October 26, 2018, 6pm
Book launch with a discussion between Lisa Mazza, Lisa Tan and Mette Edvardsen, moderated by Eva González-Sancho and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk.
The book OSLO PILOT (2015–17)—a project investigating the role of art in and for public space—laying the groundwork for Oslo Biennial First Edition is the outcome of a collaborative endeavour by a team of notable artists and researchers, directed by curators Eva González-Sancho and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk. Of sober design, its 600-plus pages are comprised of texts from the twentieth and twenty-first century by a diverse collection of artists: 19 specially commissioned texts and 38 republished texts, some revised by their authors.
The book is structured around four concepts—reactivation, periodicity, disappearance, public—that form a reflection on the effects of temporality on the work of art, investigating, questioning and discussing questions related to the complex rhythms to which art is subject when it enters the public space/public sphere: production, decay or destruction, and reinvention.
The book brings together a wide range of voices, artistic movements, specific historical and political moments and contexts, that operate as a broad open arena given over to art, reflecting the city of Oslo’s long-standing tradition of promoting art projects in public space, the main inspiration behind the impending biennial, with texts by Lida Abdul, Kim Henning Andreassen, Merete Joelsen Aune, Mark Bain, Amy Balkin, Lene Berg, Dineo Bopape, Barbara Browning & Yve Laris Cohen, Pavel Büchler, Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann, Dora García, Mette Edvardsen, Marte Eknæs, Cassius Fadlabi, Jan Freuchen & Sigurd Tenningen, Alberto Giacometti, Félix González-Torres, Matthew Goulish, Johan Grimonprez & Catherine Bernard, Lina Viste Grønli, Ane Hjort Guttu, Flaka Haliti, Thomas Hirschhorn, Liv Kristin Holmberg, Jonas Ib F.H. Jensen, Farhad Kalantary, Mike Kelley, Karl Larsson, Mara Lee, LIGNA, Minouk Lim, Lotte Konow Lund, Inger Wold Lund, Metahaven, Henri Michaux, Juan Muñoz, Miriam Myrstad, Maurizio Nannucci, Maria Nordman, Douglas Park, Matthew Rana, Martha Rosler, Allen Ruppersberg, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Lisa Tan, Lisa Torell, Vibeke Tandberg, Jan Verwoert, Annee Grøtte Viken, Andy Warhol, Haytham El-Wardany, Stephen Willats, Pamela Wye and Knut Åsdam.
The texts have in close collaboration with the editorial team been discussed and selected by four editorial advisory boards, each dedicated to one of the four key concepts, and each including one visual artist, the voice of the artist constituting the nucleus of the OSLO PILOT project.
The book was developed between 2015 and 2017, layer by layer, evolving and mutating over time, like its principal subject matter. This communal project involves multiple approaches to art and the city, a living transformative process that has generated not only this publication but has also made a direct contribution to public discussion in the symposium “The Giver, the Guest, and Ghost: The Presence of Art in Public Realms,” held in Oslo, November 16–18, 2016, from which an edited transcription forms chapter two of the book. Both chapters encompass the idea of the city as basis and pre-existing requisite for certain modes of art production, derived from the condition of public space as the meeting point of diverse agents, identities and interests.
In this way, the book sets out to reactivate the debate on public art as a contemporary, open-ended vision, while also constituting the conceptual foundations for a first Biennial of art in public space/the public sphere in the city of Oslo. In the words of the artist Juan Muñoz, author of En una Plaza (On a Square), one of the texts selected for the book: “beyond this adding and subtracting of meanings, there remains the single realization: we are destined to be the interpreters of presences.”
OSLO PILOT: a project initiated and financed by the City of Oslo, Agency for Cultural Affairs to lay the ground for a premier Oslo Biennial taking place in public spaces and the public sphere.
Oslo Biennial First Edition will open to the public on May 25, 2019, preceded by a three-day preview for professionals (May 22–24).
OSLO PILOT (2015–17)—a project investigating the role of art in and for public space—laying the groundwork for Oslo Biennial First Edition.
Editors: Eva González-Sancho and Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk
Design by NODE
Published and distributed by Mousse Publishing
ISBN: 978 88 6749 342 5
General enquiries: info [at] oslobiennial.no
Oslo Biennial First Edition
The Agency for Cultural Affairs, City of Oslo
Postbox 1453 Vika
0116 Oslo
Norway
