Toril Johannessen: Deterrence and Reassurance

Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present Toril Johannessen as the Festival Artist 2024. Johannessen will exhibit a new installation across the four main galleries of Bergen Kunsthall, including a new large-scale woven carpet made from military textiles.

Information as material is central in many of Johannessen’s projects, including the development of methods and datasets which form the basis for her investigation. Past works have linked historical contexts and recent technological developments, examining how historical factors interact and shape how we perceive and create reality. Her approach highlights the relationship between art, knowledge production and technology, giving visibility to social structures and events that otherwise remain hidden or publicly inaccessible.

The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall is based on the artist’s current interest in military presence and the geopolitical situation in the High North. The conceptual framework for the exhibition is formed by the concept of deterrence and reassurance that forms the core of Norwegian security policies in the North, with a border to Russia, previously the Soviet Union. With Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 and the war against Ukraine starting in 2022, the security landscape has changed significantly, also in Norway. Johannessen’s project documents and visualises the presence of the military in the landscape and the social imaginary, which seemingly belonged to the past but has, in fact, never disappeared. 

The exhibition presents, amongst other works, an extensive series of silk-screen works, titled Presence, for which a first part was created for the Evenes Air Station, commissioned by KORO, Norway’s national agency for public art. Each work in the series has its theme and method, from personal observations to the collection of colloquial place names hinting at military presence and mappings of linguistic diversity. The exhibition also presents documentation of a second—unrealised—public artwork by Johannessen, intended as a memorial for prisoners of war in Northern Norway.

The Festival Exhibition is considered the most important solo presentation for a Norwegian artist in the country and has been shown each summer since 1953, in parallel to the Bergen International Festival. 

Toril Johannessen grew up in Harstad, studied at Bergen Academy of Art and Design and currently lives and works in Bergen. Johannessen has shown in national and international exhibitions, including documenta 13 (2012), Munchmuseet on the Move (2018) and the Museum of Contemporary Art (2016 in Oslo.

Curated by Axel Wieder and Silja Leifsdottir.

Also opening
Jessie Homer French: In parallel to the Festival Exhibition, Bergen Kunsthall presents an exhibition of paintings and textile works by Jessie Homer French. French, a self-proclaimed “regional narrative painter,” is known for her works in small-scale format that explore themes of life, death, and natural disaster. Influenced by the rugged landscapes of the Coachella Valley area, French captures the interactions between untamed wilderness, encompassing mountains, lakes, forests, and deserts, and the human presence on the edges of urban landscapes.

Even when depicting bleak scenes such as graveyards or funerals, as seen in works like The Sunken Grave (2017), her paintings show a saturated liveliness and formal peculiarity that fills them with a sense of vitality and twists the narrative. Homer French’s themes also encompass the spectre of natural disaster, as in Burning (2020). French’s sincere appreciation for the beauty of wildfires and her ability to convey their power and complexity invites viewers to contemplate the fragile balance between natural forces and human intervention.

The exhibition presents a selection of works made over the past twenty years that give a poetic, associative insight into French’s long-standing artistic practice. In addition to the more well-known works on canvas and plywood, the show also includes a selection of rarely shown textile works, called “mapestries”, which depict fault lines and other landmarks and were designed to be hung above the bed in earthquake-affected areas.

Jessie Homer French (b. 1940, New York) has most recently shown in the main exhibition of the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), amongst many others.

Events
Opening
Official opening on the steps of Bergen Kunsthall.
Thursday, May 23, 1pm

Plattform / Toril Johannessen in conversation
Upstairs and streamed online
Saturday, May 25, 2pm

Cross-border Cooperation—Pikene på Broen
Conversation in Gallery I
Thursday, May 30, 6pm

Radical Mapping—A talk with Philippe Rekacewicz
Talk
Saturday, June 8, 2pm

Plattform / Aileen Asreon Espiritu
Cultural diplomacy at a crossroad—The Norwegian-Russian borderlands. Upstairs.
Saturday, August 10, 2pm