assertions: in Back to basics that which fills the air between the down-to-earth and the elevated is rather a desire for increased exchange between rationality and intuition, between objective science and personal conviction.

Cultural criticism

A closer inspection of the other three works, apparently representing scientific methods and mind-sets, reveals how simplistic the interpretation of Rustand’s firmament as a shining halo over the modernist project is. All the works contain criticism of mankind’s colonisation and categorisation of nature, which the scientific approach to the world may be an example of.

Both Reisch and Lindén’s works are politically motivated and have a critical sting. Lindén, through ‘infecting’ ceramic apples, hopes to draw our attention to how our consumption standardizes the production of foodstuffs. Consumer surveys demonstrate that customers prefer red apples to green or yellow ones, a fact that leads to fewer varieties being grown and preserved, a homogenisation which also results in fewer varieties becoming resistant to plant diseases. The artist hopes to reverse this sterilising manipulation of nature, and does this by reintroducing natural fungi to apples to ensure they are immune. Fungal pests are one of the most common problems when cultivating crops, but at the same time the invisible fungal mucelium is fundamental to the maintenance of fertile soil. In so doing, the artist confronts us consumers with the contradiction existing between the aesthetics of marketing and the maintenance of biological diversity.

Reisch’s work contains an analogous criticism. When studying his strata it is clear that the uppermost layers of soil, those most proximate to the present, are depleted and polluted. The soil is changing from breathing freely to becoming poorer in nutrition, but ever richer in cultural waste. Further, in the ruins crowning the sculpture, we see how concrete displaces and destroys long-established building practices, before it in turn is destroyed as nature encroaches on the cultural influence with retrospective force in order to re-establish a natural balance. The crystals protruding from the concrete allude to the fact that crystallisation takes place as uniform environments are exposed to protracted change, and thus suggest that prolonged use of new and efficient building materials frequently containing chemicals leads to changes that are potentially damaging to the surroundings.

Wold Lund does not explicitly criticise progress and cultivation. Nonetheless she questions scientific objectivity and classifications by expanding the fact-based information on her charts with small epistles where the plants are positioned in situations associated with mankind’s – and the artist’s own – emotional drama. The private sphere, personal reflections, and the individual experiences these works expose us to are posited as an alternative to scientific categories, and offer, similar to Rustand’s firmament, a more intuitive and fabulist approach to that which surrounds us.

Positioning

The works in Back to basic present an alternative to a purely scientific world-view, not just by virtue of their theme, but also through their material form and mode of presentation. The modern world-view may be traced back to Cartesian dualism, which, simply put, identifies a division between subject and object, and the tendency to prioritise the former. Cartography, linear perspective, and landscape painting must be highlighted as the primary visual expressions of this scientific worldview. The mapping gaze which views the world from above, and the panoramic gaze which look forwards and outwards, correspond to the overview formed by the subject’s elevated position.[2] In these visual forms of expression the surroundings are entirely filtered through the rational, nature is objectified, while humans are placed in the world’s centre.[3] On the other hand, a person subject to the scientific paradigm always looks inwards to the centre, and is in this sense outside or distanced from objects.

In Back to basics a scientific overview and distance is replaced by an intuitive and close interaction between subject and object, the viewer and the work. The bodily experience, the haptic quality,[4] and the vain beauty of materials emerge as central in the works presented. Each of the projects elevates nature’s simplest constituent parts as atomised and isolated entities. Material elements such as earth, metal, and plants are torn from their natural connections and circulation, and placed before us as in a direct and confrontational manner. To use what has over time become a clichéd term in art history, nature is here stripped bare, undressed, and presented as a readymade or a component in an assemblage.[5] In this way we are confronted by the natural as an independent thing or concrete object. This objectification is however of a different nature to that which may be found within modern science and its visual forms of expression, for, in Reisch, Lund, Rustand and Lindén's direct presentation of nature, the viewer is placed in a position where, rather than gazing into a landscape, the observer enters it and sees from or through it. By offering such realism rather than representation, the works place humans in the real centre, where we stand in close proximity to, and exist in unison with, the objects around us.

This intuitive and sensual meeting with natural raw-materials contrasts starkly with the distanced views of landscapes in the tradition of painting. As the Arte Povera works created in Italy towards the end of the sixties, the works in Back to basics rather share their materiality and immediate tangible nature with crafts and that often termed primitive art. This may again be seen as an illustration of how the artists presented through this exhibition aspire to an extra- or pre-scientific discourse, free from modernity’s demands of a distanced and disinterested aesthetic.

Communication

In a modern, scientific paradigm, where the subject is contrasted with and placed above objects, the human’s gaze and language shape the frame through which we see and understand the world: humans are in this sense a transitional medium, they articulate their surroundings and attribute rational meaning to them, that is meaning exclusive to humans. As mediated, the objects around us are part of a communicative system, but if dualism is assumed, then surroundings are subject to a human monologue where they lack their own voice. The surroundings are therefore not something we communicate with, but across. The works in Back to basics distance themselves from this linguistic colonisation by offering a model of communication where the objects themselves have the right to speak. When nature is not represented in the works, but is to a real extent presented as unmediated ‘found objects’, a situation ensues where motif, material, and medium collapse, and where any distinction between addressor and message, object and attributed meaning is blurred. In this arises a confrontation between the work presented and the addressee, where the addressor or collocutor appears to be no one other than the work or the material itself.

Symbols are considered conventional and culturally determined, and what the works in Back to basics communicate will consequently depend on which observer they address. However, the forms and material elements presented in the exhibition are so general that they can function as a form of ideas or ideal forms. The apple, the flower, the soil, and the firmament may perhaps be seen as the language of nature responding to geometry’s squares and circles, they are building blocks that contain and construct meaning. It is possibly incorrect to maintain that these forms have a completely natural meaning, but they may be considered to have an almost universal cultural symbolic value based on essential characteristics. In such a context Lund’s plants, frozen between a state of vitality and putrefaction, and Lindén’s apples, gradually devoured by ever expanding fungi, come to represent not only variation and vanity, but implicitly also the predictable repetition and promise of new life that is inherent in nature’s cycle. A somewhat corresponding relationship is embodied in the contrast between Reisch and Rustand’s works, where the soil in the former represents something simple, stable, firm and sensible, something close and accessible, while the firmament in the latter is more often associated with the vague, the fleeting and anticipatory, the new and the unknown. Through the symbolism of nature the works express themselves about different periods of time, discuss relations between the contemporary, that which has been, and that which will come to be.

A time for everything

In the sixties pop-art gained notoriety by bringing simple and everyday materials into the gallery. The works in Back to basics may be said to share pop-art’s use of banal materials and direct presentation techniques, but where the earlier artistic movement was littered with social commentary, Lund, Lindén, Reisch and Rustand have generalised their works by removing virtually all cultural markers and time-specific characteristics. This absence of temporal references ensures that the works don’t merely discuss or make topical the break between different time periods, but situate themselves outside the boundaries of time and space. The works are simultaneously pre-temporal, post-temporal, multi-temporal, and timeless, and in their presence the distinction between the erstwhile, that existing here and now, and the forthcoming comes to naught. In such a timeless vacuum a disconnect emerges with any idea of progress, and consequently also a fundamental contradiction both of the on-going process criticised by some of the artists, namely the ever increasing cultural exploitation of nature, and of the endpoint or doomsday scenario as such. Fear of the future is suspended as temporal space is frozen or bereft of chronology.

Through the coalescence of different ages the works contribute to an exchange between entities that were initially presented as polar opposites, then as science and religion, nature and culture. A common point of departure for religious and scientific thinking is precisely this exploration of the link between history, the present, and the future. The juxtaposition of temporal distinctions also introduces an element of the unfathomable and fabulous into the otherwise so physically present and materially sound works in the exhibition, which in the process, it must be said, bear the hallmark of magical realism where the distinction between the rational and the mystical is blurred. By seeking a temporal point zero the artists succeed in balancing the fetishisation of progress which for a long time has dominated both art and science, and the nostalgia that characterises parts of the environmental movement. The works thus do not appeal to specific audiences, and neither do they idealise any chosen period, but instead invite us into an essential and always relevant landscape where each and every one of us should have the opportunity to reflect freely upon how to treat our physical surroundings, as well as our intuitive persuasions and natural emotional reactions.

[1] As with Rustand’s piece, the name of this work may also be said to contain a reference to the Old Testament, as the expression ‘the fat of the land’ (or ‘the fattest of the land’ in the 2011 Norwegian translation of the Bible) is used in Genesis 45:18 where Pharaoh says to Josef ‘and take your father and your households, and come to me, and I will give you the best of the land of Egypt, and you shall eat the fat of the land’ (English Standard Version, 2001). In the vernacular the phrase ‘living off the fat of the land’ means to be rich enough to have the best of everything (Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus).

[2] For an explanation of the terms ‘panoramic gaze’ and ‘mapping gaze’, see for instance the review of ‘The Art Seminar’, held at Burren College of Art in 2006 and reproduced in James Elkins and Rachel DeLue (eds.), Landscape Theory, New York; Routledge, 2008 (pp. 87-157)

[3] For an account of modern science’s objectification of nature, se for instance Alf Hornborg, ‘Animism, Fetishism, and Objetivism as Strategies of Knowing (or not Knowing) the World’ in Ethnos, vol. 71/1, March 2006 (s. 21-32).

[4] The term haptic refers to tactile perception. The term may be traced back to the art historian Alois Riegel (1858-1905), who introduced a divide between the haptic, clearly defined form, and the optic, defused form.

[5] ‘Stripped bare’ is a reference to the English title of Duchamp’s La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. This work has for art historians such as Thierry de Duve emerged as a symbol of Duchamp’s transition from painter to artist, and the expression ‘stripped bare’ has come to symbolise the direct and naked in the unassisted readymade.

Witness Report 2011: Dog-Thoughts on Hokaës by Andrea Spreafico

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:09:02 +0100

Prologue

Three years ago in Nanterre, France a dog became the first animal in the world to appear as a witness in a murder trial.

The animal was believed to have been with the victim at the moment of her death. She was found hanging from the ceiling of her flat. Police believed it was suicide but her family demanded a murder investigation. During a preliminary hearing the dog was led into the witness box for the court to see how it reacted to a suspect.

It is said to have "barked furiously".

Witness

Normally a witness is needed after a crime, in order to find the guilty person.

Already here my work could be done. I'm not interested in finding the guilty. I also don't like the idea of complexity being reduced to a judgment that sends someone to jail. Even disregarding what I like, what would the crime be? Is art a crime? I think that assigning guilt or crime to art would be a much too easy way to satisfy catholic drives towards medieval images of inquisition, guilt and fire, – with “catholic drives” I mean the tendency to filter truth trough tough infrastructures. Thinking of it in that way the word witness sounds too charged, and would make me come across as someone who barks big words in a situation where I am asked to be more precise than loud.

There has been no crime to be witness of and I won't bark furiously, so I see my role as witness to be closer to the role of a person who is present at the signing of a document and who signs it himself to confirm it. Someone writes a document and a witness has to certify its authenticity. The catalogue you now have in your hands is this document, and this report is my signature. What have I witnessed, and what does the document say? Who is signing it? How?

The document

The document, this catalogue, is in fact signed by many: In the introduction by the director of Hokaës, Anne Szefer Karlsen, in which it is stated that the institution has existed for 35 years. In the rest of the catalogue by a composite group of artists and curators who took part in and created the activities of the institution during its 35^th year, even people who visited and others who read this catalogue now. All of you are involved in the signature of this document exactly as you have been part of the realisation of the program of Hokaës. With this signature I would like to emphasise what this year’s programme has been, as seen by my eyes as witness of this programme, not as how it was intended by the institution (for that you can read the introduction text).

35s

Every invitation to every exhibition at Hokaës this year has ended with a statement for the 35 year programme, which stated that the aim of the exhibitions was not to mythologise the institution and its past, but to explore idea of histories and futures, in this moment when the institution finds itself in the position of being an established institution. The intention was not to deal with the history or the future of the institution itself, but with the meaning of having a past and looking to the future. Thus the programme was a statement to say that this anniversary was a threshold rather then an achieved goal. There is a coincidence that I find interesting in approaching the topic of the anniversary. The director of Hokaës turned 35 this year too, and I too turned 35 in the days I was writing these pages. I will use this coincidence as an excuse to report a personal anecdote:

Six years ago in Nanterre – the same city were the witness dog was barking furiously – a person, making a remark on my non-linear career told me: «soon you will be 35, and with 35 you know what you are». He mentioned this age referring to it as the moment when you know what your main activity is, what your role in the society is, in short: what you do. It is clearly non-sense to strictly define an age as a threshold. Nevertheless this age represented a threshold of human life already in the first line of Dante's Divine Comedy and, 700 years after, 35 still belongs to the collective imagination as one of the threshold ages for a human being. If taken too seriously this idea of the threshold becomes the idea of a place of truth: as if a person walks her path, arrives, opens the door and knows exactly where she is. On one side of the threshold she is in, on the other out. That's how an ideal threshold works. In fact there are usually many other doors behind the door in question, just like there must already have been some other doors on her path. One can safely say that the person will never have an overview, nor know where the doors appear. Even if I think it is silly to think that with the age of 35 we cross the line, I can agree with the fact that around 35 a person belongs to a phase that belongs to neither youth nor wisdom.

Adventure and Care

I will hold the first exhibition of this year at Hokaës as example of what can happen during this transition. The moving images by Len Lye shown in the exhibition Len Lye are paradigmatic of a path that could be the one of every artist or any institution: His early films were political reflections on rhythm: the rhythm of the assembly line production of Chrysler cars and the rhythm of the postal system as metronome of trade. In these works the film is the tool used to develop a discourse on a third element. As observers we can decide if the tool is more interesting as the object of investigation – for instance I could say that in the case of the Chrysler-video the object “assembly line production” was overwhelmed by the tool Lye used to investigate it, I saw the topic of the film as an excuse for an intellectual production: the rhythmic film. At the same time I should say that the film about the postal system’s role in trade activated some reflections on the ruling importance of postmen in our time of amazon.com – in this case the object of investigation stands out from the tool. In both cases, though, the film works as tools in relation to a topic and the viewer can focus either on the tool or on the topic. In Lye’s later films this dialogue and its potential to activate different interests in the viewer disappears, as the artist concentrates on the art making technique itself. This doesn't mean that they become auto-referential, but they certainly concentrate on the production of a tool; that which was a method to investigate a topic becomes topic itself, the method becomes the work itself. In these films the focus of the viewer is directed towards the observation of the production details. The artist becomes a designer rather than an investigator, since he investigates his own method. Care overwhelms adventure. Design and discovery belong to any work of art, they are nevertheless present each time in different gradients and their balance is decided by the size and the shape of the discourse carried by the work itself. Over time it is apparent that the artist, any artist, finds himself inside of his own discourse that he feels obliged to develop, and he has to challenge how to do that through his visual agility without being trapped by the discourse itself.

Institutionalisation

I would say that this path from adventure to care is paradigmatic of an institution too. It starts its own adventure, creates its own past and is obliged to deal with it. The institution “institutionalises” itself. The exhibition Nostalgia by Omer Fast was in my opinion the coronation of the Hokaës institutionalisation. The artist is renowned, the work is beautiful, the exhibition was clear. The work’s content was the reason for the institution to display it during this anniversary year. The film projects an hypothetical inversion of the current domination between the north and the south of the world and the artist projects the spectator into a future where he will regret our time of political power; in this way he coerces us to face the dramatic violence of this power. The content is a future past. The fact that the institution could permit itself this great video installation, independently from its content, is yet a parameter to understand the magnitude of its wealth.

If Hokaës' present shines in this video installation, its past doesn't seem to be forgotten as we can see in another exhibition this year: the exhibition Shot Through curated by Glenn Adamson. Hokaës is born and has grown up as the co-operation between craft makers and visual artists and celebrate this cooperation with an exhibition of weaved high tech photo image tapestries. Here the care reaches its highest point and Hokaës brings its history of collaboration into the domain of the “well done”. Is then the adventure over? Is Hokaës just taking care of its own discourse, of the discourse built in these 35 years?

Polyphonies

I mentioned before the idea of “knowing what you do” at the age of 35. In this idea two statements are excessively strong. One is the “what”, i.e. the pretension to read individuality in one category – and we have seen how this is problematic for an institution as well as for the person; the second is the “you do”, i.e. the idea of the individuality as cause of an action. Nietzsche means that this idea comes from the Christian culture of guilt. Wherever it comes from, it doesn't seem to be helpful in understanding this year's program at Hokaës. What happened at Hokaës cannot be read simply as “what Hokaës has done”, what happened is rather “what Hokaës has been involved with”.

From this perspective the exhibition The Bergen Accords curated by Sarah Rifky has been the most interesting. It is the one where the problematic of ownership of the work has reached its most critical point. In my opinion the exhibition was working on five levels: 1) a performance was announcing it two weeks prior to the opening of 2) its core exhibition of new works by Oraib Toukan; followed by 3) the publication online of a text from Malak Helmy and by 4) three evenings when the experimental documentary The specialist by Eyal Sivan was screened. On top of that 5) the curator initiated a procedure to change the name of Hordaland Art Centre (HKS). The show by Toukan was itself sliced in five layers approaching the institution Hokaës in different ways: 2a) showing pictures in the space 2b) changing the space by moving a wall 2c) dealing with the manifestation of Hokaës' board by staging chairs for them to use during meetings 2d) posing as a curator as she “invited students at the architecture program of Birzeit University in Palestine to conceive A table that negotiates a negotiating table 2e) placing copies of an old issue of the Journal of Palestine Studies questioning the Oslo accords in the café area of the Art Centre.

Now, if we see the project as a game and through this metaphor try to understand whom the works belongs to we see that by dividing the game pieces between too many people we can’t play the game anymore. A piece of the chess game can be cute in itself, but it works better if it stays together with the other pieces. The same happens with The Bergen Accords. None of the elements blew my mind, but all the pieces together created a graceful, elegant, fresh, articulated and clever work. The director of Hokaës, Szefer Karlsen, commissioned a curator, Rifky, to do a show and in this show one of the artist, Toukan, commissioned a work from Palestinian students. I don't know if this chain was planned at the beginning – it doesn't even matter here – what is evident is that it is impossible to claim authorship. Each actor brought an element that activated the others in a discourse. We are far from recognising the discourse of each single actor, what we see is that a fabric composed by the actors and their own single interventions appear. This intellectual fabric is stronger and nicer if its threads are straight and solid, but it doesn't break if one of the threads breaks. Under these circumstances the fabric of this project is more flexible and thus more solid than the weaves of the exhibition Shot Through, where the artistic quality of the woven fabric made the works both nice and delicate.

Similarly to The Bergen Accords the show Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image created by one artist, Elsebeth Jørgensen, had different moments and means of expression. One main video installation in the gallery of Hokaës was accompanied by different interventions in the city. In this sense the authorship was more defined, but nevertheless it was the knowledge from the archivists and librarians of The Picture Collection of the University of Bergen where Jørgensen’s materials came from, that activated the intuition of the artist. This exhibition is an intellectual fabric, but differently from The Bergen Accords it has a defined weaver. Through more control by the single artist on the whole work, its choreographic dimension created a more solid unity, but also established some mannerisms, like by using black and white photographs from the archives of the Image Collection belonging to the University of Bergen to create the film archives that constituted the main piece and accentuated the decorative nuances of the work rather then the informative ones. All exhibitions, however, testifies the care of the polyphony that characterise the activities of Hokaës, where every exhibition is accompanied by workshops, seminars or concerts, as I personally have had a chance to enjoy with the Action Weaving Workshops by Travis Meinolf in October, or with the commissioned concert by Espen Sommer Eide, Lasse Marhaug and Maia Urstad to accompany works by Len Lye one evening in January.

Retrospective Catalogue 2011

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:55:56 +0100

Let’s make a detour

Foreword to Retrospective Catalogue 2011 by Anne Szefer Karlsen, director Hordaland Art Centre.

In 2011 we have marked the 35th anniversary of Hordaland Art Centre, and we designed a programme where we explored history(ies) and future(s) based on different themes and institutional frameworks.

At the start of the year we asked a number of questions we thought would be pertinent to the present: Do we need to take a closer look at the past? How can we prepare for the future? Is it possible to act as if the present were independent of both history and future? Or are history and future always present, in disguise? Could it be that the present is kept in place by history as it charges into the future? We have collaborated with many different voices from different parts of the world, and together we have produced five exhibitions as well as lectures and seminars, in addition to original texts. Thus we have continued our role as an institution where art is presented and as well as a centre of learning.

This jubilee program has deliberately steered clear of a self-mythologising approach, focussing rather on the idea of history(ies) and future(s) as the framework of the present. Nostalgia and hope, longing for what has been and longing for what is yet to come, may serve as poetic concepts with regard to this year’s program.

We have taken on the challenge of finding new ways of thought, new strategies for understanding the relationship between history and future as sketched in the introduction, in other words, how to understand the present. There is no direct route to such understanding, so we have had to make some detours. Detours may put us in contact with voices that are trained in the exploration of areas where the possibilities are endless.

However, let us make a detour before getting down to the nitty gritty of this year’s program! First, an experiment in visualisation: Try to describe the time surrounding an event in terms of an image, for instance the time surrounding a chaotic event of uncertain outcome. This time is at the centre of the event, but it passes so swiftly that it is almost impossible to take it in. At such a centre, time is brief, hurried and confusing. At this time, we must trust our reflexes and intuitions, as there is no time to analyse or reflect on the event that is taking place. It seems as if time is non-existent at the centre of an event, or to put it differently, it seems to be standing still because everything is happening so fast. We may visualise this time as a dot. We put a dot on the sheet of paper, swiftly and intuitively. The event need not be all that dramatic. Not at all. Everyday time also passes quickly. (The event may be somebody accidentally scratching a negative.)

Then let us continue by attending to time outside the centre of the event. We draw a large circle around the dot, turning the dot into the centre of the event. Time moves slowly at the periphery of the event. It takes longer to move around the centre of the event than to experience it; we have more time on our hands. Out here time lasts longer, at the periphery, it is slow and transparent, there is time to stop and analyse and reflect on the event at the centre of things, but also on our present distance to the event. (At this time we may for example find someone trying to negotiate a contract.)

History is made in the tension between these two concepts, the dot at the middle and the circular movement around it. Inside this circle we agree on what has happened. This is where we turn to eyewitnesses who describe the event. (Here we might for example find a description of how the skill of constructing a trap is passed on from one person to the next.)

Our perspective is created at the periphery of the circle. In fact, the circle is so wide that there is no way we could move all the way round the periphery, only part of it. All of the time we and the eyewitness have our eyes turned towards the centre of the circle, trying to understand the event that has taken place. Subconsciously, but in an attempt at analysis and reflection, we produce a pie chart. This triangular slice of time envelops the event and becomes our idea of the heart of the matter. (An archive, for example, is an excellent example of a physical pie chart.)

In recent decades art has taken on the role of producing juxtapositions of time within our circle. The artist trawls archives, creating asymmetrical slices of the circle, or launches actionist events that are such hastily printed dots. (We may notice this when we juxtapose different art works that appear to have been created using the same technique.)

Our challenge at the present is one of seeing beyond the model we have sketched above. Art cannot be just a matter of looking at history, refining our understanding of ourselves and the world. It can and must encompass something more, it can present us with opportunities where we can be challenged and make detours outside the circle: Art gives us a sense of the endless possibilities contained in things we are unaware of. Our sense of imagination enriches the world, making the time we inhabit endlessly available without assuming that things like economic growth or progress are the sole purpose of our existence. Let us take a closer look and see if we are capable of applying our sense of imagination. Let us start by creating a larger notion of the present.

Let us return to the model we drew on our imaginary sheet of paper. What if we don’t just direct our gaze at the centre of the circle? What if we turn round, looking outside the circle? What is out there, if not our own sense of imagination? In order to turn round we must employ intuition as well as reflection, analysis as well as reflex. On the best of days we will find art out there. We hope Hordaland Art Centre has been somewhere art has found its place this last year.

Len Lye was the first exhibition of the year. We presented six of the films he made between 1935 and 1979: A Colour Box (1935), Trade Tattoo (1937), Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939), Rhythm (1957), Free Radicals (1958, reworked 1979) and Particles in Space (1957). For his film Tusalava (1929), whose sound track has gone missing, we commissioned three specially written sound works by Espen Sommer Eide, Lasse Marhaug and Maia Urstad for an evening program called Len LIVE! The exhibition was not retrospective in the sense of trying to present a definitive understanding of Lye as an artist; it was more of an exploration of how we can relate to his works at the present time. Lye’s point of departure was always movement, his films were made using new methods; he scratched celluloid film, painting directly onto it, so called “direct film”. This allowed him to explore ways of expression in a vivid way, one otherwise impossible through the medium of film. Lye also explored scale through his sculptures, sometimes making several versions of the same art work in different sizes. Thus he also questioned the notion of originality. In keeping with his interests we created a situation where people had to move about relative to the films in order to see the exhibition; within a limited area of the gallery the films moved between screens of different sizes and in random sequence. Exhibitions often confront us with at static display and a carefully calculated presentation. Using new technology, not available in Lye’s day, we made it possible to watch all the films in new ways.

There are several reasons why Hordaland Art Centre – as part of the 35th anniversary program – put on a solo exhibition of a deceased artist for the first time in its history. In this case the most important reason was our continued commitment to the exploration of what artists of our day are interested in and want to discuss. Lye’s works were first mentioned at Hordaland Art Centre when the artist HC Gilje talked about his work in connection with his exhibition blink, in 2009. Presenting Len Lye was an expression of our institution’s desire to take the interest one of our local artists has shown in another artist seriously, hence we invited Gilje to co-curate the exhibition.

Throughout the autumn of 2010 and the spring of 2011 we worked with the Egyptian curator Sarah Rifky, who created the exhibition The Bergen Accords, in which she took as her starting point the accord, or contract, which turned into a project in three parts. The Bergen Accords was introduced at Torgalmenningen on May Day, with the production of the living sculpture If not Us, Who? If not Now, When? by the two artists Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová. This work served as a prologue to the second part of the project, a solo exhibition at Hordaland Art Centre titled This one is for the birds, presenting new and partly site specific works by the artist Oraib Toukan. In many ways Toukan’s work came about through direct negotiations between the curator and the institution, besides purely physical negotiations with the exhibition room. Also, we supported Rifky’s wish to present a proposal suggesting that the name of Hordaland Art Centre be permanently changed, a process titled Name Change Act which was part of the art centre’s inner matter until September 1, when the board of directors considered the 26 names proposed by artists and curators, and decided to keep the present name.

Here we should mention that our colleague, Sarah, was challenged to rethink the project again and again, in view of the extraordinary situation in her home city, Cairo. Processes that began in February this year and are still going on, must have contributed to the shaping The Bergen Accords and will surely contribute to the way this project will be understood for a long time to come.

2011 was the first time in many years that Hordaland Art Centre kept an exhibition open during the summer months. We decided to exhibit a work by the artist Omer Fast, Nostalgia from 2009, which is a carefully constructed film narrative in three parts, using the eye witness as source. His work is poised between the probable and the fictional, and the nerve running through the loops, screens and projections is sympathetic, maybe even empathic. This work, which was first shown at the South London Gallery, arises from interviews with immigrants to the United Kingdom. The immigrants become narrators, and through what to European eyes may look like a post-apocalyptic society we ourselves, through a filmic change of roles, are turned into eye witnesses observing the obstacles and difficulties as “we” try to seek refuge in an Africa that is alluringly peaceful and prosperous.

The work’s proposition is simple enough, as Fast turns a situation that is very real for many on its head, he uses an old trick of the storyteller's trade to get the “truth” across. But this assertion also wove a complex web of questions that were, and continue to be, important in a North European context. Assuming that everyone, given the chance, would get up and leave, is naïve. It is also naïve to believe that all migrations are voluntarily. The tension between these two assertions creates a vast landscape of reasons, duties, hopes, dreams and forces. Regrettably, we are not able to see this landscape in the media images and broadcast debates, which is why we thought this was such an important work for us to see, discuss and experience. Our summer exhibition was unexpectedly given contemporary relevance by events outside the Art Centre, i. e. the events in Oslo and at Utøya July 22.

Following a turbulent summer, we opened a new exhibition project, one that Hordaland Art Centre and the artist Elsebeth Jørgensen have been involved with since 2008. In early 2010 we started the practical implementation of what became Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image. In close cooperation with the Picture Collection at the University of Bergen – Special Collections, in particular with senior academic librarian Solveig Greve, this exhibition achieved the merger of several elements. All the material for the work was drawn from the Picture Collection as Jørgensen created a work with more than one point of entry, just like an archive. Her works have for years circled in on various ideas in connection with the documentation of place, historicity and montages, as well as how archival processes and the construction of collective memories result in ambivalence and dilemmas related to concepts of preservation, choice, systematising and the importance of a subjective view.

Jørgensen observed this archive as a whole for a year, after which the historical records were juxtaposed with her own artistic observations in Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image. The project arises from an interest in the potential poetic narrative of the picture collection and the inaccessible part of the collection here in Bergen; the material that has not yet been registered, as well as the meta-archive of the place itself. Jørgensen’s adaptation of this material mixed fact and fiction, she reflected on how historical information may be used as hypothetical conjecture about our understanding of the future.

The last exhibition of the year was curated by Glenn Adamson, Head of Research and Graduate Studies at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In a much smaller exhibition space than he is used to this turned into an exploration in miniature of the relationship between textiles and photography. As Adamson writes in the introduction to his text accompanying the exhibition: Textiles and photography: the two mediums seem, at first, to be antithetical. On the one hand we have a painstakingly slow craft, and on the other an immediate and automatic process. One is constructive, the other indexical.

The exhibition focused on the way the Jaquard loom could unite these two techniques, showing works by the artists Chuck Close, Lia Cook, Kari Dyrdal and Johanna Friedman, who between them created a photographic landscape in the exhibition by way of different approaches to and use of the same technique. Karina Presttun continued the possibilities for a layered composition of images offered by digital photo processing, lending a spatial impression to her fabric collage, while Sabrina Gschwandtner and Kate Nartker exploited a different cross pollination of the two media through their video works; Gschwandtner, with a documentary video that might appropriately be termed a sound study which spread throughout the room, and Kate Narthker with a time-lapse video of woven stills that together made up the exhibition’s other video work.

In addition to the exhibitions of the year we have arranged our regular Master Weekends, where we have presented two different installations. In the spring Jason Dunne created the installation Potemkin Village, in which a male figure of varying sizes is repeated almost endlessly, creating a society which the viewer could not automatically gain access to, and in the autumn Gabriel Johann Kvendseth reproduced a workshop in the gallery room which was home to his installation Prototypes: ARSENAL.

Even if we have spent the whole year discussing history/histories and future/futures as a year long jubilee ceremony, we still wanted to mark the year by celebrating specificity. Therefore we invited everyone to join the seminar A piece of Anti-History in which four artists who had previously held exhibitions at Hordaland Art Centre were invited to present a talk. Torbjørn Kvasbø (solo exhibition in October 1987 and March 1993), Talleiv Taro Manum (solo exhibition in May 1998) and Eva Kun (solo exhibition in September 1988 and May 2003) lectured and held presentations, and Kurt Johannessen (several performances and solo exhibitions in September 1988 and May 2004) did a performance lecture for the occasion.

Thus this seminar was not a question of a comprehensive institutional historiography, rather a piece of anti-history,[1] as we focused on the time we have been at 17 Klosteret (since 1985) through the smallest and most crucial components; a selection of specific exhibitions represented by the artists whose works were shown.

It is easy to feel caught unawares and bulldozed when faced with the history of an institution. Thematising such a history is a demanding task and presents a number of challenges. Especially as the institution and its life must be sustained at the same time as one turns around to look at history. We had to make a few dramatic choices during the preparations for this seminar that we think has made it a poetic as well as a constructive contribution in view of what an art centre can be. By choosing to focus on the time when Hordaland Art Centre has existed at Klosteret, much of what was said that day could almost be “physically tested”. We could say that THIS happened HERE. Besides, our frame of reference allowed us to concentrate solely on art that had been exhibited.

You may say that celebrating an institution’s 35th anniversary is a bit odd. It is. We took this opportunity as we think Norwegian art centres are underappreciated structures of art mediation, and their role as art institutions that are common to both the public and the art professionals, is very seldom celebrated. We wanted to change that, and I hope we have succeeded.

Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Fredheim.

[1]In his introduction to the book The Beauty And The Sorrow of Combat, historian and author Peter Englund reflects on his work: more than 600 pages written based on the personal notes and diaries of nineteen people of different ages and of different nationalities and backgrounds who lived through World War I. Towards the end of the introduction he writes: “Most of these nineteen people will take part in dramatic, terrible events, but even so, our focus will be on everyday life during the war. In one sense, this is a piece of anti-history, in that I have tried to retrace this in every sense of the word epochal event to its minutest part, the individual person and his or her experiences.”

Anthea Buys (ZAF)

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:59:25 +0100

Her research will entail developing an archive of anecdotal, instructional and critical material on artists’ and curators’ cultivation of expertise in conventionally non-art disciplines for art-related purposes.

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Anthea Buys (b. 1984, Johannesburg) is a curator and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She currently works at the South African National Gallery as curator of contemporary art. After stumbling into the art world as a far-too-young journalist for the Mail & Guardian in South Africa, she began working with artists on what turned out to be exhibitions. She is writing a PhD on imaginary architecture, and her amateur expertise include growing Cape fynbos, a plant species unique to the Southern tip of Africa, and baking.

B-open reading group: Anthea Buys

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:14:25 +0100

Buys writes:

“An exhibition-maker is… an administrator, amateur, author of introductions, librarian, manager and accountant, animator, conservator, financier, and diplomat.” (Harald Szeemann)

Since Marcel Duchamp, in the early Twentieth Century, coined the term “readymade” to describe artworks made by the appropriation of everyday objects, the material and disciplinary scope of contemporary art has continued to expand exponentially. In the context of post-minimalist American sculpture, American art theorist Rosalind Krauss calls this widening of the substance and content of art “the expanded field”. The notion of an “expanded field” has been installed in the common language of art discourse in such a way that curators, writers, artists and other inhabitants of the art world use the term to speak of, and justify, a seemingly limitless scope of actions, objects, disciplines and expertise available for appropriation in the name of art.

In this light, are artists and curators today serial “amateur professionals”, moving from one conventionally “non-art” specialist skill-set to the next as projects come and go? While to me, at least, artists seem to show more constancy in their fields of appropriation, many contemporary curators seem to “check in” and “check out” of specialist fields like flâneurs moving from one part of a city to the next.

In some cases this itinerant amateur specialisation is born of circumstantial necessity (such as financial or institutional limitations); in other cases it is conceptually appropriate to a project, and in others still it occurs just because there is no reason it shouldn’t.

I would like to propose two short readings prior to our discussion both of which relate to this topic literarily and anecdotally, rather than theoretically. The first is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), which is the literary origin of the figure of the flâneur. Walter Benjamin discusses this story extensively in his theorizing of the flâneur in The Arcades Project. The second is a short extract from Charlotte Birnbaum’s On the Table: Three Banquets for a Queen, which is a sumptuous read. There is a bonus “reading” as well, which is a recipe passed down to me from my great grandmother. I use it a lot in professional contexts, mostly to thank people for favours. If you would like, you are welcome to try the recipe out, and bring your batch of baked goods with you to the study circle.

Please make reservations with B-open: toril.johannessen [at] gmail.com
The texts are provided to participants who register.
Free and open for all.

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Anthea Buys is a curator and writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. She works at the South African National Gallery, as curator of contemporary art, and likes to keep fit by doing plenty of independent projects on the side.

Back to the future – Evaluation of Collaborative Research Residency by Arne Skaug Olsen

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:36:36 +0100

Introduction - Bare life
In his video Them from 2007, Polish artist Artur Żmijewski arranges what might tongue in cheek be called a multidisciplinary workshop where representatives of four sections of Polish society with widely different agendas get together to battle with visual means. Young nationalists, old ultra-Catholic ladies, young LGTB-activists and Jewish youngsters begin gently, painting their respective symbols on large sheets of paper, later to be painted over and edited by the other groups. It all develops at a great speed as the nationalists and the ultra-Catholics unite against the LGTB activists and the Jewish youngsters. Having started as a naivist presentation of symbols, it morphs into a battle of insults, destruction and scuffles, only interrupted when a fire alarm is sounded.

In his essay, Game Theory[1], Jan Verwoert points out how Żmijewski time and again exposes the protagonists of his films to situations where reality as they know it is suspended and replaced by a precarious situation, parallel to what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes as bare life.[2]

By demonstrating how little it takes to isolate people in the position of bare life, Żmijewski identifies this state as a condition that impinges on contemporary society at a subcutaneous level.

This somewhat speculative comparison may be an exaggeration of the drama experienced by the participants of CRR. However, one might argue that the participants, artists, curators, writers and academics alike, are subjected to a parallel, albeit not equally pointed, experience: for four weeks a group of three cultural workers gather at one of the host institutions to immerse themselves in a predetermined area of research. The situation may end in success, the outcome may be a catastrophe, or it may all come to nothing. Thus, the unpredictability of the outcome – which the institutions have anticipated and expected – is the very core of the project, and whether activating this risk constitutes a productive platform, is the crux of the matter and the point of departure of this text.

It may be worth noting that the concept “research” is not limited to a methodological framework, but is close to a common-sense understanding of the concept, in which an area or theme becomes the object of wide-ranging investigation with a view to gathering knowledge. Rather than predetermining the research parameters, a context is created by the research situation itself. Also, CRR doesn’t require any kind of output, be that articles, exhibitions, publications or seminars. From this point of view, CRR is a framework for an institutionalised reaction to the demands of production residencies.

This kind of project involves risks at several levels, even if the participants have formulated the theme of their research ahead of time. Because the insistence on productivity, which pervades the rest of society, is absent, the experiential basis for the participants’ practice is, potentially, suspended. Whatever the outcome, the situation is fraught with risk, not least socially, but also in other, more far-reaching respects. The practice of CRR delays the concept “results” in a radical way, focusing on the situation and its ramifications, rather than a material or knowledge-based end-product.

Productivity and risk
This essay is an attempt at a reflection on certain opportunities and challenges that might emerge when defining a new mode of artistic practice as assumed by Collaborative Research Residency. Any structure, whether institutional, legal or social, contributes to the shaping of the landscape it is a part of. It is equally important how relations are formed by a structure, which regulates the relationships between people. As a structure, CRR regulates the relationship between the participating artists and their practice by introducing them to a collective/collaborative situation shaped by political, economic and intellectual limits. A major point of concern in this text is the investigation of whether CRR may be considered a template for a kind of institution representing a type of freedom, which is threatened in the present political climate, and specifically how the concept of autonomy may be linked to that of risk.

The open model established by CRR distributes the risk involved in the project between participants, host institutions and sponsors.[3] Using Żmijewski’s video as an introductory example illustrates the risk of instrumentalising which the participants are subjected to. They become part of a game whose rules are defined by a framework that is the result of structural conditions. One might argue that participation in CRR maximizes what might be termed creative risk because the temporary organisation CRR shields them from the immediate effects of a political agenda.

CRR is an organisational model in which the insistence on productivity and production is absorbed by the organization. The model pre-supposes that the further removed one is from the sponsor, the greater one’s freedom, and hence the risk. The crux of the matter is to what extent this model produces a sufficiently strong buffer and whether the creative freedom is, in practice, maximised.

Productivity and freedom
The paradigm of productivity is all-pervasive in classical capitalist theory as well as in neoliberal economic thought, and in practically all political rhetoric. This is the paradigm in which art is subjected to most pressure, as it is by all accounts obvious that the aim of any economic or political act (and what acts are not, in the final analysis, politically or economically motivated?) must be the creation and accumulation of some kind of value. One proposition which needs to be tested is whether CRR is based on freedom from such a productivity paradigm by providing for what might be termed unproductive time. The concept of unproductive time is a synthesis of Georges Bataille’s critique of Weber’s protestant work ethic and Jacques Rancière’s focus on how a specific mode of sensibility in art gets to the core of societal and political development. Bataille draws attention to the way in which the productivity paradigm of Western capitalist culture has distanced us from the irrational – religious and sexual transcendence – as the starting point of artistic activity. Rancière links politics and art by pointing to this parallel, that both insist somebody make their time available with no other goal in view than that of making something visible to the community that has previously not been visible. Unproductivity is opposed to economic and political instrumentality, also within artistic and cultural practices. Following Rancière and Bataille’s criticism of the paradigm of productivity, it is interesting to approach the specific residency concept produced by CRR from what may appear to be a surprising angle, that of an economic theory proposed by liberalist guru George Gilder back in the nineteen eighties.

Rhetoric
CRR may be considered a piece of political rhetoric, designed not merely to create a situation where actors from a wide section of the art field can get together to collaborate. The political (and by implication economic) situation CRR reacts against is the rhetoric underlying the instrumentalisation of the art scene whose driving force is the Bologna process.[4] It might seem as if the Bologna process and CRR share a common goal: To create a situation (structure) in which research is viewed as the new engine of artistic development.[5] However, CRR and the Bologna process pursue radically different ideological paths. Whereas the new paradigm for art education creates an efficient rhetoric focused on the demand for verifiability according to predetermined assessment criteria, CRR does the opposite.

CRR reclaims an important model derived from modernist/modern thinking about art: that free play engaged in by artists, writers and curators. Where the Bologna process and the instrumentalisation of art take leave of the enlightenment motto of exploration through dialogue and the production of knowledge based on an educational ideal, CRR reclaims what might, in slightly tabloid terms, be called “artistic freedom”, based on the absence of an insistence on immediate utility in exchange for a particular kind of risk.

Liberalism as the defence of “free” art
Using George Gilder’s ideas to criticise neo-liberal developments in society’s response to the freedom manifested in art may seem paradoxical. Even so, it may be instructive as an attempt at an alternative analysis, since Gilder himself makes exemplary use of the rhetoric of ideological opponents to expand the field of his own agenda.

In his economic theory, George Gilder performed a Copernican turnaround, attempting to legitimise the neo-liberalist economic thought of the eighties. In his book, Wealth & Poverty[6] Gilder turns Marxist analysis of capitalism, where demand is in the driving seat rather than supply, on its head. In Marxist economic theory, popular demand initiates the production of goods, which in turn paves the way for demand. Gilder, however, designates supply as the driving force of capitalism. To Gilder, supply generates demand, and somewhat surprisingly, this is what he terms the “vital impulse” of capitalism. In a surprising turnaround, he finds the impulse of capitalism in an extension of the gift economy, as practiced by tribal societies:

Contrary to the notions of Mauss and Levi-Strauss, the giving impulse in modem capitalism is no less prevalent and important - no less central to all creative and productive activity; no less crucial to the mutuality of culture and trust - than in a primitive tribe. The unending offering of entrepreneurs, investing jobs, accumulating inventories - all long before any return is received, all without any assurance that the enterprise will not fail - constitute a pattern of giving that dwarfs in extent and in essential generosity any primitive rite of exchange. Giving is the vital impulse and moral center of capitalism. (Gilder, 30)

Here, Gilder places the “moral center” of capitalism somewhere radically different from the bourgeoisie creed of accumulation, savings and moderation. On the one hand, one might say that Gilder anticipates the highly charged consumer capitalism that characterised the eighties, but more importantly, he describes capitalism as a creative activity at the core of which is generosity and the spirit of sacrifice. According to French philosopher and economics critic Jean-Joseph Goux, in legitimising neoliberalism Gilder presents a postmodern critique of classic capitalism:

That capitalism legitimates itself today in a postmodern version, and could not do otherwise, not only profoundly illuminates its present nature, but also permits us apparently to decipher the socio-historical meaning of postmodernism's philosophical (and aesthetic) manifestations.[7]

The question is, might Gilder’s rhetorical turnaround and criticism of classic bourgeois capitalism be used as a possible starting point for a criticism of an ever increasing instrumentalisation of the art scene, and, by implication, as a possible defence of structures emphasizing free play, dialogue and collaboration exempt from the insistence on productivity. One thing Gilder does teach us, is not to get tied down to accustomed ways of thinking. His ideas are radical, not just for classic capitalists (he is not above labelling former generations of economists boring old men), but also for opponents of neoliberal dominance.

Instrumentalisation
In the description of the purpose of CRR, reference is made to the ever growing importance of collaboration and research for artistic work:

The project takes as its starting point the upsurge within the contemporary art field of collaborative artistic practices, and the increased emphasis on research in the development of artistic work.[8]

CRR absorbs an existing tendency within the art scene, creating a situation that welcomes the needs and desires of its actors to develop their individual and collaborative practice according to this situation. On the one hand, CRR adapts to requests within the art scene for arenas that provide new conditions for artistic production, as well as knowledge production. On the other hand, this may also be thought of as the host institutions trying to legitimise their own practice to a changing art scene. This aspect is not specifically articulated in CRR’s presentations, but one may fairly suppose that this kind of institution-building gains its legitimacy as an extension of other, comparable international projects. In other words, the discursive turnaround of the art scene may also have an instrumentalising or instructive effect on new institutions wishing to make their mark in the emerging rhetorical landscapes. It is also worth considering that the CRR host institutions have a need to legitimise their own practice to their sponsors. CRR’s main source of income is the transnational fund provided by the Nordic Council of Ministers, which also has specific agendas governing their priorities as to who and what they will sponsor.

The politicisation of collaboration
The crux of the matter is the way in which projects presented with instrumental demands are shaped by such demands, but also how and through what strategies they circumvent these demands. The Nordic Council of Ministers' demand for the transnational is an unavoidable part of their evaluation criteria. To a large extent, this political condition governs which groups may be considered, and not least, which groups must be excluded from consideration. It is difficult to determine the actual consequences of this policy, but the ideological notions behind it are based on a rigid understanding of the inherent value of cultural cooperation across Nordic and Baltic borders. At any rate, through the Nordic Council of Ministers, CRR has adopted an ideological framework, which, through individual residencies, exhibitions, seminars etc., has little to do with the international focus of the host institutions. This kind of problem may easily be dismissed as a minor inconvenience, something requiring a pragmatic approach, and something the host institutions would have to consider if it were to have serious implications for the quality and catchment area of the project.

CRR is entering a different and more obscure quasi-ideological machinery, hardly an ideology in the fullest sense of the word, but one which gathers relevance and substance from areas within contemporary social developments. The focus on research and collaboration in the project’s position statement (and its name) derives its ideas, not just from the Bologna process’s academisation of art education, but also from the notions that are basic to the idea of cultural workers being part of a new class of workers who take the temporary jobs that are on offer and adapt flexibly to new situations, networks and contexts. In the contemporary art scene, these are interwoven and, as Ina Blom says with reference to Boltanski and Ciappello: “... lend each other shape to the extent that they can no longer be distinguished from each other.”[9] The phenomenon of residencies may be the most striking example of a machinery providing for a neoliberal ideology in which cultural workers legitimise the development of new ways of working and temporary employment conditions. Even if CRR represents a rethinking of the conventional residency format, it still does not represent a departure from the neoliberal credo of mobility and flexibility as a basic condition of the new creative class.

The Belgian philosopher Dieter Lesage has discussed this in his article Minimum Presence,[10] where he concluded that artists are forced to operate on the fringes, involuntarily, because this is where capital is provided that – in the name of regional development – should be reinvested locally and regionally through a legitimisation of the cultural capital of the place. The question remains whether Lesage’s analysis is sufficiently precise: does the movement of artists across national borders constitute a redistribution and development of creative risk capital, or are cultural workers a precariate that is moved around involuntarily within a network governed by an idea of regional productivity and artistic constraint. In his article, Lesage steered clear of the question of reciprocity. Rather than consider the residency community as an exploitation of the precarious situation of cultural workers, it should be recognised that artists and residency institutions enjoy a mutually symbiotic relationship. Together they make up a potentially parasitic organism, living off the host organism, be this the nation-state, regional, or transnational structures. By investigating the creative risk upon which the art scene is based, they can attempt to reduce and subvert the legitimacy of the sluggish, fossilized structures they depend on. Before this happens, they must make sure to grow sufficiently deep rhetorical roots in order to sustain themselves.

And so, in order to answer the question of whether, and if so, in which way, CRR circumvents the instrumentalisation and maintenance of the negative consequences of “the neoliberalising” of the working lives of cultural workers, we need to ask a few tentative questions. Can CRR be considered an attempt to establish an artistically collaborative practice as an alternative to the academising of art education in the wake of the Bologna process? It is difficult to test this hypothesis as CRR uses precisely (or at least apparently so) the same language as that which underlies the establishment of academic method within art education. Central to the Bologna process is the attempt to establish assessment criteria for artistic output. This is a paradox, as Dieter Lesage points out in his essay Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research? On measuring artistic research output.[11]He says that historically academies of art have aimed to promote art that is less academic and that “academic” art has been considered inadequate and characteristic of art that is lacking in artistic quality. He also points to the mismatch between the obvious potential of artistic research and the problem of evaluating artistic output using academic assessment criteria.

Creative risk
As stated in the CRR position statement: “...the project is focused on the research phase, the goal is to encourage new relationships, the testing of new ideas and the taking of creative risk.”[12] How should the concept “creative risk” be interpreted? This is where Gilder may point the way to an answer with his use of the antithesis of risk and safety, and by viewing them in the light of freedom and regulation. Placing capitalism at the extension of ethnologist Marcel Mauss’ description of the gift economy of primitive civilisations, potlatch[13], Gilder situates his economic politics in the same landscape as George Bataille’s general economics[14], which describes the inevitable tendency of our world to unproductively consume and waste our accumulated wealth without thought of profit. As far as Bataille is concerned, wars, sexual perversions and art are naturalised phenomena, a part of our nature that neither can nor should be suppressed, but rather seen as expressions of conditions of life. This puts human nature in opposition to any rational Weberian understanding of economics as the accumulation and safeguarding of wealth. When we, like Bataille, look at the precarious experience, not as a state of emergency, but rather as the condition of creativity and development, new light is shed on Agamben’s bare life. As Gilder puts it: “...a society ruled by risk and freedom rather than by rational calculus, a society open to the future rather than planning it, can call forth an endless stream of invention, enterprise, and art”. Jean-Joseph Goux, who has analysed the relationship of Gilder and Bataille, has put it precisely:

When it is a matter of giving a theology to capitalism, of infusing it with a grandeur that even its most brilliant defenders generally do not recognize, there is no route but the one Bataille has already mapped out, as if the singularity of capitalism could only be upheld by connecting it, despite everything, with an unchanging, anthropological base, most clearly revealed by primitive societies: the gift alone creates the glory and the grandeur. Therefore, from the start, Gilder is obliged to position himself on the terrain that Bataille has cultivated.[15]

Thus Goux demonstrates quite elegantly how small the distance is between radical, if not surreal, criticism of the hegemony of capitalism and a defence of it. Gilder formulates his legitimisation as a defence of the game of chance, of the irrational within capitalism. This is exactly what appears to be missing from an instrumental understanding of cultural production where rationalist and positivist values are allowed to dominated art’s demand for the free play of ideas, materials and experiences. Gilder also says:

The most dire and fatal hubris for any leader is to cut off his people from providence, from the miraculous prodigality of chance by substituting a closed system of human planning. (Gilder, 156)

Goux points to the paradox that neither Mauss nor Bataille is capable of seeing capitalism as an extension of potlatch, while Gilder in 1980 has no qualms about appealing to ethnology as his moral guarantor. It is in just this kind of movement, the upturning of neoliberal ideology and instrumentalisation, that we must measure the worth of the “creative risk” which underlies CRR. The question is whether the left wing hegemony, which is hell-bent on repeating its own Marxist notions, can borrow ideas from a neoliberal vocabulary in order to legitimise its demand for freedom.

Moral hazard
Still, in Gilder’s view, both risk and safety are essential to capitalism. The concept of moral hazard is derived from economic theory, characterising a situation where the absence of risk leads to unpredictable behaviour. “In economic theory, moral hazard is a situation in which a party insulated from risk behaves differently from how it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk.”[16] The classic example of moral hazard in research is the one where the certainty of being insured, and hence protected from risk, results in more fires, consciously and unconsciously. In economic theory, moral hazard is an exclusively negative phenomenon because it upsets the balance, giving individuals undeserved returns without any investment of wealth or risk. In art, on the other hand, moral hazard may be considered a basic, productive strategy, precisely because the destabilisation of accustomed forms of interaction between humans and the unpredictable is a necessary part of the ongoing exploration of art, man and society.

In future, the question to be answered is whether CRR is a structure that can activate the potential of creative and moral risk and produce a refuge between the pressures of instrumentalisation and neoliberal currents of political reality, now and in the future.

Translated from the Norwegian by Egil Fredheim.

[1] Frieze Magazine, Issue 114, April 2008. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/game_theory/

[2] Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer. Stanford University Press Stanford California 1998.

[3] Financing (Nordic Council of Ministers)
- Criteria mirroring a political agenda

Organisation (BAC, FFKD, HKS)
- - Criteria corresponding to the political agenda
- - - Conceptual buffer shielding the participants from political agenda (no insistence on production)

Participation (Artists, curators, etc.)
- - - - Material conditions, economic support etc.
- - - - - Discursive liberty
- - - - - - Creative risk

[4] http://www.ond.vlaanderen.be/hogeronderwijs/bologna/

[5] The aim of the Bologna process is the establishment of a common system of higher education, including art education. Here, we refer to the Bologna process merely in the context of its implications for art education.

[6] Gilder, George, Wealth & Poverty, Buchanan & Enwright, London 1982.

[7] Jean-Joseph Goux, General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism. Yale French Studies No. 178 1990, p. 217

[8] Fra CRRs web page: http://www.crresidency.net/AboutCRR.html

[9] Blom, Ina, Sosial skulptur - Joseph Beuys, nevroplastisitet og sosial skulptur. Agora nr. 3 2010 p. 105

[10] Dieter Lesage, Minimumsnærvær. Norsk Kunstårbok 2010, pp. 44-47

[11] www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/pdfs/lesage.pdf

[12] http://www.crresidency.net/AboutCRR.html

[13]Potlatch is a gift-giving festival and an economic system practiced by native Americans, theorized in Marcel Mauss’ The Gift (1922)

[14] Bataille, George, The Accursed Share, (orig. 1946.1949), Zone Books (1991).

[15] Jean-Joseph Goux, General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism. Yale French Studies No. 178 1990, p. s 226

[16] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

Back to basics

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 23:33:51 +0100

The works in Back to basics are by four young artists: Frøydis Lindén, Inger Wold Lund, Tore Reisch and Anngjerd Rustand, and are free from direct doomsday symbolism. Nonetheless, some of the works touch upon a number of the existentialist propositions highlighted by the perception of impending doom. By the artists taking rational categorisations, collective convictions, and individual experiences of natural environment as their point of departure, the works converge in a space between science, faith, and superstition. Further, the works reflect historical and potential relationships between nature and culture, and express concerns about a growing cultural colonisation of our surroundings. This notwithstanding, the exhibition testifies to the possibility of more natural and immediate interactions with the world.

To accompany the exhibition, curator Eva Rem Hansen has written the text Back to basics, where she discusses world views, art as culture criticism and our relation to time through the four commissioned pieces. Back to basics is Rem Hansen’s first curatorial project.

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Frøydis Lindén (1973) has studied ceramics at Hochschule Niederrhein in Krefeld, Germany, and at The Danish Design School, Bornholm, Denmark, and holds a BA in ceramics (2006) and an MA of Fine Arts (2011) from Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Lindén has also studied at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, from where she holds an MA of agroecology (2002), still influencing her artistic work. Lindén has been involved in several collaborative projects, such as Cupola, with the artist collective Ytter at USF Visningsrommet, Bergen (2010), Rasteplass Nytorget at Rogaland Kunstsenter (2010), the art in landscape project Eksperiment SUS 2 at Prosjekt Alvøen, Bergen (2010) and Eksperiment SUS 3 at Fron-fjellet (2010), Present with the group Før/Nu at Bomuldsfabriken Kunsthall, Arendal (2007), and Living tool at Galleri Korea, Berlin (2007).

Inger Wold Lund (1983) holds an MFA from Oslo National Academy of the Arts (2011). She has also studied at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden, and Århus Art Academy, Århus, Denmark. She has presented solo exhibitions at Borderline Centre for Foreign Contemporary Art, Stockholm, Galleri Fisk, Bergen, and One Night Only, UKS, Oslo, and participated in group exhibitions such as Approaching is distancing at BKS Garage, Copenhagen (2011), Reshuffling Forest, Holodeck, Oslo (2011), Festival Junger Talente 2010, Frankfurt (2010), and Sympathy for the Devil and Multipple Stress at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (both 2009). Wold Lund has also made commissioned work for the Norwegian National Broadcasting (NRK).

Tore Reisch (1978) has studied art at Rotvoll Art School in Trondheim, and holds an MFA from Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (2011), where he currently works as a workshop manager in the sculpture department. He has attended several group exhibitions, such as The artists are present at Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art (2011), Manufacturing today in the bunker Dora, Trondheim (2010), and the national annual exhibition Høstutstillingen at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2007). Reisch has also made several projects in public space, like his MA-project The Great Forgetting, an outdoor sculpture now in the collection of Trondheim Museum of Art, and permanently installed at Sverresborg Trøndelag Folk Museum.

Anngjerd Rustand (1982) has studied art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden, and holds an MFA from Bergen National Academy of the Arts (2010). She has presented solo exhibitions at Holodeck, Oslo (2011) and Galleri N. Bergslien, Eidfjord (2011) and participated in several group exhibitions, such as Opplandsutstillingen and Vestlandsutstillingen, both 2011. Rustand has also been involved in several projects with the artist group Ytter, such as ART IS KUKU NU UT in Tartu, Estland (2011), Bergen Biennale’10 at Landmark and Entrée, Bergen, and Bergen Biennale II, The Woodmill, London, both 2011. Rustand founded and directed the gallery Borderline Centre for Foreign Contemporary Art, Stockholm between 2008 and 2010. She is also a writer, and has published artist books like Erratic (2010) and Bolivia (2010), and acts as a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Vagant.

Eva Rem Hansen (1983) holds an MA of Art History from the University of Bergen, with the thesis Kontrastfylte kunstforståelser (2008). After graduating, she has worked as an assistant professor at the University of Bergen, teaching modern and contemporary art and theory. Rem Hansen is also manager of information and public programs at Hordaland Art Centre, art history editor of Masterbloggen.no, and freelance writer.

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The exhibition is produced by Hordaland Art Centre. Frøydis Lindén, Inger Wold Lund, Tore Reisch and Anngjerd Rustand have received BKH-project support from Hordaland Art Centre. Inger Wold Lund and Tore Reisch have received Statens utstillingsstipend. Lie Blikk AS in Sandnes supports Anngjerd Rustand. Frøydis Lindén wishes to thank Arne Stensvand and Trude Slørstad at Bioforsk Ås, Irén Lunde Knutsen at Bioforsk Ullensvang, and Inn AS og Gjesdal Aluminium AS.

Solicited document by Malak Helmy

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 17:21:18 +0100

[dancer dragging a spectator on stage by the collar]

AN UNSOLICITED INTRODUCTION

This morning I had this introduction much better written up in my head, but half way through sounding it to myself - a friend from the past called. I didn’t recognize his number. I picked up the phone anyway. He had just had a child. I heard the boy child coo on the phone. He then told me about failures of the revolution, how he was out on the 28th and for the following 18 days but now he was going to the 6th of October to sit by the pool, “oh, you mean today’s protest? Fuck that, fuck them all.” Yeah, ok and fuck you. I'm not sure what I'm doing today. I know I want to go, but in all honesty I don’t think today makes sense and I don’t get what they’re asking for. Non-military trials for civilians, excellent - with you. A second revolution? No, premature… bad try... you need more people for revolution number two. Misnomer. It will lose people. It already has. The tone is all off. Yesterday they were talking about it being a day of anger and by noon, the same day, others called for humor and swimming costumes.

But I am bored. I am bored of being a document writer. I yearn for a pre-linguistic space where one can prowl, a fantastical space to tickle. A space without archives. Where you must feel your way. A space of water. But oh! This is not possible outside the lands of anarchy and magic golden plums. I often think the space of text is the space of death. They say you get too stuck in your head, in an obsession with a trail of knowledge of sources and solutions. But there are ways by which to live in this darkness. A certain living dead who know how to move there: dark, anarchistic, circulating with no clear source and destination. We write documents in order to safeguard free experience; to safe guard the rites and rights of the individual, in order to nourish the desires of the body. To occupy a pre-linguistic space where you can only think of fucking and love. My friend said, “oh you, I used to think like this too, you're just jacked up on serotonin and oxytocin, this madness will end soon.”

Last night I watched a film. May I retell parts of it to you? The woman, a redhead delivers a monologue to an Arian looking USSR Commie figure skater about the artist’s inability to love an individual. She ridicules his belief that he is there to sacrifice himself for the masses, she tells the man of art off and calls for the action of his penis, he weakens at the knees, falls for her, makes love to her four times, then chops her head off with the blade at the bottom of the skate.

EVENT

[a man swimming with the aid of a black tire tube in water]

A group, each surrounded by a tire in the sea, a moment in waves and you float in its body. The body is vulnerable for it does not know fully what it is, what affects it and where it will lead. In each moment in an event, one’s constitution changes outside of its knowledge. There is pleasure and there is anxiety in this suspension.

[hands wrinkled from sea water]

Body acts on body, ground acts on feet, feet acts on posture, posture acts on voice, voice acts on listener, listening acts on body, body acts on wall, wall acts on room, room acts on objects it carries, objects carried act on bodies observing, observation acts on mind, mind acts on feeling, feeling acts on breath, breath acts on words, words act on rhythm, rhythm acts on perception, perception acts on mind, mind acts on heart, heart acts on body – all at once.

Something emerges and is missed.

[movement in a room]

And then in the next moment these new composites act on each other again.

[waves from the sea]

SUSPENDING KNOWLEDGE

Non-knowledge that which results from every proposition when we are looking to go to the fundamental depths of its content, and which makes us uneasy.

– Georges Bataille

Unforseeability considers the very structure of the event.

– Jacques Derrida

SEPERATION ANXIETY

“Displaced” Oraib Toukan (2011), moved partition wall, Hordaland Art Center, underlying wood, varnish.

(Present EXPERIENCE) ANXIETY

Anxiety of experience without knowledge. Anxiety of not having knowledge of the script in which you perform. Anxiety of a body being acted on without a sports presenter informing it of its movements. Anxiety that there might not be any significance to this moment. Anxiety that it is not of value. Anxiety that you are not of value. Knowledge that you have no value in a moment of experience, any more than a cup in a room might have. Anxiety that we are all objects with equal agency. Anxiety of not knowing how to assign value to pleasure. Anxiety of not knowing how to experience pleasure. Anxiety that pleasure can only be told and delivered in words. Anxiety of how to use words right in the right order with the right metronomic meter with the right structure. An anxiety with being entrapped by language that orders your mind. Anxiety that you lack value without knowledge. Anxiety that you need knowledge for pleasure. The anxiety that you can only feel pleasure with a knowledge of value. The anxiety that you find pleasure in knowing the trajectory of value. The knowledge of value is what makes your body feel safe and of worth.

[distance, desert or mirage]

IMAGE

An illusion of control by looking at an image knowing you know more than everything in that image in that moment. A pleasure from feeling the power of your brain, that you can assign words and structures, that there has been no loss of information. That everything of worth is there.

A head projected in a second atmosphere with another time pattern. From this second atmosphere the head looks back and sees the present as an image in stasis – to relive forever without anxiety?

[stretched image]

Only from the second atmosphere can one begin to feel pleasure.

Only when oxygen is claimed by ammonia and methane, in reduction.

An illusion of time control. An illusion of measured, tabulated, countable distance between yourself and the image you hold. A control over the future of your past body. But it is only an illusion. This illusion was yesterday. Tomorrow today will be yesterday but yesterday will still be yesterday. Yesterdays are always yesterdays. Except yesterday is always today.

“If not Us, Who? If not Now, When?” Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová – 1 May 2011, Torgallmenningen, Bergen, Norway

One turns the image over and makes a score on its back each day: this is one yesterday, this is two yesterdays, this is three yesterdays. And with each stroke one feels them getting stronger and more visible through the distance. That too is an illusion.

[television static]

UNFATHOMABLE EVENT / MEASURE

A writer named Nick Royle launches his book “Quilt” at the London School of Economics. An event during which he would read a passage from his new book. He begins by briefly explaining the multiple qualities of the term “Quilt”: 1. Quilt as a blanket; 2. To quilt as a means to swallow and; 3. Quilt being another name, form the 18^th century, for a Mantaray. The three terms become ways by which he explores the notion of an “unfathomable event”.

He deconstructs the title of that evening: “Unfathomable event”. He begins by defining the term “fathom”. The fathoms and unfathomables, are what I am interested in here. He says:

Fathom… in its verb form is

one. To get to the bottom of;

to dive in;

to penetrate;

to see through;

and to thoroughly understand;

- that’s the OED definition.

- There’s another OED definition which is,

two.

To take soundings.

Perhaps, there is a tension between those two senses –

fathom: to understand thoroughly

and

fathom: to take soundings but,

not necessarily to understand, thoroughly.

The word fathom is Old English, originally meant to encircle with extended arms. So the old Saxon ‘fathoms’ (plural), was two arms outstretched, which is, of course, how we get to fathom of six feet… the length, I suppose, of two arms of a six foot person. [1]

The anthropocentric fathom. A means by which to extinguish fear of unfathomables, far echoing sounds, misunderstandings, garbled words, dreams, tongues, schizophrenic waters by turning them into regulated, calculable, intimately known-by-father fathoms.

I engulf you with my arms black night!

I extinguish your blindness and make you light!

[locked in embrace on a train platform]

I worry often about the educational turn in 'art'. I worry often about the unquestionable value in the archive. I worry about this unquestioning Humanism. I worry about placing notions of progress and value on a linguistic, intellectual knowledge. All value being placed on the mind, with a reduction of the value of the body, the values of the information society. The being of the body being annihilated for the most part. You learn about the politics of the body in complex theoretical terms. And you pant for life when you breath air.

FEDDAN / RHYME / ECHO

Fathom Feddan

Feddan Fathom

Fathom Fethan

An almost-rhyme in the sounds of units of area. Two words, perhaps they were once one and echoed away from each other with glossolalias of shifting time and place. But no, it seems not so. It seems they never knew each other, met late in life and found they are completely different conceptions of the nature of measuring nature. The Fathom is a measure as a stable man who does not grow or change. His stability organizes space. Regulated patterned, ordered. The Feddan is a measure based on the power of an Ox on different kinds of nature – a measure based on energy - slower on wetlands by the river, faster on dry grass inland – a varying space determined by a varying time.

A unit of an area, feddan (pronounced faddān), from the Arabic, the word means a 'yoke of oxen'. It is used in Egypt, Sudan and Syria, implying the area of ground that could be tilled by an oxen, in a certain time. In Egypt, the feddan is the only non-metric unit which remains in use, even after switching to the metric system. A feddan, is divided into 24 Kirats (175 m²)

[a forest / a cruising site / sound of water]

OFF-SITE / RHYTHM / SILENCE

Negotiations on land must happen off-site. In a land of another nature. Negotiations occur in the act of walking in this other nature, in a forest perhaps. And only later renegotiated around a table and on chairs. There must be distance between the land on which the future events will take place and the land on which the document is written. A way to relate to land through the head from projections of images. This is necessary in order to produce legible words, thoughts, intentions and documents. It is perhaps not so unordinary that when one returns to the land and reinstates the order of understanding towards a comprehension of politics, through relating to the world from the stand point of the body, that the memory and framework of these documents fall apart.

Walking becomes a means of reordering the notion of rhythm in nature to recalibrate the body to the mind. A way to extinguish body rhythms. From offsite other land becomes flat image. A map, a topology. Without ecology. An image of a nature. In theory, agreeing become easier. Its rhythm and flows from this distance can never be known.

[the cosmos or a deep dark mesmerizing blackness]

[ecology without nature]

UNFATHOMABLE DISTANCE

The death of a father.

The death of a land.

The depth of the sea.

At the book launch Nick Royle explains the unfathomable event of the death of one’s father. He explains that the notion of the death of the father as a means to explore unfathomables is shared with that of the “Interpretation of Dreams”. A book too, which Freud said was penned, “as a reaction to the death of my father, that is – the most poignant loss in a man’s life”.

Is it then the loss of a body that finally launches one into the unknowable distance of a deep time, a deep ecological time - to the depths of exploring the time of dreams, of death, of another consciousness, of being on another edge. It is only in the escape of dreams that one sees the agency of inanimate objects, an alternate subterranean life of simple living and non-living forms – a notion that one can barely hold in wake.[2]

SOUNDING / DEEP TIME

A sounding is a way to measure the sea through vibrations. It is an invisible stretch into the depths, a way to learn by calculating another sense, a sense of different materials and powers. Sound waves become a relation, bouncing from one surface and returning to another.

sounding¹|ˈsoundi ng |

noun

the action or process of measuring the depth of the sea or other body of water.

• a measurement taken by sounding. (vibrations)

• the determination of any physical property at a depth in the sea or at a height in the atmosphere.

sounding²

adjective [ attrib. ] archaic

giving forth sound, esp. loud or resonant sound : he went in with a sounding plunge.

• having an imposing sound but little substance : the orator has been apt to deal in sounding commonplaces.

– (excerpted) New Oxford American Dictionary

SEA

The profound seas hiding unknown fathoms.

– Shakespeare, A Winter’s Tale

A saline dehydration of language. A place where time is lost. A place where one senses the body. A place where the land collaborates with sea, with light waves and with temperature to reach across geometrically unseeable distances and projects them forth as its future image. In the sky it displays its own dreams to confuse distance, to confuse time, to confuse the power of who produces and holds images.

People at sea lose their mind at the confrontation with such a loss of control. People at sea lose their mind with the realization that the function of their mind - its intentions, language and education has a diminished value here - here one is a mere object as anything else. Dream Democracy.

[fish bone / exoskeleton / salt]

DOCUMENT

The shell of a snake’s skin shed.

A bone.

A script.

A dissertation.

A certificate.

A proposal.

A future reference.

A man calls out in the desert for 24 minutes. He takes a photograph and makes notes. Fifteen years later he is no longer a madman but an artist that has a document of fifteen years of continued intention in a functionless act.

Meeting minutes.

DEATH OF EXPERIENCE

The state of a formerly living body. A person is dead by law if a Death Certificate is approved by a licensed medical practitioner. At that point a person is removed of their personhood.

Ultimately there is no value in experience, for it bares no trace. Ultimately the value in experience is lost because we don’t know how to assign value to something without use. And so auras, or the surplus value is lost. Ultimately the aura is lost because every time it possibly emerges, one brings it to light. And in too much light, one can summon, an aura is more product.

The value of experience, giving reason to the event, risks the annihilation of experience, in becoming obsessed with the knowledge of its future. The value of the event is transferred from the moment of its happening to a document, that allows it to re-exist, enabling it to be re-lived. The referral becomes of higher value. The document becomes the form through which we live through.

– Does this create more value and faith in the post-script, as a monument?

– I am not so sure.

A MEASURE / VALUE / COMPUTE / METER

Words

Soundings

Image

Man

Perception

Intention

DOCUMENT AS EVIDENCE

A performing artist, in the 80s in the United Arab Emirates, used to go out in the desert and give speeches for 30 minutes to what was no more than an audience of 3 or 4 and sometimes just 1. At other times he would go out into the desert and throw stones then measure the distance of his throws. Later he made a large tumbleweed, and when he laid it down it blew away. An interviewer asked him once, what was the function of these works? He responded that they were acts, happenings, events without a function. Upon being asked by the interviewer why then - if the purpose was to have no function - was the audience largely made up of the documenters of the event of his work? His response was that documentation is evidence of intention (an intention of a non-function).

It is often believed that document, monument, structure or events are evidences of human organization - a human organization that explicitly comes from the intention of human thought processes.

In the market of art great value is placed on the evidence of intention in human thought processes. Today, thirty years later, the value of the performing artist’s dematerialized work grows. Documents of these events circulate in museums.

Evidence of a man making documents, making known his presence in nature and marking a power of intention, a light in the unknown unfathomable darkness – a way to move out of the an unfathomable sea, a way to move out of dreams, a way to move out of deep ecology.

Having evidence of intention allows one to reconstitute the importance of the mind, to reconsolidate its value, in preservation against the threat of autonomous objects and dream democracy. The document as evidence of intention becomes a way to preserve the value of human progress above all else, namely an assertion of the power of language amongst living systems over being engulfed by ecology, a means to document fading existence.

Evidence of a moment of human life. Evidence of the absence of a human life now. Evidence of death. Evidence as a form of legitimacy assigned to a moment and made visible, legible. This legitimacy it seems is what gives value and worth.

Is this value given to legitimacy a way to confirm a certain agency as a being? Is there a fear that there might be larger agents – both living and non-living agents – who might have a certain higher consciousness too, and can have power over us – without the need for language and images?

FEAR OF ECOLOGY

Ultimately, it seems the document is evidence of the art world’s fear of the dark – the dark of a deep ecology. The concept of deep ecology regards human life as just one of many equal components of a global ecosystem. In such, it considers diamonds, a fork, a manta ray, light rays, imaginary countries and figments of the imagination to have equally as much agency in the movement of life, and to have individual and autonomous existence outside of human perception. All objects are on par. And all relations are on an equal footing. Be it an interaction between a human with an art work or the interaction of cotton with fire. All objects comprehend – in some manner – each other’s presence. Ultimately, if the art world acknowledged such a notion of democracy all notions of value would fall apart. The document then becomes a way to set ones self apart – as if trying to archive certificates of life in fear of actually dealing with the notion of being of equal value, and of having to experience things with traceless qualities. The power of language, certification and legitimacy would begin to defragment. How then would you measure progress?

A show of documents, a show of archives, is a show of fear; fear of expenditure, fear of loosing worth, these are not enigmatic fears, they are signs of real human fear, signs that even language and human consciousness are sometimes no greater than an ants' relation to its neighbor. Fear of losing worth. Fear of having no worth. Fear that we can ultimately all have the same value as objects/imaginations/fictions.

TRACELESS ACTIONS OF OTHERS

[hologram of Calla Lilies, an epilogue and a glossary]

Both living and non-living systems produce events, structures, ephemera and can exhibit the most complex of organizations – this is evident in the studies of self-organization and emergence in biological systems.

Self-organization is a term applied to a system in dynamic interaction with itself; that builds and structures itself. Particular to it is the point that the organization is not directed by a plan or a leader or coordinator. Instead, individuals or elements in such a system interact to local conditions. It is a very complex, volatile, dynamic system in motion, which is sourced in ongoing internal activity and feedback mechanisms. One of its primary conditions is that all forms of interacting elements in the system act in a parallel way with equal agency running through all entities, whoever the system consists of. When large numbers of individuals act simultaneously a system can break out of an amorphous state and begin to exhibit order and pattern.

Emergence is a term applied to a system where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That is, when some new property or unexpected structure appears in a grouping of elements that cant be accounted for by the addition of elements to that property or structure is said to be “emergent”. The paradigmatic example is how the mind or human consciousness emerges from biochemical processes.

Equally profound, perhaps, is how an intricate and complex architecture of an army ant mound can be produced by the work and self-organization of a form of life as simple as an ant. Or in a third example, the formation of a perfect sphere in which a million individual fish swim in perfect moving and twirling order and coordination as a school.

What is interesting about this is a question of occasional moments of order and pattern which emerge outside of the plan or intention of a singular actor, but by exterior conditions which switches on a system of feedback mechanisms where individual actors do individual actions with no knowledge of the end structure, but by reacting to their neighbors – sounding off of them and responding intuitively without thought. It is a situation of trust, of equal agency where all individual actors act as one unit and what emerges is a higher collective consciousness.

No documents are left as evidence of this moment of profound intelligence and self-organization. It is something that emerges and then ends. The evidence is the event itself – the value is in the self-preservation at the moment of experiencing this emergence.

[1] Link to: http://richmedia.lse.ac.uk/publicLecturesAndEvents/20110510_1830_unfathomableEvent.mp3 - listen starting 5:45

[2] Link to Ralph Vaughan Williams “The Lark Ascending” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKz6XJlI_jk

Launch: Bookshop

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 17:21:48 +0100

For the bookshop launch we have invited curator Øystein Ustvedt for a conversation about his new book Ny norsk kunst (New Norwegian Art), with the director of Hordaland Art Centre Anne Szefer Karlsen. The book is intended as an introduction to Norwegian art after 1990, and is written to make contemporary art accessible to a wide audience. Ny norsk kunst (New Norwegian Art) will give its readers an overview of key trends and developments in the period, and insight into practices which have been important in recent decades. Qustions to be discussed are: What is characteristic for the past 20 years Norwegian art scene? And Is it possible to record history, while history is being played out?

The conversation will be in Norwegian.

Hordaland Art Centre Bookshop carry catalogues and books by artists in Hordaland, books from publishers such as Afterall, Sternberg Press, Revolver, Hatje Cantz, JRP|Ringier, Les Presses du Réel, e-flux, as well as numerous imprints and art institutions.

Magazines and fanzines in the bookshop: Afterall, A priori, Biduon, B-post, Cine Qua Non, Concept Store, DOTDOTDOT, Ekfrase, Exhibitionist, first person – The Art Insider, Fukt, Gagarin, Gastronomica, Girls Like Us, Fillip, It’s Nice That, Journal for Northeast Issues, Kaleidoscope, Kuk & Parfyme, Kunsthåndverk, Kunst og Kultur, Lazlo Magazine, Little Joe, May, MONO KULTUR, n+1, No Order, Paletten, Parole, Petunia, Pyramid Power, ROV, Ultraviolet Magazine, Versuch, White Fungus, Wouldn’t it be nice…, Year

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Øystein Ustvedt (1965) is an art historian (University of Oslo) and curator at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design. Previously he wrote art criticism for the daily newspaper Aftenposten, and acted as curator at the Astrup Fearnley Museum and director of The Stenersen Museum.

In collaboration with Fagbokforlaget.

Resident: Valentinas Klimasauskas

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:14:26 +0100

He has titled his presentatin he has "A Narrative Is A Selection. A Preview Of Selected Documentation Of Norwegian Public Art Projects (That Were Chosen For Personal Reasons), In Chronological Order (1977-2001)" and with this he asks: How do you construct the story about a subject that is unknown to you?

A highly imaginative German writer called Karl May never visited the exotic locales featured in his stories, but still this didn’t stop him writing books that haunted the imagination of the whole world. What would have happened if Karl May had been visiting and really knew the places he only was imagining? Would he still write about them?

We may be reminded about the case of Solaris, a 1961 Polish science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem. As we all know science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with the imaginary. The Solaris novel radicalizes the concept of the sci-fi genre by revealing that our expectations and imagination is always limited to our own experience and projections, as in the case of meeting the other in the form of the planet Solaris.

The public is invited to recollect, invent, and create memories of the public art projects to be shown during the slide night preview.

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Valentinas Klimašauskas is a curator and writer from Vilnius who writes shows and curates texts. While being interested in speculative economies of language, he is into linking concepts and readers into language based performative systems. He is also a founding co-editor of Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt and a curator at Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre.

Valentinas Klimasauskas (LIT)

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 14:53:30 +0100

Valentinas Klimašauskas is also a founding co-editor of Baltic Notebooks of Anthony Blunt and a curator at Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre.

Shot Through - Textile and Photography by Glenn Adamson

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 14:02:33 +0200

Textiles and photography: the two mediums seem, at first, to be antithetical. On the one hand we have a painstakingly slow craft, and on the other an immediate and automatic process. One is constructive, the other indexical.

Weaving is rooted in the past, one of the most ancient crafts. Photography and its moving counterpart, film, are the ultimate expressions of modernity. Yet the history of textiles and photography are more intertwined than one would expect. At times each seems to strive for the condition of the other. Since the nineteenth century, textile artists have sought to revivify their medium by emulating the exactitude and fine grain of the photographic print. This tendency actually predated the introduction of the first cameras by several decades. The introduction of the Jacquard loom in 1801 offered designers the possibility of realizing detailed trompe l’oeil effects and to run them across long runs of fabric. The new looms were driven by punch cards that recorded extremely complex designs, which would have been prohibitively expensive to weave once but became good business once they were repeatable. The new technology was immediately used to emulate paintings, and with the introduction of photography it was perhaps inevitable that the two media should be combined, as Jacquard weavings had already attained a striking verisimilitude. The key innovator was the British textile entrepreneur Thomas Steven, based in Coventry (long a center for the production of “fancy” woven articles such as ribbons). His remarkably detailed Jacquard-woven “Stevengraphs,” first made in the 1860s, might be compared to etchings, and were based on hand-rendered drawings. But they emulated the look and detail of photographs, sometimes requiring thousands of individual Jacquard cards to realize the image.

The appealing strangeness of Stevengraphs is partly their retrospective novelty – one can still sense how intriguing they would have been to the Victorians – but also the way that they seem to compress temporality itself. A view that could have been captured instantaneously through a lens is instead replicated through an exhaustive process of card-punching and machine weaving, mechanical processes to be sure (as those of the photographer are) but ones of considerably greater scale and slowness. The resulting object has a sort of “weight” to it, as if looking itself had been brought to a crawl and attained a kind of physical presence. This same quality is evident in all the works in the present exhibition, which have been chosen to highlight the range of possibilities that artists today find at the intersection of these two seemingly antithetical media.

The contact point is perhaps most strongly incarnated in Kari Dyrdal’s Jaquard Stories series, based on photographs of a Jacquard loom itself. The one in the image Harness and Board is located in Tillberg in the Netherlands, where the artist does much of her weaving. Especially for the uninitiated, the pattern of threads may at first suggest a completely abstract design; only gradually does the recursive nature of the work, in which the loom is used to craft its own image, become clear.

Two portraits by Lia Cook and Chuck Close, provide the exhibition with its greatest moments of drama, as the inherent intensity of the woven photo is put to the service of mapping a single face’s topography. Both artists have a longstanding interest in the way that images can be built from tiny units, in such a way that they break down into abstraction from close range. The experience of looking at either work in the relatively narrow confines of the Hordaland Art Centre might well remind you of pressing your face to a television screen. Cook is and has always been a weaver, with a particular interest in adapting two-centuries old Jacquard technology to the new possibilities of digital design. The work included in the show portrays the artist herself as a child, adding a further layer of temporal flow to the space. Close is a prominent painter who often portrays other members of the art world – the work in this exhibition shows the American artist Lorna Simpson, well known for her politically engaged work in photo and video. Close relies on Magnolia Editions to realize his woven portraits; interestingly, this Oakland-based firm is normally concerned with printmaking, but has a significant sideline in tapestries which are produced in Belgium based on digital files. In both photography and weaving the mechanical means of production intervenes between artist and object, offering the chance for such creative expansions of authorship.

If Close and Cook give us a single person’s identity, pixelated and monumentalized, then Johanna Friedman and Kate Nartker investigate the perhaps more poignant possibilities of amateur imagery. It is probably within family life that the greatest number photographs are created, and certainly in that context they become unusually important as bearers of memory and emotion. Both Friedman and Nartker have studied at the California College of the Arts in the Bay Area, where Lia Cook teaches, and her influence on them is evident in their embrace of such everyday photos, as well as their use of stitches as the building blocks for imagery. But they both take the idea of the woven photo and break it apart. Friedman does so by slicing an image into three parts, which hang at different depths in the room. The picture is a haunting one. It shows the artist’s own family at a moment of uncomfortable disclosure – the key dramatis personae are just off stage to the left – and the lines of division between each person suggest an instant of breaking-apart, inscribed in the memory and never to be fully resolved. Nartker’s seemingly simple footage of a girl on a bike is laboriously constructed from hand-stitched panels, each based on a single frame of a home video. The title, West Main, situates the action just about anywhere. But the combination of the stuttering movement and the intervention of the hand, carried out over many thousands of stitches, produces an eerie sense of reclamation, as if this little piece of animation were the only remnant of an otherwise vanished past.

Sabrina Gschwandtner’s three-part film No Idle Hands also plunges us into uncertain temporal terrain. Though shot in 2008, her choice of now-antiquated Super-8 film creates a sense of distant past, which is underpinned in the whole by the use of folk songs and political protests evocative of the 60s. For this viewing, only the third and final part of the piece is shown: a low-fi technical experiment in which the clacking sounds of knitting needles are amplified through the use of contact microphones. The effect is percussive, reminding one of experimental music in the lineage of John Cage, but also intimate because of the close-up visuals. As Gschwandtner writes, the total effect is “gloomy, loud, mercurial, and ecstatic… [the] sounds echo back an abstract, aural sense of community.”

The final piece in the exhibition, by Karina Presttun, is not woven but rather appliquéd – a technique in which innumerable small pieces of fabric are stitched to an underlying layer. Though the work may seem an exception, it was actually an encounter with an earlier piece by Presttun that inspired me to curate this exhibition. So poignant is her choice of subject matter, and so exquisite her craftsmanship, that one would feel rewarded for any amount of time spent looking at one of her intimate panoramas, which depict young men on the brink of adulthood, who seem to experiment freely with their own identities. That Presttun herself has pored over every inch of these loving depictions of her ‘boys’ (as she fondly calls them), accumulating their likenesses from many thousands of scraps, never leaves your mind. It’s this very active form of making and seeing, I hope, that the unexpected meeting of photography and textiles will encourage in every viewer of Shot Through.

A note on the installation

The unconventional hanging of the space was designed by Anne Szefer Karlsen and her colleagues at the Hordaland Art Centre. Though I didn’t come up with it, I love the way that it renders the pieces into a set of linear elements, which only gradually reveal themselves as pictures as one enters (like threads becoming weavings). When drawn out on a floor plan, the display also suggests a set of warp threads running down the length of the gallery. The play in depth also affords layered views and shifting crops, a 3D walkthrough analogue to the possibilities of photographic composition. As an American, I also enjoy a resonance that will be lost on most European viewers. In the Southern states there is a term, the “shotgun house,” which refers to a long building with a very narrow front, with the doors all set to one side. The cost of a townhouse was often calculated based on the footage that faced the street, hence the odd proportions – you wanted your house as skinny as possible. The idea of the term is that you could open the front door, all the interior doors and the backdoor, and fire a gun right through without hitting a thing. That is roughly the layout here. There are other associations with the title – a silk can be “shot”, meaning that it has multicolored threads that shimmer in the light; you might think of a shuttle as shooting across the width of the loom; and of course you shoot a camera.

And there is an art historical reference too: the great critic Clement Greenberg’s idea of an abstract painting that hits you purely optically, all in “one shot.” This exhibition, clearly, is the opposite of that kind of seeing. It is a tacit departure from the idea that any art could be a purely visual experience. By insisting on the materiality of these two unlike media, I hope to suggest that all art can be understood as more complex if its making is fully embraced, rather than left to one side.

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Glenn Adamson is an art historian and Head of Research and of Graduate Studies at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

MA-weekend: Gabriel Johann Kvendseth - Prototypes: ARSENAL

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:41:24 +0200

By creating new constellations of the found material, he redefines it into sculptural, weapon-like objects, which also resembles things belonging to ritual ceremonies. As Kvendseth uses only found material, he does not contribute to higher demand for material or increased production. In this presentation of his ongoing work, the process of creating the artifacts is emphasized, and the audience will during a weekend be able to visit an installation of his workspace, where both his materials and finished items are tested and presented.

Gabriel Johann Kvendseth (b. 1984) is MA-student at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. The past year his work has been presented at numerous exhibitions, such as Supermarket Art Fair in Stockholm and BGO1 at Bergen Art Museum, both curated by Entrée. He has also shown at Small Projects in Tromsø, in Den 65. Nordnorsken, and he is one of the contributing artists in 11, shown at Galleri S.E. in Bergen until October 16^th.

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The MA-weekend is collaboration between Hordaland Art Centre and Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Twice a year the MA-students at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts are invited to submit proposals for an exhibition to be realised at Hordaland Art Centre, and a professional jury selects one of the proposals.

Workshop: Travis Meinolf - Action Weaving Week

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 23:29:49 +0200

The creative process is key to Meinolf’s workshops, as well as the social sphere that is created. The workshops are not in addition to his artistic practice, but rather an intrinsic part of his practice. Thus the participants become co-creators, and the ambition for this Bergen project is to communally create one art piece. The design for the piece is made by artist Lia Cook who also participates in the exhibition Shot Through.

Workshop programme

Saturday October 29th, Nordnes bydelshus

11:00-13:00 and 15:00-17:00 (3-16 yrs)

Sunday October 30th, Nordnes bydelshus
11:00-13:00 and 15:00-17:00 (3-16 yrs)

Tuesday November 1st, Hordaland Art Centre

18:00-20:00, youth with Kulturkort

All participants are invited to see the finished piece at Hordaland Art Centre Wednesday November 2nd at 6 P.M. and it will be on display in our café until Sunday November 6th.

REGISTRATION: hks@kunstsenter.no. Please state which workshop you/your child(ren)would like to take part in. The workshop is free, and all children can bring one adult.

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Monday October 31st and Tuesday November 1st Travis Meinolf will give workshops for schools. For more information on this, please contact hks@kunstsenter.no

The Action Weaving Week is supported by Kunstløftet/Arts Council Norway and Hordaland fylkeskommunes Kulturkort for ungdom.

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Travis Meinolf received an MFA in Textiles/Social Practice from California College of the Arts, San Francisco in 2008, and holds a BA in Industrial Arts from San Francisco State University. He mines his own knowledge and experiences in his artistic practice, as he constructs and produces the looms he uses in his workshops and practice. He creates his social craft by valuing the artistic process more than the commercial aspects of industrial design. He uses the weave to create social spheres, collaborations and conversations between people with different interests and background, from different generations and social groups.

The Action Weaving Week is in conjunction with the exhibition Shot Through, which is on display at Hordaland Art Centre October 28th – December 18th. The exhibition shows works by Chuck Close, Lia Cook, Kari Dyrdal, Johanna Friedman, Sabrina Gschwandtner and Karina Presttun, and is curated by art historian Glenn Adamson, Deputy Head of Research and Head of Graduate Studies at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Book launch: Brandon LaBelle - Site of Sound: Of Architecture and the Ear #2

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:01:34 +0200

Since the publication of the first volume of Site of Sound in 1999 the issues and activities pertaining to sound and architecture have expanded to circulate more dynamically within the fields of sound art, sound design, and spatial practices. From acoustical technologies and urban planning to public art, concerns for auditory structures and the experiences of listening are finding deeper footing within both artistic and environmental contexts.

Recent noise mappings across Europe, along with new possibilities for acoustical implementation, as well as the ongoing emergence of sound art and design educational programs, point toward sound as a crucial subject for thinking through contemporary culture and politics.

Site of Sound Vol. 2 aims to address contemporary work being done in the cross-over between sound and architecture. The anthology brings together new research and writing that charts out the theoretical implications and consequences for artistic and spatial discourses, while documenting contemporary projects that come to occupy and define a sonic-spatial territory.

With contributions by Justin Bennett, Usman Haque, David Schafer, James Webb, Edwin van der Heide, Raviv Ganchrow, Jodi Rose, Nigel Helyer, Michael Gendreau, Jean-Paul Thibaud, Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, Oliver Laric, David Stalling & Anthony Kelly, Romano, Natasha Barrett & Birger Sevaldson, Scott Arford & Randy Yau, Riccardo Benassi, Carrie Bodle, Jenny Pickett & Julien Ottavi, Joaquín Gutiérrez Hadid, Pascal Broccolichi, Jacob Kreutzfeldt, Franz Pomassl, Björn Quiring.

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Brandon LaBelle is an artist and writer. His work addresses the relation of the public and the private, formal and informal cultures, sociality and the narratives of everyday life, using performance and sited constructions as creative supplements to existing conditions. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, lately at IMT gallery, London (2011), Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (2010), A/V Festival, Newcastle (2008, 2010), MuseumsQuartier/ Tonspur, Vienna (2009), 7th Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Allegro (2009), Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade (2009). He is the author of Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (Continuum, 2006) and Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life (Continuum, 2010). He is currently Professor at the Bergen National Academy of the Arts.

Conversation: Hito Steyerl in conversation with Tone Hansen

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 23:30:35 +0200

Through a conversation Steyerl's practice, where she examines social and political processes through working at the interface between film and visual art, will be discussed. Migration, cultural globalisation, feminist and political theory, as well as media are central themes of her artistic and theoretical works. In her documentary film essays she merges her own imagery with archival and fictional material, in which she takes a critical artistic position towards the circulation of images, and the relation between evidence and truth.

In the text In Defence of the Poor Image, e-flux Journal 11/2009 she writes:
The poor image embodies the afterlife of many former masterpieces of cinema and video art. It has been expelled from the sheltered paradise that cinema seems to have once been. After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travellers in a digital no-man’s land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.

Registration hks [at] kunstsenter [.] no. LImited seating.

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Hito Steyerl studied cinematography in Tokyo and Munich and has a Phd in Philosophy. Her work has been showed in exhibitions such as the 3. Berlin biennial for contemporary art (2004), Manifesta 5 (2004), documenta 12 (2007), the Shanghai Biennial (2008), Gwangju and Taipeh biennials 2010 as well as numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe. She is professor of Media Art at the University of Arts, Berlin and has taught film and theory at different institutions such as Goldsmiths College and Bard College, Center for Curatorial Studies. Steyerl also writes for a number of magazines and websites. Her book Die Farbe der Wahrheit: Dokumentarismen im Kunstfeld (Verlag Turia + Kant) was published in 2008.

Tone Hansen is newly appointed Director of the Henie Onstad Art Centre, where she has worked as curator since 2008. Lately she has curated The World Rehersal Court, Judy Radul, accompanied by the anthology (edited by Marit Paasche and Judy Radul) and symposium titled A Thousand Eyes: Media technology, the law and the aesthetics. In 2011she edited the reader (Re)Staging the Art Museum (2011, Revolver). In 2010 she curated a solo exhibition with the works of Hito Steyerl at the Henie Onstad Art Centre. Hansen held a research position at the Oslo National Academy of Art in Oslo from 2003-2008.

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Organised by Ellen Røed and Michelle Teran (both research fellows at Bergen National Academy of the Arts and working within Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowship Programme) in collaboration with Hordaland Art Centre. Supported by the Bergen National Academy of the Arts and the Hordaland Art Centre.

Pre-screening at 17.45: The Empty Centre (1998) 62:00 min
The film documents the transformations of the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin throughout the course of history, where both global restructuring as well as the perpetuation of social and political divides can be detected.

Lovely Andrea (2007) 30:00 min
If all pictures became current—in that they pass by and are thus connectable with one another, whether elegantly or obscenely, through translation or association—how would it be possible to fasten down a picture? Hito Steyerl’s light-hearted picture translations are about fastening things in an elegant-obscene way. In Tokyo she seeks a photo series for which she posed in 1987 as a "rope bondage" model. While making inquiries with experts and authorities in the bondage arts (which are mainly marketed online nowadays), she finds what she is looking for in a magazine archive.

November (2004) 25:00 min
In the 1980s Hito Steyerl shot a feminist martial arts film on Super-8 stock. Her best friend Andrea Wolf played the lead role of a woman warrior dressed in leather and mounted on a motorcycle. The engagement expressed in the formal grammar of exploitation films later became Wolf’s political praxis. In November Hito Steyerl examines the spectrum of interrelations between territorial power politics (as practiced by Turkey in Kurdistan with the support of Germany) and individual forms of resistance.

Master night: Tor Steffen Espedal - Artist and maniera. The concept of sublimity in manierism and contemporary art

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 11:46:57 +0200

In his presentation on Master Night, Tor Steffen Espedal will take as his starting point Miroslaw Balka’s How it Is, an artwork that had a relatively short life in the turbine hall at Tate Modern in 2009/10. The work was asking to be categorized as “sublime”. With this work in mind, Espedal will try to outline the concept of sublimity related to contemporary art by examining the meaning of the concept from the 18^th century to our own day.

Espedal will also ask whether “the sublime” is a relevant aesthetic category in relation to manieristic art, specifically Italian painting from around 1520 to 1600. Can we trace a rhetorical or stylistic transition from the rationality of early and high renaissance to the focus on the indefinable and non-rational in late renaissance or manierist works, in which “the sublime” can be a relevant concept?

The presentation will be held in Norwegian.

Tor Steffen Espedal is MA-student in art history at the University of Bergen. He is also a teaching assistant in the aesthetic course ”from image theory to aesthetics” at the University of Bergen, and works with texts and printed matter. Espedal has been a high school teacher for many years, and has also been involved in educating teachers.

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Master Night is a series of lectures where both MA students and recently graduated art historians present their MA dissertations to a public. With Master Night Hordaland Art Centre wishes to bridge the gap between the academic and practicing art scenes in Bergen, and create a place for interaction between students and professionals.

Eva Rem Hansen is responsible for this program and Master Night is made possible due to good help from the study committee of Art History at the University of Bergen.

Master night: Anne Blindheim - The construction of identity through documentary photography

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 11:44:25 +0200

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Eva Rem Hansen is responsible for this program and Master Night is made possible due to good help from the study committee of Art History at the University of Bergen.

Master night: Julie Tessem - Underground art in the USSR! Everyday life and the symbols of Stalin: the deconstructive universe of the Moscow Conceptualists

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 11:41:20 +0200

It is held that these artists have deconstructed different aspects of the official art of Soviet, something which has had an enormous impact on the Russian contemporary art scene. In her presentation, Tessem will discuss the background of the aesthetics used by the Moscow conceptualists, and present the development of Soviet underground art. As the official Soviet art doctrine, social realism, is an important precondition for the work made by the Moscow conceptualists, Tessem will also point at main features of this often overlooked genre.

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Julie Tessem finished her MA in Art History at the University of Bergen in 2008. To prove to herself that art really can save the world, she started working with culture programmes at a refugee asylum for single minors. She has also spent her time on organizing and participating in different culture- and integration projects, and other fine, unprofitable projects is being on the board of Bergen Film Club and the editorial board of Bergen International Film Festival. She is particularly interested in political art and censorship, and in exploring the critical/uplifting potential of art in society.

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Eva Rem Hansen is responsible for this program and Master Night is made possible due to good help from the study committee of Art History at the University of Bergen.

Master night: Helga Nyman - Art and archive: History, place and narratives in the practice of Elsebeth Jørgensen

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 11:37:14 +0200

In her thesis, Nyman looks at Jørgensen’s earlier works: the nomadic project Cinemagic Tour and Unofficial Deposited Records a work made in collaboration with Pia Rönicke, shown at Tate Modern from 2005 to 2010. Jørgensen’s artworks often combine photographic documentation with appropriated archive material in a montage like installation. Her works have a narrative structure, but like the montage medium, they are also fragmented. Jørgensen’s works raise questions related to the construction of history, memory and the human desire for collecting.

Starting with Jacques Derrida’s theories, Nyman investigates if and how Jørgensen’s works can be said to deconstruct traditional conceptions about the archive, and how the archive material is staged in a productive and performative way in the works. The thesis also looks at Jørgensen’s use of the photographic medium, and it’s place between the indexical and the constructed. Finally, Nyman sees Jørgensen’s re-use and re-organisation of archival material in relation to Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of postproduction.

Jørgensen’s projects are long term studies of concrete places and archives, and informants and other contributors are actively involved in the process. Nyman will therefore discuss her works in light of a discursive tendency within a site specific tradition of art, known for expanding into culture and for using ethnographic methods.

Helga Nyman is MA student of Art History at the University of Bergen, and will finish her thesis in November. She has previously worked as a gallery host at Bergen City Museum, and currently works at Kabuso in Hardanger and BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen. This summer she was one of the organisers behind Hørte Annualen 2011 in Telemark. While studying she has also been active in the committee for art history students, of which she was the leader in 2009/2010.

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Eva Rem Hansen is responsible for this program and Master Night is made possible due to good help from the study committee of Art History at the University of Bergen.

Seminar: What is left?

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:03:37 +0200

Sydneshaugen skole, auditorie A, Sydnesplassen 9, Bergen
2.30-4.30 P.M.

The exhibition Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image poses a series of questions about photographic production, as it occurs both publicly and privately. Through this twin lecture discussions of origin in relation to the photographic image will be discussed as well as how photographic collections can be read or re-actualised through artistic methods. Implicit in both lectures is a consideration of the photographic “residue”.

Elsebeth Jørgensen’s lecture has been titled The Tempo of the Archive… and will deal with how she as an artist works from within historical archives with collecting and processing of the material she comes across. Through examples from her own practice she will present how she through methods of site specificity makes spatial montages, thus creating both documentary and fictional stories. She will address how the archive is both a space and a stage for aesthetic acts, based on enthusiasm, ambivalence and dilemmas connected to the production of history, as well as the role of the individual in the construction of systems of knowledge and collective memory.

Christine Hansen’s lecture has been titled The double photograph and will take as its starting point a photograph of the two actors Marie Bonnevie and Mikael Persbrandt shot right after a performance of the play Miss Julie by August Strindberg a few years back. The image, an ordinary news photo, produced a notion that the characters they had just portrayed on stage were still visible in their faces. This phenomena is discussed based on the theories of Roland Barthes, as well as the photographic works of August Sander and Rineke Dijkstra. The latter very often examines this phenomenon in her projects, meaning the trace of a situation prior to the moment of photographing being present in the photograph. The question arising from this is if this phenomenon is possible to trace due to the image itself or the attitude of the viewer.

The lectures are given in Dansih and Norwegian.

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Christine Hansen is researching hitory of art and photography, and has recently submitted her PhD thesis with the University of Bergen, titled A Trip through the Ordinary Norwegian Landscape. Perspectives on Photography’s Role in Contemporary Art. Hansen teaches at the Universities of Bergen and Stavanger, and the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. She is also a photographer and has published the two artist books Familiegrafier (2006) and Himmelrike (2003). She holds an MA in photography from the Bergen National Academy of the Arts (2000) and is represented in the collections of Arts Council Norway and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design.

Elsebeth Jørgensen works conceptually and site related with photography, video, sound and spatial montages emerging from long-term research projects, very often in historical archives. After her education at Royal Danish Academy (1995-2002) she has shown in several group exhibitions. Selected solo exhibitions include Cinemagic Tour at Overgaden, Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen (2005), the three part exhibition Cinemagic Tour: Scenes from an Imaginary Place, Deveron Arts, Huntly, Aberdeenshire (2005-06) and Arkivet: Cinemagic Tour & Crystal Palac, Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde (2010).

This twin lecture is supported by Hordaland County Archive, Hordaland county.

Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image – Elsebeth Jørgensen is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen.

Seminar: A piece of anti-history

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 09:28:54 +0200

This is not a question of a comprehensive institutional historiography, but rather a piece of anti-history: We want to focus on the time we have been at the premises at Klosteret (since 1985) through the smallest, and most crucial components: a selection of exhibitions represented through the artists whose work was shown.

We have invited Torbjørn Kvasbø (solo exhibitions in October 1987 and March 1993), Talleiv Taro Manum (solo exhibition in May 1998) and Eva Kun (solo exhibitions in September 1988 and May 2003) to give short lectures and Kurt Johannessen (several performances and solo exhibitions in September 1988 and May 2004) to give a performance lecture especially for this occasion.

Please book a seat for the seminar at hks [at] kunstsenter [.] no

In the evening we welcome everyone to an anniversary party from 8 P.M. to 1 A.M.

2 P.M. Introduction / Anne Szefer Karlsen, director Hordaland Art Centre
2.15-2.30 P.M. ”This decade – 80s” / Eva Rem Hansen, Information and public programmes Hordaland Art Centre
2.30-3 P.M. Torbjørn Kvasbø
3-3.15 P.M. Qs
3.15-3.30 P.M. Break
3.30-3.45 P.M. ”This decade – 90s” / Eva Rem Hansen
3.45-4.15 P.M. Talleiv Taro Manum
4.15-4.30 P.M. Qs
4.30-5.00 P.M. Performance lecture About Everything (Om alt) by Kurt Johannessen
5.00-5.15 P.M. Break
5.15-5.30 P.M. ”This decade – 00s” / Eva Rem Hansen
5.30-6.00 P.M. Eva Kun
6.00-6.15 P.M. Qs
6.15-6.30 P.M. Summing up/remaining Qs / Anne Szefer Karlsen

8.00 P.M.-1 A.M. Party!

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Thank you to all the exhibitions producers and co-ordinators who have helped us remember our history: Jorunn Veiteberg (1985-86), Lise Jonette Gjertsen (1985-96), Ingebjørg Astrup (1987-88/91), Atle Maurseth (1988-92), Grethe Riis (1991), Sonja Wiik (1992-95), Helga Norland (1994-95), Eli Okkenhaug (1995-99), Martin Larsson (1997-2000), Evelyn Holm (1999-2001), Jana Winderen (2002), Anne Szefer Karlsen (2002), Arne Skaug Olsen (2003), Malin Barth (2002-2004), Mari Aarre (director, 2005-08).

We also wish to thank Kari Dyrdal (Director of the Board, 1984-86) and Åshild Tetler (Junior Executive Officer, 1985-2009) who also have been helping us to refresh the institution’s history.

The seminar is supported by Art Council Norway

About Everything (Om alt) by Kurt Johanessen is supported by Norsk Illustrasjonsfond and Norsk Forfattersentrum

Walking tour: Elsebeth Jørgensen/Bjørn Arvid Bagge - Walk Along Various Paths

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:07:10 +0200

Throughout the walk the story teller circles a series of photographer's relation to the city, connected by local historical fragments as well s a meta-story dealing with the importance of the walking tour's capacity to contain memory. Thus Walk Along Various Paths is dealing with how a place produces both images and stories, and where the walking tour acts as an historical concept, a construction of stories and aesthetic action.

Booking essential at hks (at) kunstsenter (.) no. Max. 35 participants per walking tour.

The walking tour is developed in collaboration between Elsebeth Jørgensen and Bjørn Arvid Bagge, historian and academic librarian at The Special Collections - University of Bergen. Bagge has written the manuscript, and senior academic librarian with the Picture Collection of the University of Bergen, Solveig Greve has acted as guide and pathfinder.

The exhibition project this walking tour is part of is produced by Hordaland Art Centre, supported by The Picture Collection of the University of Bergen, BKH-project support from Hordaland Art Centre, Culture Point North, and Danish Art Council. Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image – Elsebeth Jørgensen is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen.

Remembrance and repression. Displacements in Elsebeth Jørgensen's archival-aesthetic practice - Sanne Kofod Olsen

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 21:32:29 +0200

As an archive, the psychical apparatus is not a monolithic, unified site for storage but the interface between two distinct sets of data, one manifest and subject to observation, the other latent and visible only to the extent that it is imperceptibly woven into the first.[1]

In his book, The Big Archive (2008), the American theoretician, Sven Spieker, compares the archive to the disclosure of the human psyche by psychoanalysis.

Thus, in every archive, the interpretation of items is a condition that opens up a number of possibilities. Its construction and composition is filled with those hidden meanings, which arise through the connections and incidental juxtaposition of the archived material. Searching through an archive is like surfing the Net. One piece of information leads to another, and if you search long enough, a chain of meaning arises which can be the starting point for further searches for meaning in the archived material.

Searching through the archive for links can also be compared to the process of dérive. The concept of dérive was defined by the situationists and Guy Debord, and has been described as an unplanned tour of a cityscape, guided by the emotions that the surroundings create in the individual, whose primary aim is to map and investigate the psychogeography of the neighbourhoods. The investigation of an archive will remain just as incomplete as the mapping carried out by an individual moving about the town. Moving about in the archive is a sort of haphazard walkabout where the information discovered is made up of fragments from a great number of stories. The archive is the psychogeographical landscape of history, where the possibilities seem unlimited.

The archive is Elsebeth Jørgensen's choice of material. Often, her projects are an examination of fragmented connections in a certain archive, resulting in stories, images and information that is the focus of the archive and those who have collected the materials in the archive. Jørgensen's method has become one of "walking" through the archive for weeks, months, even years, finding information and new perspectives in factual materials that only appear as pictures and stories when the material becomes part of the combination of fact and fiction and artistic documentation.

This method is reminiscent of the method used by the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) when he built his famous Mnemosyne Atlas in 1924-29. In contrast to the common history of style as adopted by his contemporaries, Warburg used a method that was both academic and associative, producing a spatial historical story, which was both chaotic and disciplined. Mnemosyne Atlas was an art historical "atlas," a mapping of motifs collected as a series of charts consisting of collages of classical motives, the way they were repeated and altered at different times, such as the Renaissance and Warburg's own time. Mnemosyne refers to the Greek goddess of the same name, the goddess of memory and the art of remembrance. She was the mother of the muses, who between them were the protectors of music, poetry, and later of art and science.

Mnemosyne Atlas, which was supposed to consist of some 60 or 70 charts, was never completed, but would, according to Warburg himself, be a visual presentation of the "iconology of the interval"[2]. As Warburg was concerned with inherited values of expression in his Atlas, it may be considered a visual archive of the history of culture, as mediated through art.

In contrast to many other art historians of his time, Warburg's image archive focused on the expression of emotions and iconography. His interests embraced artefacts of antiquity, as well as the art of the Renaissance, the visual representations of primitive cultures, contemporary advertising shots, and astrological images. Mnemosyne Atlas was a visual telling of the history of art that, from a present day perspective, might be considered to have more in common with an art project. From a scientific point of view, it introduced something as uncommon as associative methods, intuition and feelings. So there was a non-conformist expressivity to it, being a more equivocal remembrance of art.

Unpacking My Library

The simultaneously scientific, intuitive, associative and personal approach to the data of the archive is a starting point for Elsebeth Jørgensen, who, since 2001, has been involved in the archival aesthetic praxis, and thus also with remembrance and the interpretation of memory.

Still, in her first real unfolding of an archival project, Unpacking My Library, begun in 2000, the artist's starting point is a different one. In her almost programmatic text from 2003, after Unpacking My Library, Elsebeth Jørgensen writes that the examination of how memory is produced "as a constant flow between cultural an personal processes," is an important focus of her artistic production. In her work, she focuses in particular on the idea of how cultural memory and the archival room are constructions that contain potential fictions. Thus, she establishes a presentation of the story that is at once both spatial and subjective, aligning herself with Warburg's reproof to the writing of linear history (of style) and the predominance of textual language, which remains a dominant principle of historical presentations.

In its form, Unpacking My Library is an art project in several passages, reflecting on libraries and book collections as cultural spaces of meaning while also viewing the collector as a character. There are 11 chapters in all, most of them presented as photographs, video, digitally created images, printed matter, etc. These are 11 different works subsumed under the same project title, which have been created for different exhibitions. All the projects deal with the motive force of the collection, often taking as its point of departure the context in which the artist will be exhibiting or happens to be present. This is most clearly reflected in Unpacking My Library # III: Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, which juxtaposes images from the artist's own photo archive (of inaccessible libraries and private book collections) and a revised version of the American author Eugene Field's autobiographical novel Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac from 1895.

Here, the personal and factual story (the literary autobiography and the photographing of rooms with book collections), along with the artist's own visual documentation, is introduced, becoming motives and themes to be revisited in later works. The photographs of libraries and book collections trace a factual course, being a matter of matter-of-fact recording without an interpretative layer. The interpretation emerges in the interval and the juxtaposition of the images and the audible personal story. The biographically, literary, perspective (with Eugene Field) and the book's explicit reference to the book lover, point to the personal nerve and structure, and the subjectivity and enjoyment of collecting books, as well as to the collecting and organisation of knowledge. This may, like Warburgs Mnemosyne Atlas, also be understood as a reaction to the idea of an objective historiography in museal and archival collections, as the archivist/collector/bibliophile bases his collecting on personal motives.

The focus on the interchange of cultural and personal processes is even reflected in the title Unpacking My Library, which is a direct allusion to the title of an article by Walter Benjamin, with that same title. The article Unpacking My Library[3] is from 1931, dealing with the subject of book collecting, taking as its point of departure Benjamin's own library. The text is a story in the first person, emphasising the subjective influences on the structure of a collection; just like Jørgensen uses her own photo collection of books and book collections as the starting point of her installation.

In his article, Benjamin compares the collecting of books with the renewal of existence. However, collecting is just one of many processes of renewal. Another might be that of painting things, cutting out or copying, Benjamin writes. A method characteristic of the collage, montage and reproduction, which Benjamin is preoccupied with in other contexts. He compares these practices to the activities of children, but here the point is not the childish aspect. Rather, it is the artistic method of collage and montage, used by contemporaries of Benjamin, the Dadaists John Heartfield, Hannah Höch and Raoul Haussman, around 1920.

Collage/montage is a formal, content-based method and conceptual aesthetic of presentation that is central to Elsebeth Jørgensen's artistic practice. Her method is also a process, which may be characterised as a renewal of existence, as she makes use of fragments that, when placed in new contexts, create new meanings. While montage is often connected with film, collage, which in a sense is the same, is connected with two-dimensional images, consisting of picture fragments. Both methods have been commonly used in visual culture; in visual art they have been instrumental to the definition of a new concept of work – aesthetics of production (rooted in the avant-garde movements of the 1910's and 1920's)[4].

In today's artistic practice, the concept of montage is typically applied to video- or installation art, which makes use of fragmentary story telling. An installation can contain all forms of visual fragments from film and photos to text and objects, to speech and sound. Elsebeth Jørgensen's works are spatial montages, where the story fragments together create the more or less coherent narrative. Montage as form describes precisely Jørgensen's approach to the archive and her artistic presentations, which both in form and contents primarily make use of spatial juxtapositions of fragments of varying kinds, photography, film, sound and text being the main devices.

Cinemagic Tour

The renewal of existence is also very much the fulcrum of the next serial project, Cinemagic Tour, which was begun in 2003. The project thematizes the disappearance of film architecture relative to the collective memory of the cinema and its social and aesthetic significance. The project is based on the artist's visual documentation of cinemas and research into archives in Germany, Finland, Denmark, the US, Latvia, England, Lithuania and Scotland.

The focus of Cinemagic Tour is the photographing of these either abandoned or converted cinemas. The cinemas are ruins which until recently shaped our production of memory and consumption of moving images. They can serve as signposts to a lost time, a vanished culture and a new sort of iconoclastic situation, which is now being renegotiated through Elsebeth Jørgensen's optics. These closed down cinemas direct our attention to cultural changes in Western culture, and is the social and cultural structure of change, which becomes the starting point for Jørgensen's investigations.

Cinemagic Tour started as a project of photo documentation, but it quickly turned into a sort of assembling and registration of a missing documentation of cultural historical change. Jørgensen used archives and dialogue to find out how people felt about having lost the cinema, as well as the cultural significance that had been attached to the local cinema, now closed. This story becomes a fulcrum of the work Cinemagic Tour # II: Scenes from an Imaginary Place.

Situated in Huntly in North Scotland, this project is much more than just a photo documentation of the closed cinema from another time. Investigating the structures of change, and taking as its point of departure the personal and collective experience and understanding of loss, oblivion and change, the project is both documentary and based on archives. It consists of photographs of the cinema, which Jørgensen, as the first person in 20 years, was allowed to photograph, as well as sound pieces consisting of a large number of testimonies, among others that from Gordon McTavish, the film operator at the cinema. Also included are video works, paper cuttings and archival documents in the form of letters, taped conversations, museum registrants of the presentation as a kind of trace of the negotiation between the artist and the Aberdeenshire board of cultural heritage. The presentation of the work documents the well-nigh activistically delayed reaction to the closure of the cinema, which occurred during the artist's research on site. The exhibition of Cinemagic Tour # II: Scenes from an Imaginary Place took place in three parts: partly at the local town museum, where Jørgensen exhibited video- and audio works, archival documentation and artefacts, partly a performative event where the photographs of the interior of the cinema were shown to the public, and partly a film of the inner room of the old cinema, projected onto the outer facade of the cinema.

The ruinous mood of the closed cinemas becomes an active element in Jørgensen's research into the cinemas of the past. The way they appear in the landscape, as remnants of old buildings – temples, castles, towers, theatres – ruins often testify to past greatness and decay. They are testimonies about lost times and civilizations, about power and money, about faith, illusion and entertainment. Closed and disused cinemas are the ruins of the recent past. Like Greek theatres, cinemas testify to places that have been cultural and social meeting places. The local cinema was a place where people met the world, as well as phantasies, harvesting common experiences impacting their relationship with the world. As such the local cinema was a strong social and cultural marker that in many ways helped create a common local identity. The closure and sealing up of the cinema, as the case was in Huntly, contains a wealth of importance relative to local rootedness and common identity. The reaction simultaneously is one of a nostalgic clinging to the past as well as the visualisation of the loss of a shared identity as this social and cultural space, and hence community, is no longer accessible. The work Cinemagic Tour # II: Scenes from an Imaginary Place, as presented in Scotland in 2006, and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, 2010, served as a sort of hypothetical archaeology of the larger, collective landscape of film ruins, of which Jørgensen has been an observer for a long time. A cultural landscape whose geography is no longer locally defined, and where the social sphere of places have this pronounced change in common.

Cinemagic Tour is very much the story of a world in transition and the identity crisis between the local and the global that has arisen in many places. The paradigm shift of late capitalism, where a new economic, political and global order is transforming cultures and communities, has forced the local community into a process where it must redefine itself and create new conventions.

Crystal Palace: Notes from the Archive

An altogether different poetic tone is found in the project Crystal Palace: Notes from the Archive, begun in 2009. Like Cinemagic Tour, it also takes as its starting point a period of cultural paradigm shifts, but this one happened at the threshold to modern capitalist society in the mid-19th century. In her work, Jørgensen focuses on the Danish brewer and founder of Carlsberg, J.C. Jacobsen (1811-1887), and his fascination with greenhouses of which London's Crystal Palace, designed by Joseph Paxton, was the prototype. Crystal Palace was a palace of glass, built in London's Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The purpose of the world fair was to present the newest technological advances of the industrial revolution; as such it was a tribute to progress. J.C. Jacobsen's interest in glass architecture, resulted in the building of The Palm House – a Crystal Palace in miniature – in Copenhagen's Botanical Garden in 1874, thanks to the brewer's political and financial support. Besides, he built several smaller, private greenhouses on the Carlsberg property. In Crystal Palace: Notes from the Archive, the artist takes a general look at the interest in growth in the time of Jacobsen, both in a real and symbolic sense. The Palm House as well as those other greenhouses symbolise the interest one individual had in social growth, but it is also the centre of the scientific research that was carried out at Carlsberg.

Thus the Palm House becomes a symbol of the driving force that was Carlsberg, as a part of the industrial revolution in Denmark. The Brewer was interested in both forms of growth, expressed through fragments of texts and pictures from the Carlsberg archive. The imagery of Crystal Palace: Notes from the Archive consists of the artist's own photographic documentation of private parts of the garden at Carlsberg, which was once the brewer's personal botanical garden. Here she has focused on those places, which will be altered, demolished or preserved due to the physical nature of the place, the structure of the firm, and economic changes. There are also photographs of the physical archive as well as collected visual and textual archive documents and historical records about the garden and research at Carlsberg.

The archive is presented as the historical space from which knowledge is mined. The anecdotal presence of the place as far as images are concerned, is important, as it points to a spatial, not linear telling of history, hidden in the drawers and cupboards of the archive. A spatial logic, reminiscent of the Web's potential for finding information, albeit with physical presence, movement and extension in time as decisive factors.

The audio part consists of montage readings of letters and reports from the archive, supplemented by fragments of texts from Notes from Underground (1864) by Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). In Notes from Underground, a person, who in many ways must be considered J.C. Jacobsen's opposite, is portrayed. The first-person narrator of the book is described as bitter about the naive faith in reason, progress and individualism, displayed by his contemporaries. He thinks man is basically irrational, his actions based on emotions, whims and boredom. Through the introduction of Dostoyevsky's fictional character, the otherwise documentary project is supplied with a layer of fiction, thus adding a dimension of meaning that arises through the juxtaposing of fact and fiction. The main character in Notes from Underground creates a break with the optimistic belief in science, industrial development and future, which is otherwise implicit in the documentary archival story of J.C. Jacobsen. The misanthropic character (Underground Man) is opposed to the spirit of the times, but he represents the contemporary voice of criticism, or the sceptic, who doesn't dream about progress or celebrate it. Dostoyevsky's story has been given this function in view of the present day optics of the work, contrasting with the celebration of the belief in progress so typical of the capitalist project and the industrially progressive character as exclusively positive. The work's sceptical character illustrates the reverse side of faith in progress, then and now.

Crystal Palace: Notes from the Archive is neither an attempt to celebrate the brewer's huge contribution to Danish society, science and culture, nor the opposite. Rather, the work is an aesthetic investigation into the nature of opposites and opposite tendencies in man, illustrating the complexity of every society: The positive faith in change as something progressive and scepticism to change in our society as a threat. Rationality, faith in the future and in progress, is contrasted with irrationality, pessimism, self-hate or apathy, which delays or renders a realisation of the positive dream impossible. In more than one sense, the two figures represent respectively remembrance (official historiography) and repression (suppressed historiography), producing between them an associative and knowledge-based analysis of society, which, as with Warburg, balances sense and emotion.

Crystal Palace: Notes from the Archive is a poetic reflection on cultural and personal processes from a time when progress and change were central tendencies in society, but where the opposites to these values existed as the antithesis to progress and change. This paradox becomes manifest in the description of the two persons, one documentary, the other fictional, who together make up a complex story of cultural and human development, of wishes and conflicts, preservation and change in a society during a time of fermentation.

Conditions that cannot be exposed sufficiently through the historical documentation of archives, but which must be supplied through the aesthetic and poetic layers of fiction in order to establish an open and equivocal reflection and interpretation on a period.

The archive as remembrance and displacement

In Elsebeth Jørgensen's works, the open possibilities of interpretation arise at this interface of fact and fiction. Her works are built on clear, factual observations, as found in the archive, but through the juxtaposition of fact and fiction they disclose those hidden data, which no representation can visualise as anything other than abstract meanings. Hence we are talking of memories that are pushed into the space of abstraction, in a story that always balances on the borderline between the real and the unreal. Elsebeth Jørgensen's works are an attempt at an investigation of aesthetic and existential paradoxes past and present, which cannot register as facts. The extreme factuality of the archive is displayed in juxtaposition to fiction and the artist's own visual mapping, allowing for new interpretations of times, places and people. She liberates both remembrance and displacement through the artist's observations and selection of archive material and the instrumental interpretation of historical documents through montage stories and fiction. Like psychogeographers, psychoanalysts and archaeologists, the artist discloses the unseen or what has so far not been known.

Memory and repression are ways in which the human psyche can work through experiences or repressions. If both are dealt with, this may create an understanding of the processes of change that we are faced with at any given time, in society as well as in our individual development. An archive contains the memories and repressions of individuals as well as society. Working with the archive, one may find both. Written and unwritten stories exist here, mutually dependant aspects, like in a room of remembrance. Existing as order and chaos, they may be retrieved through rational as well as intuitive and associative practices by whoever searches the archive.

Elsebeth Jørgensen's search through the archive is characterized both by the rational and the irrational in an inquisitive walk of the senses. She searches, both with the methodical level-headedness of the researcher and with the artist's eye and intuition, through a long-drawn and very complex process of selection. The works appear as fragmentary stories in montages of space, reflecting the room of remembrance as well as the archival room. The works present new ways of looking at history, and new questions arise through the artist's aesthetic perspective. New perspectives and new stories contribute to a renewal of existence where the interface between two different data sets, the manifest and the equivocal, in some sense or other is made visible in a new spatial format and may be observed in a way that is different from that of the historical archive.

^{^[1]} Sven Spieker, The Big Archive – Art from Bureaucracy, MIT Press, 2008, p. 36.

^{^[2]}Quoted in Matthew Rampley, "Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas", in ed. Alex Coles; The Optic of Walter Benjamin, de-, dis-, ex-, vol. 3, Black Dog Publishing Limited, London, 1999, s. 99.

[3] Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library”, in Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, Penguin Classics, London 2009.

[4] Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, xx 1984

Translated from the Danish by Egil Fredheim.

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Sanne Kofod Olsen is an art historian and director at Museum of Contemporary Art, Roskilde, Denmark. She has been dean of Funen Art Academy (2005-2009) and curator at Danish Contemporary Art Foundation/Danish Arts Agency (1999-2005). Since the mid-90s, she has been an art writer, lecturer and occasional freelance curator. She is a member of Danish Arts Council (2011-2014) and other boards.

Lecture: Eivind Røssaak - The Performative Archive

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:25:58 +0200

In this lecture Eivind Røssaak will shed light on these questions through current theory, international films, photography projects and exhibitions.

This lecture is in relation to the exhibition Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image by Elsebeth Jørgensen. The lecture will be in Norwegian.

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Eivind Røssaak, PhD, Associate Professor, Department of Research, the National Library of Norway. Visiting Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago, fall 2011. Visiting Scholar at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2008). He has published widely on film, art and theory. Recent books include Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms (ed., forthcoming, Amsterdam UP), The Still/Moving Image: Cinema and the Arts, 2010, The Archive in Motion: New Conceptions of the Archive in Contemporary Thought and New Media Practices (2010), Selviakktakelse (on the representation of the self in fiction, 2005) and Sic: Fra litteraturens randsone (An experimental history of margins in art and philosophy, such as the history of footnotes, paratexts, frames etc., 2001).

Ben Cain (UK/HR)

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 20:49:18 +0200

The work will focus upon the question of how will, and how can the viewer respond to modes of practice in which the context of creativity is to be found no longer in the work but in the way of working. The work focuses upon the combination of a primary physiological experience of space and objects, and a cerebral experience. The intention is in part to explore the paradox of participatory practice, where the ‘participant’ is limited or directed by the ‘facilitator’.

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Ben Cain (b.1975, Leeds) lives and works in London and Zagreb. He is primarily involved in the production of video installations, sculpture, audio work, performances and printed matter, which address the convergence of theatre and documentary, with a particular interest in facilitating and highlighting the viewers’ role in the emergence of subjects and objects. Cain’s work deals with the interplay of saying and doing, action and imagination, and language and bodily movement in the process of developing work that oscillates between the visible and the non-visible, the physical and the virtual. In the last year he has exhibited in various places including the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Garanta Perform, Istanbul; Wiels, Brussels; the ICA, London; and Lenbachhaus in Munich.

Resident: Ben Cain

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 12:59:11 +0200

During his residency he will research an installation and a series of related texts, objects and posters that explore the notion of a 21^st century workshop or communal workplace. The work will focus upon the question of how will, and how can the viewer respond to modes of practice in which the context of creativity is to be found no longer in the work but in the way of working. The work focuses upon the combination of a primary physiological experience of space and objects, and a cerebral experience. The intention is in part to explore the paradox of participatory practice, where the ‘participant’ is limited or directed by the ‘facilitator’.

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Ben Cain (b.1975 Leeds) lives and works in London and Zagreb. He is primarily involved in the production of video installations, sculpture, audio work, performances and printed matter, which address the convergence of theatre and documentary, with a particular interest in facilitating and highlighting the viewers’ role in the emergence of subjects and objects. Cain’s work deals with the interplay of saying and doing, action and imagination, and language and bodily movement in the process of developing work that oscillates between the visible and the non-visible, the physical and the virtual. In the last year he has exhibited in various places including the Slought Foundation, Philadelphia; Garanta Perform, Istanbul; Wiels, Brussels; the ICA, London; and Lenbachhaus in Munich.

Damsgård - Øyvind Renberg and Miho Shimizu

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 15:31:02 +0200

Damsgård takes its starting point in the Japanese pictorial scroll, and explores the gaps between documentation and fiction. The production follows travels on the west coast of Norway, spanning from natural sanctuaries, to museums and old mansions in Hardanger, Voss and Bergen. The journey can be seen as a way to check up on Norwegian heritage, revisiting landscapes and sites of national identity, and to further relief this against a hybridised, contemporary culture. The panorama, widely applied in Renberg and Shimizu’s works, reflects their interests in editing and narrative: creating a window between tactile and pictorial worlds. The scroll stretches the panoramic format to become a visual field of travel.

Studies from the production were presented in 2010 in the exhibition Upstream at Hordaland Art Centre. At Kabuso the artists present the first in a set of a series planned pictorial scrolls. This initial scroll is designed as a silk-screened wallpaper with repetitive, floral pattern developed from drawings from the garden of the 18th century Damsgård Manor in Bergen.

Miniature Greek columns that form the structural components for the scroll have been produced in collaboration with the ceramic department of the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. A decorated box has been custom made by Buchbinder Klünder in Berlin.

The project has been supported by Statens utstillingsstipend, Vederlagsfondet and Arts Council Norway. The artists would like to thank assistants Ingeborg Blom Andersskog, Martin Woll Godal, and Anne Helen Mydland for facilitating the production, at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Hordaland Art Centre would like to thank Kabuso for their hospitality towards the project.

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Miho Shimizu and Øyvind Renberg (born in Tokyo and Oslo in 1976) graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 2000 respectively 2001. Their collaborative work is inspired from travels, and explores cultural translations and discrepancies. Works have developed in response to museum collections, the art institution, and more loosely defined social scenes. Their practice embraces collages, tableaux, and furniture, as well as music releases and design pieces. From 2001 to 2009 they worked under the collective name Danger Museum. Shimizu and Renberg have exhibited at inIVA (London), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), Art Space Hue (Seoul), Art in General (New York), Galeria Arsenal (Bialystok), and Preus Museum, Oslo Kunstforening, Stenersen Museum and UKS (Norway). Residencies include Ssamziespace (Seoul) and Peacock Visual Arts (Aberdeen).

2006

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:05:32 +0200

2005

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:04:39 +0200

2004

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 12:03:28 +0200

2003

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:55:20 +0200

24.01-16.02
Simen Johan

21.02-16.03
Vibeke Jensen

21.03-13.04
Anders Bockelle, Stefan Christiansen

25.04-18.05
Eva Kun

23.04-15.06
Rita Murstam

15.08-07.09
Signe Marie Andersen

12.09-05.10
Ellen Hansen

10.10-22.10
B-Art 2003
Theresa Hubbard, Andreas Birchler, Uwe Max Jensen,
Randi Nygård

31.10-23.11
Tulla Elieson, Trude Selnes

27.11-30.11
Helgestunt I
Ole Martin Lund Bø, Else Leirvik, Camilla Sørvik

04.12-21.12
Helgestunt II -display
Marius E. Hauge, Marie Nerland, Torunn Skjelland,
Lars Ramslie

2002

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:54:23 +0200

18.01-10.02
Elisabeth von Krogh

22.02-17.03
Kunst der folk ferdes

05.04-28.04
Syn
Lisa Rosenmeier

06.05-08.05
Barnas bilder
Bergen Kulturskole

24.05-09.06
Festspillutstilling
Gutengut

20.06-21.07
Hardingpuls
Gruppeutstilling med kunstnere tilknyttet
Hardanger

23.07-09.08
Grafikk
Eksamensarbeider, Avdeling for grafikk,
Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen

16.08-08.09
Ingejerd Beate Murstam, Kari Steihaug, Mona Strand

13.09-06.10
ArtSwap

18.10-10.11
Ståle Sørensen

15.11-17.11
Re:actor
Gisle Frøysland, Anders Gogstad, John Hegre,
Peter Pajchel

22.11-15.12
Elisabeth Skomdal, Randi Liliequist,
Nina Thormodsæther Haugen

2001

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:53:17 +0200

09.03-01.04
Et annet sted
TEMP

20.04-13.05
Harald Tørresen, Elen Solberg, Morten Hansen

25.05-17.06
Tina Jonsbu, Tine Aamodt, Helene Kortner,
Madeleine Park

23.06-08.07
Noe uvirkelig
Eksamensarbeider, Avdeling for fotografi,
Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen

12.07-19.08
Ateliéene i C.Sundtsgt. 55
Presentasjon av kunstnere fra verkstedkollektivet

31.08-23.09
Shape and volume
Reinhard Haverkamp

31.08-23.09
Morten Brakestad, Elisabeth Jarstø

05.10-28.10
Digital files
Vibeke Riisberg

05.10-28.10
Etter isen kommer suppa
Astrid Schiøth

16.11-09.12
Senere ble alt annerledes
Ingeborg Stana

16.11-09.12
Cross my heart
E.G.Crichton

2000

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:46:38 +0200

02.02-28.02
Find
Finsk produktdesign

10.03-30.04
Salong
Viel Bjekeset Andersen, Hilde Andorsen, Andrew Barton,
Cecilia Heisser, N 55, Erik Snedsbøl, Robert Sot,
Erling Eide Thorsrud, Aeneas Wilder

20.05-18.06
God Smak - Vår Belöning
Peter Johansson

20.05-18.06
Brandbuilding
Ole Martin Lund Bø

24.06-09.07
Virus
Eksamensarbeider, Avdeling for fotografi,
Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen

11.08-03.09
Klonat Hem
Ilon Huss Walin

08.09-01.10
Site Not Specific
Aralawa og Gins, Olafur Gislason, Lars Paalgard,
Elin Wikström, Turi Uldal

14.10-14.11
Apecosmonautene Insideout
Samarbeid med Rhizome og BergArt

10.11-03.12
Fokus på kunstnerisk utsmykning
Hilde Skjeggestad, Turid Uldal, Reinhard Haverkamp,
Eva Britt Rasmussen, Pål Vigeland

1999

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:45:38 +0200

22.01-07.02
Hjå farmor
Geir Egil Bergjord

12.02-07.03
Øyvind Suul

08.04-02.05
STUNT
Laila Kongevold/Pavel Büchler
Per Gunnar Tverrbakk/Erik Worsøe Eriksen
Gisle Frøysland/Jørn Bakke
Mikkel McAlinden/Una Line Hunderi

20.05-20.06
Festspillutstilling/Monolit
Mats Theselius

27.08-19.09
Camilla Søyland

01.10-24.10
Katrin Schmidbauer

29.10-28.11
Ann Tove Engenes, Una Line Hunderi, Laurie Grundt, Rannveig Holm

03.12-19.12
Eline McGeorge, Beathe C. Rønning, Elisabeth Gilje

1998

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:44:04 +0200

30.01-22.02
Bjørn Frode Larsson

27.02-22.03
Pipaluk Lake, Mari Arvidsson

03.04-03.05
Samir M´kadmir

19.05-19.07
Festspillutstilling
Talleiv Taro Manum

01.08-15.08
C4
Avgangsutstilling seksjon for fotografi
ved Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen

21.08-27.09
Arena
Anders Edström, Reinhard Haverkamp,
Chrystel Moreau, Martin Schräder

02.10-25.10
Partytime
Inge Pedersen

30.10-22.11
Fast Forward
Kunsthåndverskstudenter fra
Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen,
Konstfackskolan i Stockholm,
Kunsthåndærkerskolen i Kolding

27.11-20.12
Gränssnitt
Thomas Nordström

1997

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:42:59 +0200

17.01-09.02
Temporær installasjon
André Marandon

14.02-09.03
Tomasz Vetulani

14.03-13.04
Anne Bårdsgård, Merete Christensen

14.03-13.04
Birgit Eide

18.04-11.05
Trudi Jaeger

20.05-15.07
Festspillutstilling
Gro Jessen

22.08-14.09
Kristin Aarnes, Eva Grøttum

19.09-12.10
Børre Sæthre

17.10-09.11
Judy Fox

14.11-07.12
Linda Jansson Lothe

12.12-11.01
Heather Joy Riggs, Eileen Mawson

1996

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:40:43 +0200

13.01-04.02
Peder Rasmusen

10.02-03.03
Miles McAlinden

09.03-31.03
Mehrzad Mafi

13.04-05.05
Olav Herman Hansen

11.05-16.06
Festspillutstilling
Hilmar Fredriksen

19.06-04.08
Frisbee
Akademistudenter fra Bergen, Trondheim, Oslo

23.08-15.09
Ulla Maija Vikman

21.09-13.10
Henny Lie

19.10-03.11
Julie Tangvik, Elisa Helland-Hansen, Gunnar Thorsen,
Gunnilla Åkesson, Erik Lytskjold, Irene Nordli, Geir Tokle

09.11-01.12
Janet Ledsham, Susannah Hope, Anne Morell

07.12-05.01
Turie Lampila

1995

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 11:08:36 +0200

14.01-05.02
Unge svenske glasskunstnere presenterer seg
Annika Jarring, Katarina Andersson, Cecilia Bjelke,
Maro Papadopolous, Mona Lisa Eriksson,
Morten Medbo, Carina Seth Andersson, Åsa Månsson,
Karin Karlsson,Margot Lindberg, Caroline Sødergren

11.02-05.03
Bilder med motiv
Eli Hovdenak

11.03-06.04
Rita Tulonen, Agneta Hobin

22.04-14.05
Imens
Kjetil Berge, Gordon Hon, Simon Wells

20.05-18.06
Festspillutstilling
Sigurd Bronger, Toril Bjorg, Liv Blåvarp,
Konrad Mehus, Elsie Ann Hochlin

24.06-06.08
Sommerutstilling
Robert Meyer

21.08-27.08
Workshop
Anine Fjeldså

28.08-03.09
Workshop
Anne Simon

09.09-01.10
Ragna St. Ingadottir

07.10-29.10
Bente Knudsen Sanden

04.11-26.11
Gunnhild Lien, Allan Christensen

02.12-07.01
New York, New York; Clay
Sana Musama, Melissa Stern,
Toby Bounagurio, Shida Kuo, Marec Cecula,
Raymon Elozua, Lee Stoliar, Kathy Butterly,
James Makins, Maryl Dintenfass,
Patricia Lay, Matt Nolen, Arnold Zimmermann,
Carole Aoki

1994

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:50:10 +0200

15.01-06.02
Utsmykkingsprosjektene på Lillehammer

12.02-06.03
Anne Brit Soma Reienes

12.03-10.04
Kalle Grude

16.04-14.05
Paula Barton

24.05-26.06
Festspilluttilling
Suvi Nieminen

20.08-11.09
Gunilla Kihlgren

17.09.16.10
Kiel/Bergen
Utvekslingsprosjekt

22.10-13.11
Åse Gulbrandsen

19.11-18.12
Engelsk glass i Norge

1993

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:47:39 +0200

16.01-07.02
Lars Sture

13.02-07.03
Johannes Michler

13.03-04.04
Kommunikasjon i leire
Torbjørn Kvasbø

13.03-04.04
Michael Flynn

17.04-09.05
Sonja Landberg

11.05-23.05
EN dag i mai
13 kunstnere

01.06-20.06
Festspillutstilling
Hanne Heuch

26.06-08.08
Peter Voulkos

18.08-12.09
Gruppe Obst

18.09-17.10
Elisabeth Engen

23.10-21.11
Eun Num Ro

27.11-19.12
Sitt
Kristine Kaspersen, Tina Falch

1992

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:46:23 +0200

18.01-16.02
Ståle Blæsterdalen

22.02-22.03
Bjørg Nedrebæ

28.03-10.05
Morten Steen Kaels, Odrun Molnar-Chiodera

21.05-21.06
Festspillutstilling
Jan Groth

27.06-09.08
Sommerutstilling
Studenter VKA

15.08-13.09
Svein Ove Kirkhorn

19.09-18.10
Mette Stausland, Maurice Ducret

22.10-22.11
Else Marie Jacobsen, Saimi Kling

28.11-10.01
Cecilie Dahl

1991

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:45:09 +0200

19.01-24.02
Bjørn Finne

02.03-07.04
Ida Helland Hansen, Åse Ljones

13.04-12.05
Charlotte Fugelli

25.05-11.08
Festspillutstilling
Beret Aksnes

25.05-11.08
Odd Moe

24.08-22.09
Richard Launder

24.08-22.09
Atle Kaarstad

28.09-27.10
Solfrid Mortensen

02.11-24.11
Eirik Gjedrem, Ann Beate Tempelhaug

02.11-24.11
Gordon Craig

30.11-19.12
Gerd Tinglum

1990

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:43:27 +0200

13.01-11.02
Raymond Slåttli

17.02-25.03
Frans Jacobi

31.03-06.05
Lisbeth Dæhlin, Beth Wyller, Nina Malterud

31.03-06.05
Charlotte Block Hellum, Loise Meidell Barth

19.05-01.07
Festspillutstilling
John Petter Havnerås

05.07-20.08
VKA studentutstilling

25.08-02.09
Jens Hauge, Herman Starheimsæter

08.09-14.10
Transmission Gallery

20.10-18.11
British Ceramics in Norway

24.11-20.12
Introduksjon
Nye medlemmer i NK

1989

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:42:21 +0200

01.02-12.03
Bjørn Kolbjørnsen

18.03-16.04
Lois Walpole

18.03-16.04
Markku Kosonen

22.04-04.05
Nicola Von Skepsgardh

25.05-08.06
Horror Vacui
Inger Johanne Rasmussen

20.05-25.07
Liv Mildrid Gjernes

05.08-13.08
A summer´s work
Robert Erickson

05.08-13.08
Malin Barth

26.08-24.09
Plissé
Anne Kvam

26.08-24.09
Marianne Berg, Kjell Johannessen

30.09-29.10
Sigrid Szetu

30.09-29.10
Danuta Maczak

04.11-03.12
Lillian Dahle

04.11-03.12
Erick Stanley Hanson

09.12-22.12
Juleutstilling

1988

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:40:46 +0200

06.02-28.02
Malte tekstilflater
Tone Saastad

06.02-28.02
Keramiske mugger og kopper
Audhild J. Rypdal

05.03-27.03
Maleri
Gunnhild Bakke

05.03-27.03
Installasjon
Arne Isaksen

01.03-31.01
Relieff
Torill Bleiklie

09.04-08.05
Communicare
Kari Hauge

01.05-31.05
Foto
Eli Minck

21.05-19.06
Festspillutstilling
Camilla Wærenskjold

15.06-03.07
Installasjon
Nils Olav Bøe

01.07-31.08
Landsdelsutstillingen
Norske Kunsthåndverkere

03.09-25.09
Biletframsyning
Kurt Johannessen

01.10-30.10
Tekstil/Tegning
Unn Sønju, Liisa F. de Corral

12.11-27.11
Tekstil
Ellen Svendsen, Lise Simonnæs

12.11-27.11
Metallinstallasjon
Pål Vigeland

03.12-11.12
Juleutstilling/Medlemsutstilling
NKHSF, BKFH

1987

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:39:45 +0200

10.01-25.01
Brian Catling

29.01-15.02
"Nybrott"
Pontus Kjerrmann

21.02-15.03
Åse Eriksen

21.03-12.04
Anne Sherburne

25.04-10.05
Anne Sophie Blytt

20.05-14.06
Festspillutstilling
Rigmor Hovland

18.06-28.06
Sommerutstilling
Lucy Le Feure

01.08-16.08
Sommerutstilling
Milli Mority

05.09-27.09
Eva Kun

10.10-01.11
Richard Slee

10.10-01.11
Tobjørn Kvasbø, Anne Beate Tempelhaug

08.11-15.11
"Frå søndag til søndag"

21.11-13.12
Annette Koefoed

1986

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:37:37 +0200

18.01-09.02
Contemporary Jewelery

15.02-02.03
Marit Benthe Norheim

08.03-23.03
Inge Jensen

26.04-11.05
Dafinn Koch, Yngve Næsheim

24.05-15.06
Flags
Elsebet Rahlff

28.06-24.08
Kites
Egil Røed, Terje Westfoss, Truls Hansen,
Jennifer Lloyd, Inger Haugen, Kari Hauge

13.09-06.10
Nina Jo Melbøe

18.10-09.11
Kom jeg- går jeg
Gry Eide, Kjell Hommerstad, Agnes Guttormsgaard,
Gro Jessen, Kari Bugge Gjerstad, Marit Tingleff,
Beret Aksnes, Harald Solberg, Arne Aalberg,
Svein Ove Kirkhorn

16.11-23.11
From sunday to sunday

29.11-18.12
Glass
Karen Klim, Maud Forsblad, Helena Dahlgren,
Pia Sverrisdottir, Ulla Mari Bratenberg, Lena Ljungar,
Jesper Sødring, Else Leth Nissen, Ida Løchen,
Peter Svarrer, Ragnar Klenell, Åsa Brandt,
Per-Rene Larsen, Helene Sandegård, Peter Layton,
Eva Älmeberg

1985

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:31:04 +0200

28.09-20.10
Opening exhibition at Klosteret 17
Jeanette Christensen, Ellinor Hedemann, Kurt Johannesen,
Elsebet Rahlff, Inger Johanne Rasmussen, Lise Simonnæs,
Inger Haugen Solaas, Ann Beate Tempelhaug, Gunnar Thorsen,
Bjørn-Sigurd Tufta

26.10-17.11
12 artists from Lübeck

23.11-15.12
Anne Christensen, Ellinor Flor, Bente Ulvik

On space and spatiality - Maija Rudovska

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 13:12:24 +0200

LINK TO THE TEXT

Artist talk: Omer Fast

Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:18:46 +0200

By using the eye witness as his source, Omer Fast bases his meticulous filmed narratives on experienced life. His works balance in between the plausible and the fictional, avoiding the strictly documentary, strictly narrative, strictly fictional, strictly anything, to create the nuances that easily disappear in mainstream media and intensify certain aspects of current debate.

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Omer Fast (1972, Jerusalem), lives and works in Berlin. His recent solo exhibitions include in 2009 the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the South London Gallery, England and in 2011 Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; La Caixa Forum, Barcelona and Netherlands Media Arts Institute, Amsterdam. His work has been included in several group exhibitions, such as Illuminations at the 54^th Venice Biennale and Speaking Memory, Stroom, Den Haag (2011) and Talking Heads, The Irish Museum of Contemporary Art (IMOCA), Dublin (2010), as well as in Manifesta 7, Trento and The Whitney Biennial, New York in 2008. He was commissioned to make a project for Performa 09, New York (2009): Talk Show, and is currently working on his first feature film.

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This artist talk is made possible with the support of the City of Bergen.

Shot Through

Thu, 26 May 2011 10:30:14 +0200

Yet the history of these two art forms is more intertwined than one would expect. At times each seems to strive for the condition of the other. Since the nineteenth century, textile artists have sought to revivify their medium by emulating the exactitude and fine grain of the photographic print. Photographers, in turn, have sometimes seemed to hunger for the inherent abstraction and process-driven logic imparted by the loom. And there are other points of connection too: the origin of digital computing (now the technology in which photography generally occurs) in the mechanics of Jacquard looms; the use of photos as sources for weavers’ printing plates; and that signature image type of modern life, the fashion photo.

This exhibition seeks to trace the exchange of these two media in miniature. It brings together four disparate contemporary works that create photographic images in a weave; each perches somewhere between loom and camera.

Works in the exhibition by Chuck Close, Lia Cook, Kari Dyrdal, Johanna Friedman, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Kate Nartker and Karina Presttun.

The exhibition is curated by art historian Glenn Adamson, Head of Research and of Graduate Studies at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

The exhibition is supported by The Norwegian Association for Arts and Crafts.

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GIUDED TOURS IN THE EXHIBITION

Sunday November 13th at 2 P.M.
Wednesday November 30th at 5 P.M.
Friday December 16th at 12 Noon

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ABOUT THE 35-YEAR PROGRAMME AT HORDALAND ART CENTRE

2011 marks the 35^th year of the Hordaland Art Centre, and we are creating a programme exploring ideas of histories and futures based on different thematics and institutional frameworks.

Do we need to re-lecture the past? How do we prepare for the future? These are two immanent questions to ask in the present. Is it possible to act as if the present is suspended above both history and future? Or is it lurking below both? Maybe is it weighed down by history at the same time as it is longing and striving for the future? These and other related questions will be asked in this one year programme containing six exhibitions, several lectures and seminars, as well as text production and publications.

This anniversary programme intentionally avoids the institution’s self-mythologising approach, but rather focuses on the idea of history and future as the present’s support structure. Nostalgia and hope are two component of how we long for what has been and what is to come, and can act as poetic notions to understand the present.

Omer Fast - Nostalgia

Tue, 24 May 2011 10:55:01 +0200

GUIDED TOURS IN THE EXHIBITION

Sunday July 10^th at 2 PM (English)
Wednesday July 20^th at 5 PM (English)
Friday August 5^th at 5 PM (Norwegian)
Wednesday August 10^th at 5 PM (Norwegian)

By using the eye witness as his source, Omer Fast builds his meticulous filmed narratives on experienced life. His works balance in between the plausible and the fictional, and the nerve running through the loops, screens and projections is that of sympathy, possibly even empathy. Nostalgia (2009) is a three part video loop work that takes as its starting point interviews with immigrants to the UK. The immigrants become the storytellers, and through what will seem like a post-apocalyptic society to European eyes we ourselves are turned into eyewitnesses of the immigrant’s obstacles and hurdles as “we” try to seek refuge in the alluringly peaceful and prosperous Africa.

The proposition in the work is simple enough and puts a situation real to many on its head, which is an old trick of the storyteller trade utilised to let “truth” shine through. But the proposition of the work also creates a complex web of questions important to the Northern European context. It is naïve to think that everyone, had they had the opportunity, will uproot and migrate. At the same time it is naïve to think that any and all migration is voluntary. In the tension between these statements is a vast landscape of reasons, duties, hopes, dreams and forces. Unfortunately we are not able to see this landscape in the media images and broadcast debates, which make this particular art work an important piece to see, discuss and experience.

By taking advantage of the inherent ideals of video art, that of avoiding the strictly documentary, strictly narrative, strictly fictional, strictly anything, Fast has the ability to create the nuances that easily disappear in the mainstream and intensify certain aspects of current debate. Now, this can of course be said about much art and many an artist, but it is worth repeating one too many times, to remind ourselves that life truly is many faceted.

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This exhibition is produced by Hordaland Art Centre with the support of the City of Bergen.
Nostalgia was commissioned by the South London Gallery, the Berkeley Art Museum and the Friends of the National Galerie in Berlin.

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ABOUT THE 35-YEAR PROGRAMME AT HORDALAND ART CENTRE

2011 marks the 35^th year of the Hordaland Art Centre, and we are creating a programme exploring ideas of histories and futures based on different thematics and institutional frameworks.

Elsebeth Jørgensen - Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image

Mon, 23 May 2011 15:34:16 +0200

The outcome of this invitation will be diverse, and consist of a two part solo exhibition, located within Hordaland Art Centre and the large glass spaces located on the façade at the Picture Collection on street level; a series of public lectures, a seminar at the University of Bergen and communal walk-and-talks during the exhibition period.

Jørgensen’s works have for many years circled different ideas of documentation of places, historicity and montage storytelling, as well as how archiving processes and construction of collective memory implies both ambivalence as well as dilemmas in relation to ideas of preservation, selection, the creation of systems and the meaning of the subjective gaze.

During one year she has observed the whole archive, and in Ways of Losing Oneself in an Image she groups historical documents with her own registrations. The project arises out of an interest in the potential for poetic narratives within the archive, and the inaccessible part of the collection: the not yet registered material, as well as the site’s own meta-archive material. In Elsebeth Jørgensen’s process fact is mixed with fiction, and she reflects on how historical information just as well can be a hypothetical pondering of our notion of the future.

A book will be produced following the exhibition with text contributions by Solveig Greve (Senior Academic Librarian, The Picture Collection of the University of Bergen), Anne Szefer Karlsen (curator and director of Hordaland Art Centre), Michnea Mircan (curator and director of Extra City, Antwerp), Sanne Kofod Olsen (art historian and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde) and Joacim Sprung (PhD candidate in Art History and Visual Culture, Copenhagen University Amager).

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Elsebeth Jørgensen (1970, DK) works conceptually and site related with photography, video, sound and spatial montages emerging from long-term research projects, very often in historical archives. After her education at Royal Danish Academy (1995-2002) she has shown in several group exhibitions. Selected solo exhibitions include Cinemagic Tour at Overgaden, Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen (2005), the three part exhibition Cinemagic Tour: Scenes from an Imaginary Place, Deveron Arts, Huntly, Aberdeenshire (2005-06) and Arkivet: Cinemagic Tour & Crystal Palac, Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde (2010).The last ten years she has made several exhibitions and publications in collaborative projects with other artists and writers. Elsebeth Jørgensen founded and ran APPENDIKS in Copenhagen – a project space for contemporary art, visual culture, theory and publication, together with Pia Rönicke, Jacob Fabricius and Lotte Boesen (2003-2004). Parts of her practice is realised through developing works for extended art spaces, like the project Unofficial Deposited Records in collaboration with Pia Rönicke, Tate Modern, London (2005-2010).

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The exhibition and book is produced by Hordaland Art Centre, supported by The Picture Collection of the University of Bergen, BKH-project support from Hordaland Art Centre, Culture Point North, and Danish Art Council.
Ways of Losing oneself in an image – Elsebeth Jørgensen is curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen.

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ABOUT THE 35-YEAR PROGRAMME AT HORDALAND ART CENTRE

2011 marks the 35^th year of the Hordaland Art Centre, and we are creating a programme exploring ideas of histories and futures based on different thematics and institutional frameworks.

Master night: Espen Johansen - The art of Terence Koh: "artist's artist or the most popular artist?"

Mon, 23 May 2011 13:31:36 +0200

Although Koh’s works in recent years have been shown at major museums and art institutions around the world, there are only a few publications dealing with Koh’s art. On the other hand, there are countless articles about the celebrity Koh, in fashion magazines, online newspapers and hip art blogs. Here, Koh is often portrayed as an eccentric artist who lives a jet set life in high society, and in Johansen’s opinion his works are not given the attention they deserve.

Amazed that not more is written about Koh’s art, Johansen has devoted his thesis to some of his central works. On the basis of his readings, he places Koh within an art historical context and examines how art theoretical perspectives promote alternative understandings of the works. For example, the concept of romanticism grasps several key aspects of his works, such as his accentuation of the artist-subject, and Nicolas Bourriaud’s semionaut-concept may shed light on Koh’s repeated use of religious symbols and (art-) historical references.

Espen Johansen finished his master's thesis in art history at the University of Bergen earlier this month. Besides studies, Johansen has led the student council in art history over the past year, and works as a gallery host and cafeteria worker at Hordaland Art Centre, and as a communicator at the Bergen Kunstmuseum. He has also held commissions at other institutions, such as the Bergen International Festival, B-open and Borealis.

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Eva Rem Hansen is responsible for this program and Master Night is made possible due to good help from the study committee of Art History at the University of Bergen.

Launch: Kuk & Parfyme zine and lecture by Tim Stüttgen

Thu, 19 May 2011 07:44:54 +0200

Through this issue of Kuk & Parfyme zine the editors Ingrid Forland and Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg focus on the gaze in film and video, and together with the contributors Kaja Cxzy Andersen, Madeleine Bernstorﬀ, Thelma Bonavita, Matilda Carlid, Ulrike Feser, Aksel Kielland, Ninna Poulsen, Julia Schönstädt, Nicolas Siepen, Slaves, Stine Sterk, Tim Stüttgen, Terre Thaemlitz and Livie Yo they explore the potential of another gaze.

The lecture is held in English:

While positioning myself in the tradition of pro-sex-feminism, queer activism and post-pornography, drawing on, amongst others, feminist performance artist Annie Sprinkle, film theorist Linda Williams and queer philosopher Beatriz Preciado, this lecture interrogates the wider context of the pornography-debate and its historicities in feminist and queer discourses, including the anti-porn-positions of Linda Dworkin and Catherine A. Mac Kinnon, the sex and cultural wars of censorship during and after the Reagan era, and the debates around the dramatization of sexual panic and paranoia including the aids-panic and new forms of gouvernmentality and commerce (Linda Singer), the childsex-paranoia (Laura Kipnis) and the trafficking discourse (Laura Agustin).

Through providing this context, post-pornography can be contextualized as one reaction on these multiple discourses, which were partly hijacked by the conservative and christian right. A postpornographic perspective, I argue, should not be read as a plain avantgardistic „beyond“ of classic feminist and queer discussions of pornography and its ab/uses, but in the centre of bringing a genre to its paradoxical limits.

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Tim Stüttgen has studied Film Studies, Fine Art and Gender_Queer Theories in London, Hamburg, Maastricht and Berlin. His research covers issues such as the history of pornography and post/pornography, performance art, the visual histories of black liberation and post/slavery, sexwork, Foucault and Deleuze/Guattari. As curator and activist he has organised symposia, conferences and festivals like Post / Porn / Politics (2006, Volksbüne Berlin), Genderpop! (2008, Goethe-Institut Athen) and What´s Queer About Queer Pop? (2010, Hebbel-Am-Ufer Berlin). He writes for various political and cultural magazines in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Since six years he performs as the drag queen Timi Mei Monigatti. He lives and works in Berlin. His latest publication is Post Porn Politics – The Symposium Reader on b_books, Berlin.

Kuk & Parfyme existed as a film club between 2009 and 2010 within the Kurant Visningsrom in Tromsø. The aim of Kuk & Parfyme Film Club was to screen films discussing film and sexuality. They screened films inbetween queer trash art and political horror, such as W.R: Mysteries of the Organism by Dusan Makavejev, The Cockettes by Bill Weber/David Weissman and Tornerose var et vakkert barn by Jytte Rex.

The editors of Kuk & Parfyme zine are Ingrid Forland and Vebjørn Guttormsgaard Møllberg, who both are graduates from the Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art. Vebjørn also works with video and music, and Ingrid works with drawings and publications in space and on paper.

Seminar: B-open 2011 - Visions: Upheavals and Unpractical Ideas

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 19:26:29 +0200

Starting from the concept of visions – that of being visionary, foresighted, future thinking – B-open wishes to discuss to what degree contemporary artists relate to an imagined future.

Mining the past and archives are thematic and methodical ghosts in much of contemporary art production. Looking back is motivated and shaped by many different agendas. It can be justified by the artist wanting to use the past’s visions to evaluate the present, or it can originate in a critique of the archives and institutions shaping history writing. Then again, the artist’s glance at the future could be an attempt to intervene in coming history writing, creating what can be seen as a visionary project.

The tendency to look back has been criticised for cultivating nostalgia and sentimentality, yet has also been defended as important contributions to developing a critical consciousness of history. The idea that it is no longer possible to create anything new comes from a broad political and philosophical critique of Modernity and its faith in progress and utopias. In relation to this discussion it is important to focus on art and the artist role, since our understanding of both is closely linked to Modernity.

Modernity tied the artist to the idea of the visionary: Its image of an artist is that of the one who can see further than the non-artist. From psychoanalysis, which also is an invention of Modernity, the idea emerged that the artist through her own sub-consciousness could show and interpret the collective sub-consciousness, thus part take in public as a truth witness. It is possible to argue that the ideas of the artist as a visionary and a truth witness was fractioned by Post-Modernism, when the artist started to act as a cultural DJ, autonomy yielded to populism and high- and low culture was supposedly dissolved.

We want to discuss: Is it in our time, in this historical moment, possible to make or to think something new and to escape the refrain that everything is already done?

11:00-11:15 Velcome
11:15-11:30 Introduction
11:30-12:30 Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn
12:30-13:30 Jakob H. Jakobsen
13:30-14:30 Lunch
14:30-15:30 Per-Oscar Leu
15:30-16:30 Charles Esche
16:30-17:00 Discussion

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The seminar is free and open to all, coffee/tea is included.

Visions: Upheavals and Unpractical Ideas is curated byToril Johannessen and Anne Szefer Karlsen. Seminar producer: Azar Alsharif. Thanks Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Creative Curating.

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B-open wants to take part in the debate and reflection surrounding the artist as contributor to society at large, and aim to organise challenging, interesting and memorable events for both art professionals and the general public.

B-open was initiated and is run jointly by the two artist unions Bildende Kunstneres Forening Hordaland (BKFH) and Norske Kunsthåndverkere Vest-Norge (NKVN), in collaboration with Hordaland Art Centre (HKS).

B-open reading group

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 12:17:33 +0200

B-open has chosen Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) by Matteo Pasquinelli for the reading. The introduction and chapter 1, Animal Spirits: A Conceptual Bestiary will be the vantage point for the discussion.

The term "animal spirits" was coined by the economist John Maynard Keynes, describing the spontaneity and human motivations behind the apparent rationality of the economy. Pasquinelli applies the concept to media theory and discusses how human and material forces are part of the basis of a network culture that is often regarded as immaterial and frictionless. The digital communication society is not detached from our physical reality, Pasquinelli points out, criticizing how this is overlooked and feed a false perception of the common created by network society as egalitarian and free.

Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer, curator and researcher based in Amsterdam and Berlin. He has written and lectured extensively on topics related to knowledge economy, cognitive capitalism and media culture.

The text is in English and the event is open for English speaking participants.

Please e-mail toril.johannessen [a] gmail.com for registration.
The texts will be provided by registration.
Limited seats. Participation is free.

Screening: Eyal Sivan - The Specialist (1999)

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 21:28:32 +0200

Inspired by Hannah Arendt's controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem, report on the banality of evil, Eyal Sivan presents the The Specialist, a documentary film, drawn entirely from 350 hours of rare footage, edited to present the incredible trial of a most ordinary man, Adolf Eichmann, the chief of SS transportation who was largely responsible for the logistics of the "Final Solution." The trial takes place in Jerusalem in 1961.

The Specialist is a straight-forward and matter-of-fact presentation of the modern criminal. It is about obedience and responsibility, the terror of ordinariness to the ends of indifference towards facing evil, while being confronted with the confused rage of witnesses testifying against a perpetrator of the Third Reich.

If not Us, Who? If not Now, When? - Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:41:39 +0200

If not Us, Who? If not Now, When? (2010-11) is a frozen street protest, animated by the public, as well as being the first part of the exhibition project The Bergen Accords curated by Sarah Rifky.

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Anetta Mona Chişa (1975, Romania) and Lucia Tkáčová (1977, Slovakia), have been working in collaboration since 2000. They work across a variety of media including video, drawing and sculpture, often employing performance, intervention, language and game tactics in their acts. Their recent exhibitions include Figura cuncta vedentis at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; How to Make a Revolution at MLAC, Rome; andThe Making of Art at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. They are representing Romania in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).They both graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Mona Chişa and Tkáčová, currently live and work in Prague.

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The living sculpture is produced by Hordaland Art Centre.

The Bergen Accords - Oraib Toukan, Anetta Mona Chişa & Lucia Tkáčová and Eyal Sivan curated by Sarah Rifky

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:27:44 +0200

GUIDED TOURS IN THE EXHIBITION

Friday May 13^th 12 PM
Sunday May 29^th 2 PM
Wednesday June 8^th 5 PM

Curator Sarah Rifky writes: In principle, “an accord” is a mutual agreement, between two or more parties. The agreement is in essence, a political one; it connotes “the social accord,” the instant we give up our sovereignty as citizens to a government or other authority, in the name of maintaining social order through “the rule of law.” Arguably, the (art) institution is a legal body that functions within similar parameters of publicly endowed trust, between written and unwritten agreements. It exists through structures of governance; it is accountable to its representative boards, be they elected or appointed, rendering the institution, through common understanding, accountable to its audience, its public.

Within these edifices of contracts and common agreements, a cluster of questions starts to amass: What types of participation are condoned, accepted, supported and allowed within the institution? Can mutual understanding be fortified through a breach of trust or displacement of expectation? Can curatorial and artistic tactics of engagement with(in) the institution reveal not only its politics, but elucidate a particular political condition? What tools are at our disposal, as visitors, as guests to the institution, as parties within an implied accord, within the actual, social and discursive spaces the institution has founded?

The Bergen Accords are playfully named after the nuances and failures of the 1993 Oslo Accords – a political accord that has become normalized in our cache of historical understandings, as it has recessed in local and global memory, together with its array of annexes, secret and lost documents, and back channel negotiations – suspect of the unsettled status-quo of peace procedures between Israel and Palestine, almost two decades later.

As a site-specific preamble to the accords, Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová stage their living sculpture If not Us, Who? If not Now, When? at Torgallmenningen square, simultaneous to the May 1^st manifestations, celebrating the International Worker's Day or Labour Day. The “sculpture”, a frozen street demonstration, crowned with blank banners and empty posters, recalls popular revolts and mass protests; it is activated by passers-by who throw coins into a bowl, animating the protestors. The demonstration, controlled by a financial transaction—frame-by-frame—alludes to deficit and recession, demonstration governed by income, whilst signaling to the governing of public space: stated and unstated means of control, to which we consent through performing our social, economic and political roles, everyday.

The Bergen Accords as an exhibition, is a shorthand, for a series of invitations, conversations, procedures, considerations, promises, agreements, transactions and manifestations implied within its presentation, and that form site-specific tangents of thoughts and questions in relation to the place where it is held.

Oraib Toukan and I enter into an unwritten accord through which we negotiate her response as exhibition. The first conversations witness a negotiation of our positions in relation to the hosting institution, the constructed white cube of the Center, as well as the proposition of The Bergen Accords as an exhibition, event and site for negotiation.

What results is This one is for the birds: an exhibition negotiating lines of flight and loops of referentiality departing from the precept of the accord. Objects to her are indexical; they encrypt relations to their environment, to each other and to the implicit structure, and details, of accords. Toukan interrupts the determinateness of the architecture of the exhibition space by displacing an entire wall from its original position to reveal the original foundation beneath. She has invited students at the architecture program of Birzeit University in Palestine to conceive 'A table that negotiates a negotiating table'. Instruments behind classic negotiation sites during the Oslo Accords, Jericho Accords and others are revisited; be it walks in nature, ping pong matches inside the UN General Assembly horseshoe table, or the given bouquet of flowers.

Toukan also makes two further insertions in the enclosing space. Five copies of the formative 2008 essay Postscript to Oslo: The Mystery of Norway's Missing Files by Hilde Henriksen Waage in the Journal of Palestine Studies are placed within the bookshop of the Art Centre, and 17 Chairs for 17 Board Members are borrowed from artist’s studios in Bergen and replaced with chairs from the Center. The chairs are a site of negotiation for the Board of Representative meeting discussing the inital stages of the Name Change Act for the Hordaland kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre).

In March 2011, a curatorial proposition for a real legislative procedure towards the change of the legal name of the Hordaland kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre), was presented to the board of the Art Centre, soliciting their support, as a first motion, to rule in favour for a Name Change Act and, that recognizes the curator's invitation of twenty-six international artists and curators* to propose new names for the institution, towards the act's consideration by the annual meetings in 2012 of the two artist organisations which own the Art Centre and potentially by the following Board of Representatives’ annual meeting to be held in May 2012.

The Name Change Act is a real procedure, which complies with the statutes of the institution. It is a true investigation of artistic and curatorial freedom, and sutures the institutional and exhibition histories of the Art Centre, through allowing traces of the exhibition to enter the institutional archive, through the archive of institutional board meetings, and by giving visibility to standard procedures, such as handshakes, or chairs.

By virtue of the curatorial freedom, afforded to me as guest-curator of The Bergen Accords at the Hordaland Art Centre, I affirm the good will of my intentions, through all choices undergone hitherto towards the successful completion of this project, both within the time frame of the exhibition, and beyond.

Sarah Rifky

* Alex Ceccetti, Boris Ondreika, Carey Young, Dora Garcia, Eriola Pira, Francesc Ruiz, Galit Eilat, Hassan Khan, Iman Issa, Jens Maier-Rothe, Khaled Hourani, Laura Carderera, Maia Gianakos, Nathalie Melikian, Ozge Ersoy, Pablo Leon Dela Barra, Qinyi Lim, Raimundas Malasauskas, Sophia Al-Marei, Tisha Mukarji, Uriel Orlow, Vít Havránek, Wael Shawky, Xenia Nikolskaya, Yael Bartana and Zbyněk Baladrán.

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The exhibition is produced by Hordaland Art Centre.

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Oraib Toukan, was born in Boston, USA, and raised in Amman, Jordan. She holds a Masters in Fine Art from Bard College in New York and a Masters in Information Systems from the London School of Economics. Toukan often combines found text, photo and video within installation environments that use ‘mimicry-as-a-method’. Participation, referentiality, and institutional interventions under the radar, are typical of her practice. Recent exhibitions include NGBK/Kunstraum Bethanien Berlin (2010); The Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon (2010); the Irish Museum Of Contemporary Art (2010); InIva London (2010); Liverpool Biennial City States (2010); and the 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009). Toucan is based in New York and teaches at Bard College within Al Quds University in Palestine.

Anetta Mona Chişa, born in Romania, and Lucia Tkáčová, born in Slovakia, have been working in collaboration since 2000. They work across a variety of media including video, drawing and sculpture, often employing performance, intervention, language and game tactics in their acts. Their recent exhibitions include Figura cuncta vedentis at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; How to Make a Revolution at MLAC, Rome; andThe Making of Art at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. They are representing Romania in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).They both graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Mona Chişa and Tkáčová, currently live and work in Prague.

Sarah Rifky was born in Cairo, Egypt. She holds a BA in Visual Art and Mass Communication and an MFA in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University. Rifky has been Curator of the Townhouse Gallery since 2009, and Adjunct Lecturer of Art History and Theory at the American University in Cairo. Her projects include Invisible Publics (2010), The Accords (2011) and the forthcoming CIRCA, Cairo International Resource Center for Arts. Rifky lives and works in Cairo.

Malak Helmy is an artist working between Cairo and San Francisco. Her research surrounds the relationships between constructions of language and place. Through video, writing and collective ephemeral projects, she investigates ways of building, moving and organising formal and urban structures through logics of bilinguality, diglossia and translation. She received her MFA in Social Practice from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010 and her BA from the American University in Cairo in 2005.

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PUBLIC EVENTS

If not Us Who? If not Now, When? (2010-2011) by Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová is a frozen street protest, animated by the public. This Living Sculpture will be staged close to Sjøfartsmonumentet (The Maritime Monument) on the main square Torgallmenningen in Bergen, on Labor Day, May 1st, 2011 at 2.00PM.

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The Specialist (1999) directed by Eyal Sivan (Documentary, 128 minutes, b/w, 35mm) will be screened at Hordaland Art Centre as part of The Bergen Accords on Thursday, May 19^th, Tuesday, May 31^st and Thursday, June 16^th 2011. All screenings start 7 PM.

Inspired by Hannah Arendt's controversial book “Eichmann in Jerusalem, report on the banality of evil,” Eyal Sivan presents the “The Specialist,” a documentary film, drawn entirely from 350 hours of rare footage, edited to present the incredible trial of a most ordinary man, Adolf Eichmann, the chief of SS transportation who was largely responsible for the logistics of the "Final Solution." The trial takes place in Jerusalem in 1961.

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ABOUT THE 35-YEAR PROGRAMME AT HORDALAND ART CENTRE

2011 marks the 35^th year of the Hordaland Art Centre, and we are creating a programme exploring ideas of histories and futures based on different thematics and institutional frameworks.

Master Night: Linda Myklebust

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 15:38:17 +0200

Myklebust focus on the Bergen based street artist Dolk, and her analysis reveal that Dolk’s works are inextricably tied to their surroundings. The works are a part of the texture of the street, and their existence is contingent on the urban wall.

Although street art originates from the cityscape, it is also incorporated into the art institution, where it is exhibited and preserved alongside the art historical canon. Myklebust asks how this institutional management influences the traditional view of street art as an independent and non-commercial artistic expression.

The presentation is given in Norwegian.

Linda Myklebust holds an MA of art history from The University of Bergen (2008). She has worked as a communication consultant at Rogaland Kunstmuseum in Stavanger for two years. Myklebust lives in Oslo, working as a substitute school teacher, and as lecturer and examiner of art history at NISS – Nordic Institute of Stage and Studio.

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Eva Rem Hansen is responsible for this program and Master Night is made possible due to good help from the study committee of Art History at the University of Bergen.

Collaborative Research Residency 2011

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:16:06 +0200

The research group takes as their point of departure two conflicting political categories: “class” and “nation.” These concepts, which have been employed to articulate two irreconcilable political doctrines (the Left and the Right) today seem to have regained critical importance in the post-socialist countries. Socialism and nationalism have again become co-opted within eastern European intellectual and artistic circles and used to express political discontent. While some artists have joined the class struggle on the Left, others seek ways to revive the national soul on the Right, and a third type try to combine them, mixing, like the medieval alchemists, fire with water (e.g. National-Bolshevism in Russia).

The research group has proposed to examine more closely both the “social turn” and the “national turn,” looking carefully at the gamut of radical left and right artistic strategies that have proliferated over the past decades. They are concerned above all with the geography of these turns. Upon a closer look, one may observe, for instance, that radical art inspired by left-wing politics is not distributed proportionally across the post-socialist map. One may also notice that many artist groups and individual artists who subscribe today to left-wing art, and who are most prominent on the international art scene, come from countries like Russia, a country with an enduring tradition of both socialist political thought and action. In smaller countries, on the other hand, especially in those that neighbor Russia on its western borders (the Baltic States, or Moldova) artists and curators seem more concerned with issues and problems traditionally charted on the right side of the political spectrum. In these countries artists seem more interested in issues of national identity or national culture. It is the group’s working hypothesis that artists in smaller countries, such as Estonia, Lithuania or Moldova, are more aware of their national identity due to their recently gained or re-gained independence. The collaboration will result in a concrete final product: a publication, an exhibition, a website.

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Rael Artel (b. 1980) is an independent curator based in the forests of Estonia. She graduated from the Institute of Art History at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2003, and participated in the Curatorial Training Programme in De Appel, Amsterdam (2004–05). Since 2000, she has contributed to a number of magazines in Estonia and elsewhere, and curated shows in Estonia, as well as in Lisbon, New York, Amsterdam and Warsaw. In 2004–2008 she ran and moderated her experimental project space Rael Artel Gallery: Non-Profit Project Space. In 2007 she initiated Public Preparation, a platform for knowledge-production and network-based communication, which since the beginning of 2008 has focused on issues of nationalism and contemporary art in Europe in the format of international meetings. She is an artistic director of the festival of contemporary art ART IST KUKU NU UT in Tartu, Estonia.

Octavian Esanu (b. 1966) was the founding director of the Soros Center for Contemporary Art Chisinau, Moldova (currently KSA:K Chisinau). In this position he curated, published, and launched the earliest contemporary art events in his home country. He later became a participant in the Theory Department at the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht), where he researched and produced a large-scale exhibition and a two-volume publication; he has also collaborated with the Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (Bremen) on an exhibition-concert and was an artist in residence at the Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart). In 2009 he defended his doctoral dissertation at Duke University (USA) where he researched and wrote on the impact of the socio-economic transition on the post-socialist contemporary art scene. He continues his academic research and writing, in the meantime becoming involved with a new art initiative in New York City and collaborating with art institutions in Europe and the USA.

Indre Klimaite (b. 1979) Lithuanian based in The Hague, Netherlands, graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania, 2001. In 2002 she moved to The Netherlands to study at the Type&Media master course at the Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague. She owns her graphic design studio ILEGAL since 2004. In 2006 she was invited to join the Amsterdam based public art initiative Cascoland. Cascoland works with areas in transformation, activating public spaces, mixing people, changing perceptions, and creating site-specific projects. These experiences inspired her to use visual solutions to work more socially and politically. Currently she is working on a self-initiated project about dying, neglected ‘Soviet’ canteens in Lithuania. Canteens are taken as a symbol of an old political system in a country of political transformation and the project analyzes how values, memory, habits, and traditions change when they clash with another dominating system.

Stine Hebert (DK)

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:16:06 +0200

The anthology project Self-Organised Subjects is edited by Stine Hebert and Hordaland Art Centre director Anne Szefer Karlsen, and will be published spring 2012.

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Hebert is currently working as Art Theorist at Funen Art Academy in Denmark. She has previously been Acting Director of BAC- Baltic Art Center in Visby, Sweden and held curatorial positions at Arken Museum of Modern Art and The Factory of Art and Design in Copenhagen, where she also functioned as Interim Director. Hebert holds an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths College in London and is MPhil in Art History from University of Copenhagen.