@@Hordaland Kunstsenter@@

Vacancy

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:44:18 +0100

Qualifications:

Applicants must have relevant education (MA art/ art history), and should have experience from communication and information work in cultural institutions. Applicant must have relevant computer skills.

Responsibilities:

Dissemination of and information about exhibitions and activities to the public and preffesional filed, as well as tasks related to Hordaland Art Centre's work with art in public spaces and residencies.

Applicants must be flexible and independent, have good interpersonal skills and be able to express themselves well both orally and in writing in several languages.

Salary by arrangement. Part of the work hours are during weekends.

Send application with CV to anne [at] kunstsenter.no by 14 February 2012.

For further questions contact Director Anne Szefer Karlsen e-mail anne [at] kunstsenter.no or +47 97118482.

HORDALAND ART CENTRE is located in Bergen, and was established in 1976 as the first artist-run arts centre in Norway. Our activity is visible through our exhibitions and with equal emphasis on our other programmes in Forum. Since 1987, we have hosted a residency programme. HORDALAND ART CENTRE focus on local commitment in an international every day.

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.

---------

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.

----------
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.

--------

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.

--------

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

--------

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.

Artist books

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:32:56 +0100

“
Anders Smebye
(Torpedo Press)

“It´s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Johan Grimonprez
(Hatje Cantz)

Ambrosia Tønnesen “Steinhugger i det Fine”
Jorunn Veiteberg
(Pax forlag)

An Aggeration of Adversary
Marius Engh
(Torpedo Press)

Artists’ Favourites
Institute of Contemporary Art
(Institute of Contemporary Art)
115 kroner

Riffs
Yto Barrada
(Hatje Cantz)
280 kroner

Pasjon og Polemikk
Ingrid Berven
(ARThus Publisher)
200 kroner

Anne-Sophie Blytt
(2008)
40 kroner

Born in Flames
Lizzie Borden
(Occasional Press)
100 kroner

Portfolio Collection Vol. 42
Inger-Johanne Brautaset
(Telos)
140 kroner

Shadow Lessons
Per Christian Brown
(2008)
250 kroner

Karavane – Victor Linds Monument*
Erling Moestue Bugge
(Ctrl+Z Publishing/Torpedo Press)
120 kroner

The Making of the Means
Ben Cain
(2010)
200 kroner

Conversations 2009-2010
Ben Cain
(2011)
280 kroner

PSYOP Post-9/11 Leaflets
Red: Christoph Büchel & Giovanni Carmine
(JRP|Ringier)
130 kroner

Malerier 2000-2004
Therese Christensen
(2004)
50 kroner

Karavane – Kjartan Slettemarks Nixon Visions*
Boel Christensen-Scheel
(Ctrl+Z Publishing/Torpedo Press)
120 kroner

Len Lye
Red: Tyler Cann & Wystan Curnow
(Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye foundation)
350 kroner

Sketches for a Mechanical Sunrise
Espen Dietrichson
(Torpedo Press)
200 kroner

An Aggeration of Adversary
Marius Engh
(Torpedo Press)
130 kroner

Figureheads
Marius Engh
(Torpedo Press)
75 kroner

Interiør i Stillhet
Lars Staffan Evjen
(2006)
50 kroner

Exercises in Hermetics
Black Friday
(Black Friday)
185 kroner

Classification of a spit stain
Ellie Ga
(dpn)
160 kroner

Steal this book
Dora Garcia
(Paraguay Press)
100 kroner

Desert Interviews
Piero Golia
(JRP|Ringier)
130 kroner

“It´s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
Johan Grimonprez
(Hatje Cantz)
240 kroner

Klanger i Øyet
Carl Martin Hansen
60 kroner

Stille Øyeblikk
Per Helge Hansen
(2008)
50 kroner

Kunst, kultur og identitet
Harding Puls 48
(2010)
30 kroner

Inspirert av Olav H. Hauge og Geirr Tveitt
Harding Puls
(2008)
30 kroner

Substans
Vigdis Hareide
(2006)
50 kroner

Skulptur
Reinhard Haverkamp
(2007)
50 kroner

Dobbelt Hjul
Reinhard Haverkamp
(2009)
30 kroner

Fargens Magi
Synneva Heradstveit
(2007)
50 kroner

Observasjoner
Trine Hovden
(2005)
30 kroner

Line Hvoslef
(2008)
30 kroner

Rituelle, mytiske objekter
Line Hvoslef
(2005)
50 kroner

Arbeid/Works 1988-2004
Arne Ingvaldsen
(2004)
90 kroner

Arbeid/Works 2005-2009
Arne Ingvaldsen
(2009)
150 kroner

My Work and Me
Jahresring 57
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Köning)
270 kroner

Strip the Auctioneer
Christian Jankowski
(NKV)
190 kroner

Natur og Abstraksjon
Aggi Folgerø Johannessen
(2005)
30 kroner

Works
LisBeth Johansen
100 kroner

Om Alt
Kurt Johannessen
(Zeth Forlag)
230 kroner

Fotball med Meir
Kurt Johannessen
(Zeth Forlag)
300 kroner

Kurt Johannessen
Kurt Johannessen
(Zeth Forlag)
240 kroner

Alt og Ingenting
Kurt Johannessen
(Zeth Forlag)
200 kroner

Eg er ein Frosk
Kurt Johannessen
(Zeth Forlag)
200 kroner

Tida før Inkje
Kurt Johannessen
(Zeth Forlag)
180 kroner

Evolusjon
Kurt Johannessen
(Zeth Forlag)
220 kroner

Black and White and Everything In-Between
Marte Johnslien
(2008)
239 kroner

No Holds Barred
Kjetil Kausland
(Ctrl+Z Publishing)
100 kroner

Northern Comfort
Annette & Caroline Kierulf
(2003)
50 kroner

Prospectus
Ben Kinmont
(JRP|Ringier)
180 kroner

Værelser
Anne Knutsen
40 kroner

Estate
Aleksander Komarov
(Torpedo Press)
150 kroner

Retrospective
Steinar Haga Kristensen
(Torpedo Press)
250 kroner

Sierandenfabels/Jewellery fables
Felieke van der Leest
(Museums & Galleries)
225 kroner

Koldnålsraderinger
Anne-Britt Lerøy
40 kroner

Things Contemporary
Alon Levin
(2009)
140 kroner

Åse Ljones
(2007)
50 kroner

Night View from the Soap Factory
Lewis & Taggart
(2010)
50 kroner

Tegninger 2008-2009
Magnar Moen
(2009)
30 kroner

Hendelser på papir og sporet mot det uerfarte
Magnar Moen
(2007)
20 kroner

We Who Feel Differently
Red: Carlos Motta & Cristina Motta
(Ctrl+Z Publishing)
180 kroner

Anne Helen Mydland
(2004)
30 kroner

Raffle Tickets and Midges
Imi Maufe
(2008)
100 kroner

10 Days Skiing from Hut to Hut, Stølsheimen
Imi Maufe
(2008)
500 kroner

Transportør Teleportør
Ministry of Transport and Communications
(2011)
50 kroner

Perliskuu
Torill Nøst
(2009)
75 kroner

Malerier
Rolf Monsen
50 kroner

Malerier
Lillian Presthus
(2011)
280 kroner

Fly me to the Moon
Eik Van der Pol
(Steinberg Press)
185 kroner

Weak Whitepowers
Julie Lillelien Porter
(2010)
70 kroner

Billedfortellinger
Elly Prestegård
(2008)
150 kroner

The Ice Cream Social
David Robbins
(JRP|Ringier)
75 kroner

Rød-Rydland
Vibeke Rød Kjøde & Elisabeth Rydland Nilssen
(2011)
100 kroner

Reading Book Titles
Lillian Samdal
(2010)
150 kroner

I am Trying to Steal it Back
Red: Stefanie Böttcher & Katerina Sedá
(Revolver Pusblishing)

Inside the White Cube
Yann Sérandour
(JRP|Ringier)
170 kroner

Hilde Skjeggestad
(2006)
40 kroner

Malerier
Torunn Skjelland
(2009)
50 kroner

“
Anders Smebye
(Torpedo Press)
75 kroner

When Santya Claus Came to Town with Solvognen
Solvognen
(Torpedo Press)
74 kroner

Arkiv: De ufullendte
Kari Steiheug
(Magikon forlag)
298 kroner

Quadrangle
Leroy Stevens
(Small World)
200 kroner

Hito Steyerl, solo exhibition
Hito Steyerl
(Henie Onstad kunstsenter)
50 kroner

Malerier
Torild Stray
(2006)
60 kroner

Eruption
Torild Stray
(2010)
60 kroner

Arktis Blå
Anne Sæland
(2005)
50 kroner

City Angel – preparing a private space
Bjørg Taranger
(2004)
40 kroner

Urban Mosaikk
Bjørg Taranger
(2010)
30 kroner

Karen Rebekka Vasstrand
(2006)
20 kroner

The Portable John Latham
Red: Anthony Hudek & Athanasios Veilos
(Occasional Papers)
130 kroner

Ambrosia Tønnesen “Steinhugger i det Fine”
Jorunn Veiteberg
(Pax forlag)
399 kroner

What is Positive? Why?
Red: Hilde de Bruijn & Gavin Wade
(Kunsthalle Exnergasse)
95 kroner

Art in Ruins and Unknown Stranger, London 1994, an unpublished project for Frieze
Eva Weinmayr
(Occasional Press)
60 kroner

Through Symbolic Worlds
Stephen Willats
(Control)
85 kroner

Corpus
Kari Aasen
50 kroner

Arkiv: De ufullendte
Kari Steiheug
(Magikon forlag)

Artists’ Favourites
Institute of Contemporary Art
(Institute of Contemporary Art)

Art in Ruins and Unknown Stranger, London 1994, an unpublished project for Frieze
Eva Weinmayr
(Occasional Press)

Black and White and Everything In-Between
Marte Johnslien
(2008)

Born in Flames
Lizzie Borden
(Occasional Press)

Classification of a spit stain
Ellie Ga
(dpn)

Conversations 2009-2010
Ben Cain
(2011)

Desert Interviews
Piero Golia
(JRP|Ringier)

Estate
Aleksander Komarov
(Torpedo Press)

Exercises in Hermetics
Black Friday
(Black Friday)

Figureheads
Marius Engh
(Torpedo Press)

Fly me to the Moon
Eik Van der Pol
(Steinberg Press)

Hito Steyerl, solo exhibition
Hito Steyerl
(Henie Onstad kunstsenter)

I am Trying to Steal it Back
Red: Stefanie Böttcher & Katerina Sedá
(Revolver Pusblishing)

Inside the White Cube
Yann Sérandour
(JRP|Ringier)

Karavane – Kjartan Slettemarks Nixon Visions*
Boel Christensen-Scheel
(Ctrl+Z Publishing/Torpedo Press)

Karavane – Victor Linds Monument*
Erling Moestue Bugge
(Ctrl+Z Publishing/Torpedo Press)

Len Lye
Red: Tyler Cann & Wystan Curnow
(Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye foundation)

My Work and Me
Jahresring 57
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter Köning)

Prospectus
Ben Kinmont
(JRP|Ringier)

PSYOP Post-9/11 Leaflets
Red: Christoph Büchel & Giovanni Carmine
(JRP|Ringier)

Quadrangle
Leroy Stevens
(Small World)

Retrospective
Steinar Haga Kristensen
(Torpedo Press)

Riffs
Yto Barrada
(Hatje Cantz)

Shadow Lessons
Per Christian Brown
(2008)

Sierandenfabels/Jewellery fables
Felieke van der Leest
(Museums & Galleries)

Sketches for a Mechanical Sunrise
Espen Dietrichson
(Torpedo Press)

Steal this book
Dora Garcia
(Paraguay Press)

Strip the Auctioneer
Christian Jankowski
(NKV)

The Making of the Means
Ben Cain
(2010)

The Ice Cream Social
David Robbins
(JRP|Ringier)

The Portable John Latham
Red: Anthony Hudek & Athanasios Veilos
(Occasional Papers)

Things Contemporary
Alon Levin
(2009)

Through Symbolic Worlds
Stephen Willats
(Control)

We Who Feel Differently
Red: Carlos Motta & Cristina Motta
(Ctrl+Z Publishing)

What is Positive? Why?
Red: Hilde de Bruijn & Gavin Wade
(Kunsthalle Exnergasse)

When Santya Claus Came to Town with Solvognen
Solvognen
(Torpedo Press)

Writing

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 13:32:34 +0100

Anthologies and Exhibition catalogues

A.C.A.D.E.M.Y
Red: Angelika Nollert & Irit Rogoff
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

AC | DC – Contemporary Art Contemorary Design
Red: Jean-Pierre Greff
(JRP|Ringier)
220 kroner

Activity
Red: Cristoph Keller
(JRP|Ringier)
220 kroner

Adventures in Art
Sue Hubbard
(Other Criteria)
260 kroner

The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour
Stephen Wilats
(Occasional Papers)
110 kroner

Artists as Inventors
Red: Dieter Daniels & Barbara U. Schmidt
(Hatje Cantz)
200 kroner

Autopsi – Mere end 500 anskuelser
Kristina Ask, Elsebeth Jørgensen & Jørgen Michaelsen
(DPU)
120 kroner

Be Nice Share Everything Have Fun
Red: Stefan Kalmar & Daniel Pies
(Koening Books)
370 kroner

Black Sphinx – On the Comedic in Modern Art
Red: John C. Welchman
(JRP|Ringier)
120 kroner

The Catalyst
Yvett Brackman
(Sami Art Festival)
50 kroner

The Clandestine Histories of the OHO Group
Misko Suvakovic
(Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E)
125 kroner

Code:RED
Red: Tadej Pogacar
(Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E)
240 kroner

Collage Culture
Aaron Rose, Mandy Hahn & Brian Roettinger
(JRP|Ringier)
180 kroner

The Continuous Art Class – The Novi Sad Neo-Avantgarde of the 1960´s and 1970´s
Red: New Media Center
(Revolver Pusblishing)
80 kroner

Cryptozoology Out of Time Place Scale
Loren Coleman
(JRP|Ringier)
170 kroner

The Curse of Bigness
Dexter Sinister
(2010)
45 kroner

The Collected Writings of Jon Thompson
Jon Thompson
(Ridinghouse)
210 kroner

The Creative Act
Red: Tone Hansen
(Henie Onstad Art Centre)
80 kroner

Critical Complicity
Lisa Mazza & Julia Moritz
(Schlebrügge.Editor)
135 kroner

Dear Images
Red: Daniel McClean & Karsten Schubert
(Ridinghouse)
240 kroner

…dontstopdontstopdontstop
Hans Ulrich Obrist
(Sternberg Press)
mangler lapp.

Double Act. 1917
Marysia Lewandowska
(Sami Art Festival)
50 kroner

Duet for Cannibals
Red: Inti Guerrero
(Jap Sam Books)
110 kroner

East Coast Europe
Red: Markus Miessen
(Sternberg Press)
95 kroner

Es Ist Schwer das Reale Zu Berühren
Red: Søren Grammel & Maria Lind
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

Cultural Activism Today
Red: BRAVO
(2007)
170 kroner

A Fiesta of Though Choices
Red: Maria Lind & Tirdad Zolghadr
(Torpedo Press)
150 kroner

Fluxus
Red: Caroline Ugelstad
(Henie Onstad Art Centre)
198 kroner

For All Audiences
Red: Fernando Quincoces
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

From Tomorrow On
Red: Will Bradley
(MIRIAD)
50 kroner

Fundamentalism of the New Order
Red: Charlotte Brandt, Lars Bang Larsen & Christina Ricupero
(Nifca/Lukas & Sternberg)
115 kroner

The Garden of Forking Paths
Red: Lars Bang Larsen
(JRP|Ringier)
390 kroner

The Grand Domestic Revolution Goes On
Binna Choi & Maiko Tanaka
(Bedford Press)
100 kroner

Essays Lectures
Sven-Olov Wallenstein
(<axl>)
175 kroner

Human Condition
Red: Adam Budak
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning)
270 kroner

Expect Anything, Fear Nothing
Red: Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen & Jakob Jakobsen
(Nebula)
200 kroner

Hotel Polar Capital
Red: Hilde Methi & Kristin Tårnesvik
(Sami Art Festival)
200 kroner

Idols of the Market
Sven Lütticken
(Sternberg Press)
145 kroner

Images of Farming
Red: Wapke Feenstra, Antje Sciffers
(Jap Sam Books)
185 kroner

Interlude: The Reader´s Traces
Mariana Castillo Deball
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

In The Poem About Love You Don´t Write The Word Love
Red: Tanya Leighton
(Sternberg Press)
180 kroner

Internal Necessity
Tirdad Zolghadr
(Sternberg Press)
145 kroner

The Inventors of Tradition
Beca Lipscombe & Lucy McKenzie
(Köening Books)
300 kroner

Judgment and Contemporary Art Criticism
Red: J. Khonsary & M. O´Brian
(Artspeak)
125 kroner

Kunsthåndverk – Frå tause ting til talande objekt
Jorunn Veiteberg
(Pax Forlag)
299 kroner

Kunst og Prekaritet
Eivind Slettemeås
(Torpedo Press)
150 kroner

Land of Human Rights
Laila Huber
(Revolver Publishing)
145 kroner

Lapdogs of the Bourgeoise
Red: Nav Haq & Tirdad Zolghadr
(Sternberg Press)
145 kroner

L´oeuvre, plus que jamais
Red: Abdellah Karroum & SandrineWymann
(Editions Hors Champs)
200 kroner

Let´s Talk about Nationalism
Red: Rael Artel
(Public Preparation)
55 kroner

Ballongmagasinets Lydbok
Red: Yngvild Færøy & Søssa Jørgensen
(Torpedo Press)
150 kroner

Maps and Legends
Red: Luca Cerizza
(BSI)
145 kroner

Neighbourhood, room, neighbor, guest?
Oda Projesi
(Revolver Publisher)
185 kroner

Next Flag
Fernando Alvim, Heike Munder & Ulf Wuggenig
(JRP|Ringier)
225 kroner

The Nightmare of Participaction
Markus Miessen
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

The Need to Document
Red: Vit Havránek, Sabine Schaschl-Cooper & Bettina Steinbrügge
(JRP|Ringier)
120 kroner

Norsk Kunstårbok 2010
Red: Ketil Nergaard
(Pax Forlag)
398 kroner

One Day Sculpture
Red: David Cross & Claire Doherty
(Kerber Art)
190 kroner

On Surplus|Value in Art
Diedrich Diederichsen
(Witte de With Publishers)
115 kroner

Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks
Felix Stadler
(Revolver Publishing)
80 kroner

Post/Porn/Politics
Red: TimStüttgen
(B_Books)
230 kroner

Psycho Buildings
Red: Ralph Rugoff
(Hayward Publishing)
330 kroner

Pre-Specifics
Red: Vera Bühlmann & Martin Wiedmer
(JRP|Ringier)
185 kroner

Pop or Populus
Bettina Funcke
(Sternberg Press)
145 kroner

The Populism Catalogue
Red: Lars Bang Larsen, Christina Ricupero & Nicolaus Schafhausen
(Lukas & Sternberg)
250 kroner

Reality Check – Art & Activism Reader
Red: Madeleine Park
(Trøndelag Senter for Samtidskunst)
70 kroner

The Ramallah Lecture
Jakob Jakobsen
(Nebula)
115 kroner

Rehearsing Realities
Red: Francesco Pedraglio, Caterina Riva & Pieternel Vermoortel
(FormContent)
160 kroner

The Renaming Machine – The Book
Red: Suzana Milevska
(Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E)
355 kroner

Retrospektiv: Film- og Videokunst i Norge, 1960-90
Red: Farhad Kalantary & Linn Lervik
(Atopia)
350 kroner

The Road to Mental Decolonialization (DocumentationDVD)
Kuratorisk Aktion
(Sami Art Festival)
100 kroner

Samlede Kunstkritikker
Erlend Hammer
(Ctrl+Z Publishing)
160 kroner

Saving the Image – Art After Film
Red: Tanya Leighton & Pavel Büchler
(CCA/MMU)
150 kroner

See This Sound
Red: Cosima Rainer, Stella Rollig, Dieter Daniels & Manuela Ammer
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning)
280 kroner

See This Sound – Audiovisuology 2
Red: Dieter Daniels & Sandra Naumann
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning)
280 kroner

Site of Sound #2
Brandon LaBelle & Claudia Martinho
(Errant Bodies Press)
200 kroner

Skulpturlandskap Nordland
Red: Maaretta Jaukkuri
(Press)
440 kroner

Skulpturvandringer i Bergen
Anne Helene Falnes Skogland
(Bergen kommunes Fond til kunstnerisk utsmykking av byen)
100 kroner

The Master Builder
Red: Sara De Bondt & Fraser Muggeridge
(Occasional Papers)
60 kroner

Revolution is not a Garden Party
Red: Maja & Reuben Fowkes
(MIRIAD)
120 kroner

Sleppet
Red: Jørgen Larsson
(+3DB Records)
200 kroner

State Legacy – Research in the Visualisation of Political History
Red: Zhuan Huang
(Righton Press)
240 kroner

Space Invaders – A discussion about painting, space and its hybrids
Red: Sabine Schaschl-Cooper
(JRP|Ringier)
170 kroner

Tactics of Invisibility
Red: Gudrun Ankele, Emre Baykal & Daniela Zyman
(JRP|Ringier)
180 kroner

Talking Art – Interviews with Artists Since 19976
Red: Patricia Bickers & Andrew Wilson
(Ridinghouse)
190 kroner

Tekster i utvalg
Håkon Bleken
(Torpedo Press)
150 kroner

Thinking Through Craft
Glenn Adamson
(Berg Publisher & V&A)
250 kroner

UKS-Forum No. 1 - Dream Politics
Red: Marie Buskov, Steffen Håndlykken & Victoria Pihl Lind
(UKS)
90 kroner

Translated by
Red: Charles Arséne-Henry & Shumon Basar
(Bedford Press)
100 kroner

Unofficial Deposited Records, 2005
Elsebeth Jørgensen & Pia Rönicke
(2005)
150 kroner

Urban future Manifestos
Red: Peter Noever
(Hatje Cantz)
205 kroner

Utopia of Sound
Red: Diedrich Diedrichsen
(Schlebrügge.Editor)
180 kroner

Variantology 1
Red: Siegfried Zielinski & Silvia M. Wagnermaier
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning)
410 kroner

Variantology 3
Red: Siegfried Zielinski & Eckhard Fürlus
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning)
400 kroner

Variantology 4
Red: Siegfried Zielinski & Eckhard Fürlus
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning)
450 kroner

Visible
Red: Angelika Burtscher & Judith Wielander
(Sternberg Press)
215 kroner

We Shall Survive in the Memory of Others (DVD)
Vilém Flusser
(Universität der Künste Berlin)
160 kroner

What Does Public Mean?
Red: Tone Hansen
(Torpedo Press)
200 kroner

What is authority?
Henrik Olesen
Pork Salad Press
280 kroner

The way between Belgrade and Prishtina has 28000 un-proper build objects.
Red: Albert Heta & Vala Osmani
(Stacion Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina)
175 kroner

Wish You Were Here
Nynne Haugaard & Nikolaj Kilsmark
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

World Question Center (Reloaded)
Red: Maria Hlavajova & Jill Winder
(BAK)
80 kroner

Wait to Wait
Boris Groys & Andro Wekua
(JRP|Ringier)
130 kroner

The Trials of Art
Red: Daniel McClean
(Ridinghouse)
240 kroner

Artist Writing

Yours Truly
Jacob Fabricius
(Pork Salad Press)
210 kroner

(pause) 21 Scenes concerning the silence of Art in Ruins
Eva Weinmayr
(Occasional Papers)
105 kroner

Red Flags
Joe Scanlan
(Paraguay Press)
160 kroner

Geometries
Guillevic
(UDP)
100 kroner

5 Meters of Poems
Oquendo de Amat
(UDP)
160 kroner

After You, Dearest Language
Marisol Limón Martinez
(Ugly Duckling Presse)
120 kroner

Parrot
Karl Larsson
(Paraguay Press)
100 kroner

I, Coleoptile
Kristin Cmelka & Ann Cotton
(BDP)
100 kroner

A Stack of Books
Triin Tamm
(2011)
75 kroner

The Readymades
John Holten
(BDP)
146 kroner

Momentary Monument I
Lara Favaretto
(Archive Books)
240 kroner

Letter to Robin Kinross
Andy de Fiets
(True true true)
45 kroner

Ventrakl
Christian Hawkey
(Ugly Duckling Presse)
120 kroner

What do You Want?
Marina Temkina
(Ugly Duckling Presse)
115 kroner

“Dialogues” A film by Owen Land
Red: Philippe Pirotte & Julia Strebelow
(Kunsthalle Bern & Paraguay Press)
145 kroner

Answer to an Inquiry
Robert Walser
(UDP)
125 kroner

Alone, Desperate and Going Nowhere
Paul Haworth
(True true true)
85 kroner

Silk Handkerchiefs
Paul Haworth
(True true true)
85 kroner

Shahrzad History
Shirana Shahbazi, Manuel Krebs & Tirdad Zolghadr
(JRP|Ringier)
145 kroner

Three Banquets for a Queen
Charlotte Birnbaum
(Sternberg Press)
120 kroner

Sanctuary
Brian Dillon
(Sternberg Press)
120 kroner

Art Always Has Its Consequences
Dora Hegyi, Zsuzsa Lazlo, Emese Suvecz & Agnes Szanyi
(Sternberg Press)
135 kroner

The Form of the Book Book
Red: Sara De Bondt & Fraser Muggeridge
(Occasional Papers)
125 kroner

Now What? Artists write!
Red: Mark Kremer, Maria Hlavajova & Annie Fletcher
(BAK)
185 kroner

Collected Writings
Richard Prince
(Hatje Cantz)
240 kroner

Pedagogy and Art Education

A well respected man, or book of echoes
Wendelien van Oldenborgh
(Casco/Sternberg press)
135 kroner

Announcements
Departement Medien & Kunst, hgkz und Kunsthalle Zürich
(JRP|Ringier)
180 kroner

Ch-ch-ch-changes
David Mollin & John Reardon
(Ridinghouse)
190 kroner

Engage: the international journal of visual art and gallery education

Issue 12: Book Art Karen Raney
90 kroner
Issue 15: Art for Encounter
90 kroner
Issue 16: Imagination
90 kroner
Issue 17: Regeneration
90 kroner
Issue 18: Research
90 kroner
Issue 19: Diversity
90 kroner
Issue 20: Strategic Interpretation
90 kroner
Issue 21: Art and Climate Change
90 kroner
Issue 22: Young People and Agency
105 kroner
Issue 23: Disability and Access:
105 kroner
Issue 24: Digital Doorway
105 kroner
Issue 25: Family Learning
105 kroner
Issue 26: Marketing and Gallery Education
105 kroner
Extra: Museums and Galleries as Learning Places
90 kroner
Envision: a handbook
105 kroner
How red is red? A toolkit for Art in the Early Years
(Engage)
125 kroner

Estetikk, en innføring
Kjersti Bale
(Pax forlag)
299 kroner

Hva er et bilde?
Siri Meyer
(Pax forlag)
299 kroner

I Need the Truth and Aspirin
Red: Iratxe Jaio, Kirsten Leenaars
(Piet Zwart institute)
95 kroner

Art Institutions and Curating

Publich Preparation
Red: Rael Artel & Airi Triisberg
(Publuch Preparation)
55 kroner

The Biennial Reader – The Bergen Biennial Conference
Red: Elena Filipovic, Marieke Van Hal & Solveig Øvstebø
(Hatje Cantz)
280 kroner

Lokalisert
Red: Anne Szefer Karlsen, Morten Kvamme & Arne Skaug Olsen
(Ctrl+Z Publishing)
200 kroner

Global Studies
Red: Hans Belting, Jacob Birken, Andreas Buddensieg & Peter Weibel
(Hatje Cantz)
320 kroner

Changes in Museum Practice
Red: Hanne-Lovise Skartveit & Katherine Goodnow
(Museum of London & Berghahn Books)
300 kroner

Hvordan Tenke Museum i Dag?
Tone Hansen
(Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo/Torpedo Press)
200 kroner

(Re)Staging the Art Museum
Red: Tone Hansen
(Revolver Publishing)
215 kroner

The Best is Yet to Come
Red: Livia Pãldi
(Zavod P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E)
260 kroner

Contemporary Art and the Museum
Red: Peter Weibel & Andrea Buddensieg
(Hatje Cantz)
240 kroner

Collecting Contemporary Art
Red: Andrea Bellini
(JRP|Ringier)
80 kroner

Post-Propaganda
Jonas Staal
(The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture)
115 kroner

Institutional Critique And After
Red: John C. Welchman
(JRP|Ringier)
150 kroner

Institution Building
red: Nikolaus Hirsch, Phillipp Misselwitz, Markus Miessen & Matthias Görlich
(Sternberg Press)
145 kroner

The Question of the Day
Red: Nicolaus Schafhausen & Julia Moritz
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

Under Construction
Red: Vanessa Joan Müller & Nicolaus Schafhausen
(Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Köning)
130 kroner

A Manual for the 21^st Century Art Institution
Red: Shamita Sharmacharja
(Koening Books)
260 kroner

General Idea
Red: Frederic Bonnet
(JRP|Ringier)
250 kroner

Independent Spaces
Red: Valentina Anker
(JRP|Ringier)
75 kroner

Parallell historia – Skånes kontarenor 1968-2008
Red: Carl Lindh, Emma Reichert & Elena Tzotzi
(Signal)
250 kroner

Forening Marienborg Atelierfellesskap
Red: Kjersti Berg
(Foreningen Marienborg)
200 kroner

Ta bildene ned – det er Krig! BKHF 1931-2006
Red: Åse Løvgren & Stine Gonsholdt
(2006)
40 kroner

Vestlandske Kunstmisjon anno 2003-2005
Red: Hilde Kjønniksen & Torunn Skjelland
(2003)
50 kroner

Art Always Has its Consequences
Red: Ivet Curlin, Ana Devic, Natasa Ilic & Sabina Sabolovic
(What, How & for Whom)
200 kroner

L´appartement 22
Abdellah Karroum
(Éditions hors champs)
250 kroner

---

Curating Subjects
Red: Paul O´Neill
(Occasional Table)
150 kroner

Curating and the Educational Turn
Red: Paul O´Neill & Mick Wilson
(Occasional Table)
180 kroner

Exhibition Prosthetics
Joseph Grigely
(Sternberg Press)

Exhibiting the New Art
Christian Rattemeyer
(Afterall Books)
150 kroner

Kurator?
Red: Thale Fastvold & Tanja Thorjussen
(Locus)
198 kroner

Everything You Wanted to Know About Curating*
Hans Ulrich Obrist
(Sternberg Press)
95 kroner

Raising Frankenstein
Red: Kitty Scott
(Koening Books)
140 kroner

A Brief History of Curating New Media Art
Red: Sarah Cook, Beryl Graham, Verino Gfader & Alex Lapp
(CRUMB)
100 kroner

Individual Methodology
Harald Szeemann
(JRP|Ringier)
145 kroner

When Attitudes Escape Form
Isabel Zürcher
(Revolver Publishing)
145 kroner

Continuing Dialogues – A Tribute to Igor Zabel
Red: Christa Benzer, Christine Böhler & Christiane Erharter
(JRP|Ringier)
145 kroner

The Curator’s Egg
Karsten Schubert
Ridinghouse
150 kroner

Bergen National Academy of the Arts

Sensuous Knowledge No. 1 – Another Way of Knowing
Søren Kjærup
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Sensuous Knowledge No. 2 – The Debate on Research in the Arts
Henk Borgdorff
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Sensuous Knowledge No. 3 – Lighting from the Side
Aslaug Nyrnes
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Sensuous Knowledge No. 4 – Enabling Knowledge
Klaus Jung
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Sensuous Knowledge No. 5 – Unloud
Duncan Higgins
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Sensuous Knowledge No. 6 – Artistic Research within the Fields of Science
HenkBorgdorff
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Sensuous Knowledge No. 7 – Don´t touch me (…) / Commissioning a Piece of Music
Alwynne Pritchard / Roar Sletteland
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Forskyvninger
Tone Saastad
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
270 kroner

Fragments of Matter
Jeannette Christensen
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
350 kroner

El Greco Revisited
Jon Arne Mogstad
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

Närmare | Closer
Caroline Slotte
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

Himmelrike
Christine Hansen
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
150 kroner

Biography of a Photograph
Johan Sandborg
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

Shadpws/Markings/Other Stories
Jeremy Welsh
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
100 kroner

The Transit Zone
Jeremy Welsh
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
150 kroner

Allegoriens Tilbakekomst
Wencke Qvale
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

The Academy and the Corporate Public
Stephan Dillemuth
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
195 kroner

Looking for Painting
Patric Entian
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

Klack Klack
Doris Frohnapfel
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

Border Horizons
Doris Frohnapfel
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
250 kroner

Staged Spaces / Staged Bodies
Karen Kipphoff
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
150 kroner

Pure and Promiscuous
Sunniva Mcalinden
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

Liquid Matter
Dan Mihaltianu
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

Divided Files
Dan Mihaltianu
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
200 kroner

En plass i Solen
Kjersti Solberg Monsen m.fl.
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
80 kroner

Photogravure
Jan Pettersson
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
300 kroner

Ting Tang Trash – Oppvinning i Samtidskeramikken
Jorunn Veiteberg
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
250 kroner

Ting Tang Trash – Upcycling in Contemporary Ceramics
Jorunn Veiteberg
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
250 kroner

Craft in Transition
Jorun Veiteberg
(Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen)
250 kroner

Vær Så God Sitt – Levende Norsk Møbeldesign
Einar Wiig
(Eget Forlag)
200 kroner

Performance

25 – An Anthology for the 25^th Anniversary of BIT Teatergarasjen
Red: Marie Nerland
(BIT Teatergarasjen)

Conversation Pieces
Red: Frederique Bergholtz
(Revolver Publishing)
130 kroner

Experience, Memory, Re-enactment
Red: Anke Bangma, Steve Rushton & Florian Wüst
(Piet Zwart Institute)
mangler pris…

In the Mode of Giving
Red: Ingrid Hentschel, Una H. Moehrke & Klaus Hoffmann
(Kerber)
250 kroner

It takes place when it doesn´t
Red: Martina Hochmuth, Krassimira Kruschkova & Georg Schöllhammer
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

Lecture Performance
Red: Kathrin Jentjens, Radmila Joksimovic, Anja Nathan-Dorn & Jelena Vesic
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

(Mis)reading Masquerades
Red: Frederique Bergholtz & Iberia Perez
(Revolver Publishing)
260 kroner

Looking, Encountering, Staging
Red: Anke Bangma
(Revolver Publishing)
185 kroner

Bodies Voices Memories
Red: Anke Bangma, Deidre M. Donoghue, Lina Issa & Katarina Zdjelar
(Piet Zwart Institute)
190 kroner

Kunsten å Falle – Fotografier av norsk performance og prosesskunst 1966-2009
Red: Jonas Ekeberg
(Preus Museum)
150 kroner

Series of Texts

100 Notes/100 Thoughts - dOCUMENTA(13)

001: Michael Taussig: Fieldwork Notebooks
70 kroner
002: Ian Wallace: The First documenta, 1955
70 kroner
003: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: Letter to a Friend
70 kroner
005: György Lukács: Notes on Georg Simmel’s Lessons, 1906/07, and a »Sociology of Art«
55 kroner
007: Erkki Kurenniemi; Introduction: Lars Bang Larsen
55 kroner
008: Lawrence Weiner: IF IN FACT THERE IS A CONTEXT
40 kroner
009: William Kentridge & Peter L. Galison: The Refusal of Time
70 kroner
011: Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically
55 kroner
012: Vandana Shiva: The Corporate Control of Life
40 kroner
013: G. M. Tamás: Innocent Power
55 kroner
014: Alejandro Jodorowsky; Introduction: Chus Martínez
70 kroner
015: Paul Ryan: Two Is not A Number – A Conversation with Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri
55 kroner
016: Péter György: The Two Kassels: Same Time, Another Space
40 kroner
017: Kenneth Goldsmith: Letter to Bettina Funcke
40 kroner
018: Mario Bellatin: The Hundred Thousand Books of Bellatin
55 kroner
019: Dario Gamboni: The Listening Eye: Taking Notes after Gauguin
55 ktonrt
020: Romaine Moreton: Poems from a Homeland
40 kroner
021: Cornelius Castoriadis: Introduction: Nikos Papastergiadis
70 kroner
022: Suely Rolnik: Archive Mania
55 kroner
023: Nalini Malani & Arjun Appadurai: The Morality of Refusal
70 kroner
024: Mariana Castillo Deball & Roy Wagner: Coyote Anthropology: A Conversation in Words and Drawings
55 kroner
025: Annemarie Sauzeau: Alighiero Boetti’s One Hotel
55 kroner
026: Mario Garcia Torres: A Few Questions Regarding the Hesitance at Choosing between
55 kroner
027: Bifo – Franco Berardi: Ironic Ethics
40 kroner
028: Griselda Pollock: Allo-Thanatography or Allo-Auto-Biography: A Few Thoughts on One
Painting in Charlotte Salomon’s Leben? oder Theater?, 1941–42
55 kroner
029: Mariam & Ashraf Ghani: Afghanistan: A Lexicon
70 kroner
030: Pamela M. Lee: Illegibility
55 kroner
031: Alexander Kluge: He Has the Heartless Eyes of One Loved above All Else
40 kroner
032: Doug Ashford, Julie Ault, Group Material: AIDS Timeline
Bringing a Bottle of Wine or a Bouquet of Flowers
70 kroner

Artes | Musikkfilosofi
Theodor W. Adorno
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Relasjonell Estetikk
Nicolas Bourriaud
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Kant etter Duchamp
Thierry de Duve
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Dette er ikke en Pipe
Michel Foucault
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Den Modernistiske Kunsten
Clement Greenberg
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Kunstverkets Opprinnelse
Martin Heidegger
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Om Fotografi
Susan Sontag
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Det Lyse Rommet
Roland Barthes
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Kunstens Avslutning
Arthur C. Danto
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Øyet og ånden
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Bemerkninger om fargene
Ludwig Wittgenstein
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Artes | Sannheten i maleriet
Jacques Derrida
(Pax forlag)
219 kroner

Civic City Cahier 1 – Social Movements in the (Post-) Neoliberal City
Margit Mayer
(Bedford Press)
80 kroner

Civic City Cahier 3 – Distributed Agency, Design´s Potentiality
Tom Holert
(Bedford Press)
80 kroner

Civic City Cahier 5 – Designing the Post-Political City in the Insurgent Polis
Erik Swyngedouw
(Bedford Press)
80 kroner

Drawing Room Confessions
Issue #1 Charles Avery
95 kroner
Issue #2 Jason Dodge
95 kroner
Issue #3 Miriam Cahn
95 kroner
Issue #4 David Lamelas
95 kroner

E-Flux journal: Are You Working Too Much? Post-Fordism, Precarity, and the Labor of Art
Red: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood & Anton Vidokle
(Sternberg Press)
95 kroner

E-Flux journal: What is Contemporary Art?
Red: Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood & Anton Vidokle
(Sternberg Press)
95 kroner

Escape the Overcode – Activist Art in the Control Society
Brian Holmes
(Van Abbemuseum)
130 kroner

Notes from the Future of Art – Selected Writings by Jerzy Ludwiski
Red: Magdalena Ziolkowska
(Van Abbemuseum)
130 kroner

RB 001201 Der Fluch Des Leguans
Peter Friedl
(Revolver)
185 kroner

RB 020604 Sur.faces
Raimar Stange
(Revolver)
185 kroner

RB 040510 Die Visualität der Theorie vs. Die Theorie des Visuellen
Möntmann/Richter
(Revolver)
185 kroner

RB 050803 On audiences
Thomas Frank/Mark Waugh
(Revolver)
150 kroner

Promexics – Selected Writings (1988-2006)
Liam Gillick
(JRP|Ringier)
110 kroner

Interviews, Conversations and Chit-Chat (1886-2004)
Mike Kelley
(JRP|Ringier)
110 kroner

Mining for Gold – Selected Writings (1979-1996)
Thomas Lawson
(JRP|Ringier)
110 kroner

The Price Club – Selected Writings (1977-1988)
John Miller
(JRP|Ringier)
110 kroner

The Velvet Grind – Selected Essays, Interviews, Satires (1983-2005)
David Robbins
(JRP|Ringier)
110 kroner

Postproduction
Nicolas Bourriaud
(Lukas & Sternberg)
115 kroner

The Radicant
Nicolas Bourriaud
(Lukas & Sternberg)
115 kroner

Chronology
Daniel Birnbaum
(Lukas & Sternberg)
115 kroner

Canvases and Careers Today | Criticism and Its Markets
Daniel Birnbaum & Isabelle Graw
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

The Power of Judgment | A Debate on Aesthetic Critique
Daniel Birnbaum & Isabelle Graw
(Sternberg Press)
95 kroner

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth | Chardin Material
Daniel Birnbaum & Isabelle Graw
(Sternberg Press)
95 kroner

How to Do Things with Art
Dorothea von Hantelmann
(JRP|Ringier)
150 kroner

Time Action Vision
Christian Höller
(JRP|Ringier)
115 kroner

A Brief History of Curating
Hans Ulrich Obrist
(JRP|Ringier)
115 kroner

Theft Vision
Bob Nickas
(JRP|Ringier)
110 kroner

Solution 1 – 10 Umbauland
Ingo Niermann
(Sternberg Press)
145 kroner

Solution 9 The Great Pyramid
Red: Ingo Niermann & Jens Thiel
(Sternberg Press)
145 kroner

Solution 11-167 The Book of Scotlands
Momus
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

Solution 168-185 America
Tirdad Zolghadr
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

Solution 186 – 195 Dubai Democracy
Ingo Niermann
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

Solution 196 – 213 Palestine-Israel
Red: Joshua Simon
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

Solution 214 – 238 The Book of Japans
Momus
(Sternberg Press)
115 kroner

On Horizons: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art
Red: Maria Hlavajova, Simon Sheikh & Jill Winder
(BAK)
200 kroner

On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art
Red: Maria Hlavajova, Binna Choi & Jill Winder
(BAK)
165 kroner

Concerning War: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art
Red: Maria Hlavajova & Jill Winder
(BAK)
190 kroner

The Return of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art
Red: Maria Hlavajova, Sven Lütticken & Jill Winder
(BAK)
190 kroner

Magazines

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:06:00 +0100

A-Prior Magazine
Special issue # 14 on Sven Augstijnen, Deimantas Narkevicius, Joachim Koester
150 kroner
Special issue # 15 on Valérie Mannaerts, Martha Rosler, Allan Sekula
225 kroner

Alphabet Prime
Fall 2009

Kunstjournalen B-Post
nr 1.06. Politisk? Kunstens roller I offentligheten
79 kroner
nr 1.07. 00-tallet
79 kroner
nr 1.08 Kunst som forestillinger om det umulige gjort mulig?
79 kroner
nr 1.09 Feed Your Darlings
79 kroner
nr 1.10/11 Fortida Nå!
79 kroner

Bidoun – Art and Culture From the Middle East
Issue # 24 Sports
95 kroner
Issue # 25
95 kroner

Cine Qua No
Winter/spring ‘11
70 kroner

Concept Store – The Biannual Journal Published by Arnolfini
Issue #1 Art, Consumerism and the Experience Economy
70 kroner
Issue #2Possible, Probable and Preferable Futures
70 kroner
Issue #3 Art, Activism & Recuperation
85 kroner

Dot Dot Dot
#20
130 kroner

Ekfrase
Volum 2 2/2011
160 kroner

The Exhibitionist
No.1 January 2010
85 kroner
No.2 June 2010
85 kroner
No.3 January 2011
85 kroner

Fillip
Issue #13
100 kroner

First person magazine
#4 the discomfort of sculpture
95 kroner

FUKT Magazine for contemporary drawing
Issue #10
120 kroner

Gagarin
Volume 11#1
140 kroner
Volume 11#2
140 kroner
Volume 12#1
140 kroner

Gastronomica
Spring 2011
130 kroner
Summer 2011
130 kroner
Fall 2011
130 kroner

Girls Like Us
Volume 2 – Issue 1
70 kroner
Volume 2 – Issue 2
70 kroner

It´s Nice That…
Issue #5
125 kroner
Issue #6
125 kroner

Journal for northeast issues
Nr.1
mangler pris

Kaleidoscope
Issue #11
65 kroner
Issue #12
65 kroner

Kunst og Kultur
Nr.3 2011 Årg. 94
135 kroner

Kunsthåndverk / khVERK
Nr. 3, 2010
98 kroner
Nr. 4, 2010
98 kroner
Nr.1, 2011
98 kroner
Nr. 2 og 3
98 kroner

Kuk & Parfyme
80 kroner

Lazlo Magazine
#0. On dwelling
125 kroner

Little Joe
No. 2
125 kroner

May
Issue #4
85 kroner
Issue #5
85 kroner

Mono.Kultur
#26 Manfred Eicher Recording ECM
45 kroner
#27 Ryan McGinley: Daydreaming
45 kroner

n + 1
Issue #10. Self-Improvement
160 kroner

No Order
Issue #1. Art in a Post-Fordist Society
165 kroner

Paletten
Nr.3:2011
90 kroner

Petunia Magazine
Issue #1
40 kroner
Issue #2
40 kroner
Issue #3
45 kroner

Pyramid Power
07 spring/summer 2010
100 kroner
08 fall/winter 2010
100 kroner

Rov
Nummer 1
50 kroner
Nummer 2
75 kroner
Nummer 3
100 kroner

Ultraviolet Magazine
#1 The out of the Blue (into the Black) Issue
60 kroner
#2 The ‘And Justice for All’ Issue
75 kroner

Versuch
No.1: Notes and Projects
100 kroner

White Fungus
Issue #11
60 kroner
Issue #12
60 kroner

Wouldn’t it be nice… - Wishful thinking in art and design
120 kroner

Year 2011 is yours for 18€
145 kroner

Parole #1
150 kroner

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.

-----

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.

-------

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.

--------

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.

-------

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.

-------

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.

--------

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.

--------
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.

--------

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.

----------

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

----------

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.

---------

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.

----------

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.

----------

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.

-------

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).

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.

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!

---------

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.

--------

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.

---------

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’.

--------

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’.

--------

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.

--------
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

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

1985

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:31:04 +0200

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.

--------

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.

--------
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.

--------

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

--------

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.

--------

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.

--------

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.