Spring program 2020

Founded for artists by artists in 1921, today UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society) is one of Norway’s core exhibiting institutions, supporting new productions by emerging local and international artists.

In spring 2020, UKS mounts two solo shows by, respectively, Portuguese, Amsterdam-based Bruno Zhu (b. 1991) and Norwegian, Malmö-based Eli Maria Lundgaard (b. 1989) who will each create an installation enveloping the UKS venue in Oslo’s city center.

In parallel to the main exhibitions, UKS branches into a set of other programs: Through spring, occasional MINIBAR evenings continue to support informal attempts at friendship and intellectual exchange as a fundamental part of the UKS remit. Flipping this ethos into a daytime ambience, on select Monday mornings HOW TO PRACTICE? invites rotating practitioners to lead walk-in-workshops around their responses to this question. The ongoing display series YOUNG DUMB & BROKE—borrowing its title from a hit by US-pop icon Khalid—focuses on the young, impromptu artistic steps versus later pinnacles of professionalized production, showcasing one early, simple work by a now older, esteemed artist. Up this Spring is a 1996 collage by Oslo’s reputed renegade Bjarne Meldgaard.

Bruno Zhu: Shhhhhhh
Opening: Friday, January 31, 6pm
February 1–March 29, 2020

Treading the backwaters of consumer society, Bruno Zhu’s work links desire and retail therapy with intimate everyday experiences. Preoccupied with the symbolic and political value of objects, he has sewn fabric packaging for mundane commodities, carefully tailored suits for anonymous businessmen, blown up magazine photographs to life-size representations, and runs an exhibition program inside his Chinese parents’ 3000sqm home goods store A Maior in Viseu, Portugal.

At UKS, Zhu moves his focus, flipping the institution inside out. Engulfing the exhibition spaces in thick curtains and velvety walls, Zhu changes the premises into an intimate scenography concealing a male figure dressed in a jockstrap alongside a few, chosen curiosa from the UKS archive. Accompanying these physical elements, gossip, misunderstandings, and other oral tales will be passed on by staff members, who Zhu has carefully dressed for the occasion. Through these blabber-mouthed storytellers, visitors will be offered shifting entryways and sentimental ties to the displayed objects: a Polish Easter egg will prompt private tales of adolescence, desire, and corporeal concerns, while an old snapshot from an in-house event will be re-told through idiomatic anecdotes of achievements and climaxes. Zhu thus makes the innards of UKS converse in whispery tones, fusing its archival ephemera with his own backstories—all hidden behind an imperative *shhhhhhh.*

Zhu’s recent exhibitions include Guts at Kimberly-Klark, New York; Continente at Kunsthalle Lissabon; and Bugs at La Plage, Paris.*

Eli Maria Lundgaard: A Home for Occupants
Opening: Friday, April 24, 6pm
April 25–June 28, 2020

Throughout the last years, Eli Maria Lundgaard has developed an eerie cinematic language, using simple, almost insignificant close-ups of Scandinavian nature and other settings combined with performing hands and a punctuated narration voiced in a soft alto. Pivoting eco- and ethnographic motives of viscera and invasive species, animism and amoebae, Lundgaard’s idiomatically written lines lap at the porous outlines of dominant linguistic and visual language.

For UKS, the artist will populate the entire venue with around 500 tiny ceramic pieces crawling across the gallery spaces. Half of them glazed, half matte-black, the aesthetics of the tiny clods is homespun, carrying the rough imprint of the artist’s fingers, as if constructing its own odd alphabet or system of corporeal codes. Alongside these, a new video will loop. Cued by the body and its imminent state of transformation and decay, the video assembles text and image. Slippery, saturated sentences—pondering resident species such as human microbiota, germs and parasites, circles of decline-and-growth—meet footage including a snake slowly devouring a mouse, and hands, palms painted blue, taking fern leaves apart, piece by piece.

Lundgaard’s recent exhibitions include the Future Generation Art Prize exhibition in Kiev and in Venice; the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art; and the Antarctic Biennale.

UKS’ Director and Curator: Rhea Dall.
For more information, please contact UKS’ Press Officer: Live Drønen (l.dronen@uks.no).

*Zhu’s exhibition is supported by Arts Council Norway and Mondriaan Fund.