Hordaland Kunstsenter

Through the seminar B-open want to explore the relation between language and objects.

We are interested in looking at the function of language as a carrier of information and knowledge, and also the form and process of language itself: How verbal or written articulation takes part in the process of developing objects, like objects of art, and how this affects the way we look at them. Mediation of art influences not only the reception, but also the production of artworks. In light of the increasingly tightened bonds to academia through the founding of academic fellowships and PhDs for artists, the educational institutions affect artists’ relation to verbal and written articulation. We wish to address art’s role as knowledge production, and how this is connected to the use of textual and verbal expression in contemporary art production.

The seminar is curated by the B-open board; Toril Johannessen (BKFH), Liv Midbøe (NKVN) and Anne Szefer Karlsen (director, Hordaland Art Centre).

Time: Friday 30th of October 2009 at 10-15.30
Place: Permanenten, Vestlandske Kunstindustrimuseum, Nordahl Bruns Gate 9, Bergen.

With: Boško Blagojević, Will Holder, Falke Pisano and Mick Wilson.
Moderator: Marianne Hultman.

Registration: hks@kunstsenter.no by 23d of October.
Entrance: Kr 50,- Payable upon arrival.
The seminar will be held in English.


Party.
Party with food and performance at Hordaland Art Centre after the seminar!
Performance with Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.
At 7 PM
NoK 30,- / Free entry for seminar participants.

Reader.
B-open has on the occasion of the seminar Objekt+Verbal edited a reader in collaboration with the participating speakers. B-open has comissionned the Canadian/Swedish curator duo Firth-Eagland/Lund to write, and the Norwegian writer Mette Karlsvik has been invited to participate and write a text after the seminar.
All texts will be published here at www.b-open.no



About the participants.

BOšKO BLAGOJEVIć. Born i Belgrade, Yugoslavia (1983), lives in New York. He has recently mounted a solo exhibition at New York University's Kimmel Gallery, and has exhibited at cinemas and art exhibition spaces across the country. He has lectured at Parsons School of Design, Apexart, and the Emily Harvey Foundation. He has recently prepared a text for an upcoming monograph with Sternberg Press, has published criticism with journals such as Afterimage and Art Asia Pacific and has contributed to websites such as Art in America and Rhizome. He, along with Xenia Pachikov, is founder of Platform for Pedagogy, a New York-based initiative to advance a culture of public lecture attendance and develop the lecture
as form. He is also senior editor at Idiom.

WILL HOLDER (1969), British artist, designer, curator and publisher, which work concerns the relation between language and objects. Holder is engaged in a number of varied collaborations with other artists, notably some where he has taken on a role as mediator for others’ works – i.e. Falke Pisano - and thereby triggers further development and continuous reinterpretation. Holder is one of the editors of the biannual journal F.R. DAVID, and recently co-curated the month long program Talk Show at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

FALKE PISANO. Dutch artist, born in Amsterdam (1978), living and working in Berlin. Pisano's lecture-performances, text-based videos, objects and installations are the elements of a body of work that is distinctly induced by a practice of writing. She has in various ways in her practice researched how objects can have a presence in different ways by making transfers between various language forms, as for instance from abstract sculpture to verbal language in the work A Sculpture turning into a Conversation (2006). Her recent work focuses on the act of speech in relation to different forms of agency in artistic production.

MICK WILSON. Dublin based, British artist, writer and educator. Wilson completed his PhD in 2006 on the topic Conflicted Faculties: Knowledge Conflict and the University, and is author of the essay Curatorial Moments and Discursive Turns. From the mid-1990s to 2000 he produced a series of one-person shows, and the last years he has participated in group exhibitions like Blackboxing (2007) at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Coalesce: Happenstance (2009) at SMART Project Space, Amsterdam, and more recently in a two-person show with Isabel Nolan, Reach Out and Touch Faith (2009) at Gallery For One, Dublin.

MARIANNE HULTMAN was born in 1970 in Tel-Aviv, and she grew in Israel and Sweden. Hultman has been the director of Oslo Fine Art Society since 2007. Before that she worked as a curator at Norrköping Museum of Art in Sweden 2002-2006. Exhibitions curated by her include: Charlie White, Spilling Hot Gossip; The Girl Studies (2009), Maputo, A Tale of One City (2009) in collaboration with Daniella van Dijk-Wennberg and Bisi Silva, and Rock’n Roll Vol I (2007). She has contributed to books and exhibition catalogues as well as magazines, mainly on contemporary art and architecture.

ALISSA FIRTH-EAGLAND & JOHAN LUNDH (Canada & Sweden) are working as a curatorial duo. Together with artists, curators, writers and scholars, they engineer frameworks for artistic and discursive actions. Their collaborative practice addresses questions concerning the development, production, presentation and dissemination of art and ideas.

METTE KARLSVIK is one of Norway’s most talented young writers, winning both prizes and critical acclaim. In 2008 she published her third book, Pol. Besides being a writer of novels, she holds a BA in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art and works as a journalist for daily national newspapers such as Dagens Næringsliv and the weekly paper Morgenbladet.

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Hordaland Art Centre is one of three partners in the organisation B-open. B-open organises a seminar every autumn, and open studios throughout Bergen every second year (not in 2009), and thus create a forum for a diverse discussion on contemporary arts in Bergen.  The two other partners are BKFH and NKVN.

B-open reccieves an annual financial support from The City of Bergen. B-open 2009 is financially supported by: Arts Council Norway, The Freedom of Expression Foundation, Bildende Kunstneres Forening Hordaland (BKFH), Norske Kunsthåndverkere Vest-Norge (NKVN) and Hordaland Art Centre. 

Design for B-open 2009: Elida Brenna Linge