Autumn 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 autumn 2019, UKS is presenting two solo exhibitions by artists Mikael Brkic and Victoria Pihl Lind, who will respectively employ UKS’ main galleries in Oslo’s city center. Both in their own right, Brkic and Lind share a keen interest in the transgressing nature between politics and visual art and the appropriation of language.
 
In September, UKS in collaboration with the City of Oslo will reveal a new public artwork by Özgür Kar, whose solo exhibition was presented at UKS last spring. The season will also continue with YOUNG DUMB & BROKE, an exhibition series synced to the revolving solo shows, which displays 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. 

Considering informal social functions, intellectual exchange, and attempts at friendship as a fundamental part of its remit, UKS continues its MINIBAR evenings and the weekly walk-in-workshop HOW TO PRACTICE? Starting off the workweek every Monday morning at 10am, rotating local and international practitioners—such as Ahmed Umar, Elise Macmillan, and Martinka Bobrikova & Oscar de Carmen—teach their conspicuous version of this question, serving up their tricks and toolboxes, fears and desires, excel sheets, or yoga positions as UKS serves coffee.

Mikael Brkic: Fire and Forget
Opening: Friday, August 23, 6pm
August 24–October 13

Incessantly grilling political actions infringing the artistic field, Mikael Brkic’s (b. 1987, NO) solo exhibition Fire and Forget departs from a study of the Norwegian anti-ship missile, Penguin, developed in the 1960s. Designed to navigate the Norwegian coastline, the missile pioneered a special infrared seeker named Janus after the ancient Roman myth of the God of all beginnings, gates, transitions, past, future, duality, thresholds, passages, and endings. Produced specifically for his exhibition at UKS and not unlike the missile’s trajectory, Brkic weaves an elusive narrative designed to confuse and deflect an audience’s targeted reading.

Like a rebus, the exhibition’s distinct elements—a détournement, or hijacking, of the recently renovated Rococo Hall at Grand Hotel Oslo; motives of rain and of fog; a bust of Janus; and a life-size missile—all point to a void in collective memory. And in this collapsed space of firing and forgetting, the words blikket, du, fanger, ikke, meg (gaze, you, catch, not, me, as quoted from the 1966 poem Blikket by Jan Erik Vold) resonate in ever-changing formations.

Victoria Pihl Lind
Opening: November 1 
November 2–December 14

Casting a consistent set of actors throughout recent years, in her film work Victoria Pihl Lind (b. 1981, NO) has developed a tight-knit choreography of questions on trans-humanism and the schism of privilege.

Building on her recent expansion into theatre and performance, Lind is developing a large-scale installation that will premiere at UKS this autumn. In this new work Lind addresses profound experiences of vulnerability—such as loss, sleep, aging, and childbirth—questioning what might be at stake if these were removed from human existence. In an attempt to visualize such experiences in her work, Lind questions society’s apparent need to desensitize these fundamental aspects of life, in turn emphasizing their workings and roles in the production of art.

Mikael Brkic’s exhibition is made possible with the kind support from the Arts Council Norway and Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond.

Victoria Pihl Lind’s exhibition is made possible with the kind support from the Arts Council Norway.