Spring programme 2014
Kunstnernes Hus
Wergelandsveien 17
NO-0167 Oslo
Norway
Hours: Tuesday–Wednesday 11–16h,
Thursday–Friday 11–18h,
Saturday–Sunday 12–18h
www.kunstnerneshus.no
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Exhibitions:
Marianne Heier
Orfeus
22 November 2013–16 February 2014
Marianne Heier’s artistic projects relate directly and pointedly to social, political and economic structures in our own time. Through an artistic strategy based on interventions and the artist’s own active participation, she challenges standard views of the role of art and how it is shown and communicated. The exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus takes as its starting point the ongoing financial crisis in Europe, examining the symbolic language of financial capitalism. Her aim is to focus on what the capitalistic system does not encompass, what falls in-between or outside, and how art functions as a parallel value system in its own right. The exhibition brings in antiquity as well as contemporary society, underlining art as a constant and continuous element in the world. Central to the exhibition is the myth of Orpheus, symbolizing the human struggle for expansion and growth.
Jesper Alvær
Mother, Dear Mother
10 January–9 February
Jesper Alvær’s artistic practise is based on a lengthy investigation of various cultural phenomena and exchanges. Kunstnernes Hus presents a new work produced by the artist, Mother, Dear Mother, an installation that combines soundscapes and staged lighting, commenting on installed sculptural objects. The exhibition is the outcome of Alvær becoming a member of every major political party in Norway in conjunction with the country’s general election in September 2013. Alvær involved in the political activities of the respective parties, both prior to and after the election, which provided him with the content for the exhibition. Mother, Dear Mother can be seen as an attempt to describe not only the contemporary emotional experiences of a nation undergoing a political shift, but also how value hierarchies are susceptible to continuous pressure and change.
In These Great Times
Curated by Francois Piron
Participating artists: Thomas Bayrle, Victor Boullet, Paul Chan, Ane Hjort Guttu, Jenny Holzer, Kristine Kemp, Per-Oskar Leu, Adrian Piper, Lina Selander, Mladen Stilinovic´, Sturtevant
21 February–27 April
“Do not expect any words of my own from me.” On the eve of World War I, the Austrian writer Karl Kraus did not demand silence, but claimed that the violence of political discourses should only be repeated, louder and louder, until it becomes intolerable. “My business is to pin down the Age between quotation marks,” he wrote in his journal Die Fackel, where he tiredlessly unmasked the hypocrisy and the infected language of his Great Times.
Repetition is a provocation, it is offensive, it is stupid. The virtue of provocation, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has noted, is that it allows to anticipate, only by intuition, how the ordinary subjections and conformisms to ordinary situations lead to the extraordinary subjections and conformisms in extraordinary situations.
“If we see ourselves in Karl Kraus, it is because, for the most part, the same causes produce the same effects. And what Kraus observed in his times has its equivalent today,” says Bourdieu. In These Great Times is an exhibition of attitudes, a celebration of the evil spirit, a claim for the idiosyncrasy and the negativity of the artistic discourse, and its ability to take part in the Real, not in reality. Do not expect any words of their own from them.
In These Great Times is a documentary theater, in tribute to Karl Kraus. In the words of Erving Goffmann: “To be awkward or unkempt, to talk or move wrongly, is to be a dangerous giant, a destroyer of worlds. As every psychotic and comic ought to know, any accurately improper move can poke through the thin sleeve of immediate reality.”
–Erving Goffmann
Else Marie Hagen
Vokabular
14 March–27 April
The Norwegian artist Else Marie Hagen’s precise and analytical photographs and photographic installations analyze features of today’s normative visuality. They question the image, the meaning that might be derived from its formal qualities and the condition of the image as it appears in a wider social context. Her images are often presented as visual riddles playing on the oscillation between surface and object, the mimetic and the real. An engagement with the materiality of the image is also at work in Hagen’s photographs—the image itself is the subject of her photographs. This is further emphasized in the exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus through an exploration of photography’s psychological and emotional effects on the beholder. She explores the notions of atmosphere and charge in the image through examining opposite concepts like light/darkness, solid/liquid, clean/dirty, and how these are related to the viewer’s personal and collective response, and to the production of meaning in a wider sense.
Stein Rønning
Hierlieu
14 March–27 April
Stein Rønning has throughout his artistic career continuously developed photographic works based on the interplay and careful arrangements of wooden boxes. The arrangements are photographed, then further reworked digitally and printed in a variety of techniques and formats, thus allowing a three-dimensionality to form a complex and compressed picture plane. Through an exploration of the relation between image and object, he aims at manifesting the photograph as pure physical presence in front of the viewer. His photographs may seem primarily focused on materiality and proportions, but in neutralizing photography’s capacity to document, his aim is to trace the growing, historically conditioned redundancy of the photographic medium.
Oslo National Academy of the Arts
MA Degree Show
Curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen
23 May–8 June
Every Monday at Kunstnernes Hus
One Night Only Gallery
Curated by Fadlabi, Tito Frey, Andreas Hald Oxenvad and Jon Benjamin Tallerås
Open Forum lecture series
Organized by Alan Armstrong and Amelia Beavis-Harrison, Oslo National Academy of the Arts
Opening hours bar and foyer:
Monday 19–1h, Tuesday–Thursday 11–23.30h,
Friday 11–2.30h, Saturday 12–2.30h, Sunday 12–23.30h
