Spring program 2019

Founded for artists by artists in 1921 by the Oslo avant-garde, UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society) is today one of Norway’s core institutions for supporting new productions and exhibiting the practices of young, contemporary artists.

Through Spring 2019, UKS continues this focus presenting Martin Sæther and Özgür Kar, both deft draftsmen in their own rights, who will respectively employ UKS’ main galleries in Oslo’s city center. Synced to the revolving solo exhibitions, YOUNG DUMB & BROKE is a new series of displays mounting simply a single early work by a once young and unknown, today older and esteemed artist. Low-fi, slack goofs, or prodigy pearls—the series explores the quest between young artists’ experiments and the hindsight of recognition and leverage of experience, borrowing its title from a song by American pop singer Khalid. First up is an early work by Matt Mullican.

Considering informal social functions, intellectual exchange, and attempts at friendship as a fundamental part of its remit, UKS continues its MINIBAR evenings while also introducing a new, weekly walk-in-workshop: HOW TO PRACTICE? Starting off the workweek every Monday morning at 10am, rotating local and international practitioners—such as Roderick Hietbrink, Camilla Rocha Campos, and Siri Hjorth & Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas—teach their conspicuous version of this question, serving up their tricks and toolboxes, angry birds, excel, or yoga as UKS serves coffee.

Concluding the Spring program, on June 8–9, UKS presents an international conference—conceptualized by UKS Director and co-founder of PRAXES Rhea Dall in collaboration with co-founder of Lulu Chris Sharp and founder of P! Prem Krishnamurthy—discussing artist-founded and artist-centered institutional models molded to fit the artistic practice.

Martin Sæther: Toile
Opening: Friday, January 25, 7pm
January 26–March 31

Incessant, slow labor underpins the laconic vocabulary of Oslo-based draftsman and sculptor Martin Sæther (b. 1986, NO). Trite toilet paper flowers and knobbly wallpaper surfaces are examined, manipulated, and scaled up by carefully collecting and soaking surplus newspapers, grinding this substance to papier-mâché, and casting large-sized reliefs or tapestries.

At UKS, these wallpaper pieces are mounted onto life-size hand-crafted cupboards, likening IKEA’s infamous industrial shelving system, BILLY. Merging tapestry and cabinet, 2D and 3D, the cupboards—with their white-lacquered surfaces and untreated chipboard edges—change from functional furniture to prop for Sæther’s front-side reliefs, informing the artist’s meticulous reassessment of local domestic objects, decoration, and interiors.

This unremitting nearness or mimicry is a dedication, honoring the collective, memory-loaded baseline patterns of our private possessions. But there is always a glitch. The familiar is askew, aggrandized, gawky, aloof. Shifting aesthetic histories and currencies surface, such as the dated formula of the ornamented tapestry toile, often used in bathrooms and etymologically related to “toilet.”

Employing the UKS storefront galleries, Sæther creates a matrix of modular faux furniture. The chipboard cabinets repeat and recirculate, copy and clutter naïve motifs of decor into a surreal swirl. This is a serial reckoning with everyday aesthetics and its pathologies that also extends into animation and a new publication.

Özgür Kar
Opening: Friday, April 26, 7pm
April 27–June 23

Coming from drawing and graphic design, Amsterdam-based Özgür Kar’s (b. 1992, TR) recent work concentrates on black-and-white video animations. Kar sketches out anthropomorphic creatures—often half-man/half-snake, a motif borrowed from Turkish folk tradition—squeezed into the confined frame of giant flat screens. Whispering monologues of nonsense, tragedy, homoeroticism, and pulp, these archaic figures summon contemporary tales poised between libido and longing.

While rooting his inspiration in sources spanning MTV late-night adult animations of the early 1990s, slow-motion renderings of solipsist rants by Samuel Beckett, and gory X-rated cartoons out of New York in the 1970s, Kar’s primary material is that of social media. His characters are caught in portrait-format—the tablet or smart-phone screen—nearly motionless in their claustrophobic cache. Stenciled out as white lines on black backgrounds, the simple, stop-motion-like avatars are drenched in darkness, both emotional and factual.

Extending the elasticity of this somber dream and its reduced stage directions, in Kar’s new grand production for UKS he moves from single-screen digital animations to, for the first time, building up a whole set of analogue hand-drawn characters, probing his hitherto lone figures as a symphonic choir, calling out.

Martin Sæther’s exhibition is made possible with the kind support from Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond and Arts Council of Norway.

The conference on artist-centered institutions is made possible with the generous support of Nordic Culture Fond, Fritt Ord, and Arts Council of Norway and will take place at Kunstnernes Hus.