Autumn program 2020

Founded for artists by artists in 1921, UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society) is one of Norway’s core institutions supporting and exhibiting new work by emerging local and international artists at our venue in Oslo’s city center.

This autumn—carefully following local health authorities’ advice on audience circulation—UKS mounts two major solo exhibitions, presenting new film productions by, respectively, Swedish, Amsterdam-based Josefin Arnell and Kazakhstani, Oslo-based Ayatgali Tuleubek. Adjusting to the current situation, for both shows, parts of the video works will be available for online viewing via the UKS website: www.uks.no.

In parallel to the main exhibitions, occasional evening events will take place on-site in our newly installed Shhhhhhh bar, a basement speakeasy locale designed in collaboration with Bruno Zhu, borrowing its title and materials from his recent show at UKS. Meanwhile, HOW TO PRACTICE?—a Monday morning “walk-in workshop” focusing on attempts at friendship and informal collegial exchange—continues to invite rotating practitioners as speakers, first up being Melanie Kitti. Further, the display series YOUNG DUMB & BROKE maintains its focus on the first, impromptu artistic output as opposed to later peaks of professionalized production, showcasing one early, simple piece by a now older, esteemed artist.

Josefin Arnell: Wild Filly Story
Exhibition: September 11–October 18, 2020

On entering Josefin Arnell’s first large-scale solo exhibition in Scandinavia, expect a country-and-western style grandstand, silage, holograms, and horse love. Arnell’s exhibition centers on a new film starring a pack of adolescent girls in a stable, prompting questions of friendship, misfit, and normativity, fetishization and female empowerment. Instructed in a reality-show-like manner, the young girls method-act through stages of agitation, thriving on the Swedish artist’s own rural childhood trauma and her recent short-lived career as a porn film director: teens pulling hair, grand stallions being objectified, food fights, horse healing, and “explicit content” kissing. Archaic group dynamics of power and its misuse are pushed forward, lurking just below the surface of welfare society’s supposed safe-spaces and gender equality. In her film, these grim dynamics are coupled with a filmic gaze, hungry for popular entertainment: it’s an underlying rule here that someone’s got to be trashed.

Arnell (b. 1984) has recently presented work at venues including Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2019); Lily Robert, Paris (2019); and Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018). An alum of Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Arnell is based in Amsterdam.

Ayatgali Tuleubek: You Will Meet a Bird with Strange Feet
Exhibition: November 6–December 20, 2020

Ayatgali Tuleubek’s new film centers on the Soviet TV-healer Allan Chumak, whose nationally broadcast healing sessions supposedly made the Kazakhstani artist’s neighbor, who had previously turned gray, retrieve his dark hair. Intertwining the powers of technology and mythology, personal recollection and the political ambience of perestroika, the work reenacts the choreography of the healer’s Reiki-like waving hand movements, performed by dancer Mina Weider and instructed by artist and designer Ida Falck Øien. The earnest belief in screen-based curative connectivity, and that remote therapy can restore the body’s internal harmony, is staged and debated by the contemporary protagonists. Slowly working through questions spanning from the healing of a dissolving superpower’s wounds to personal homeopathy, the actors relate to the frail belief systems and actions taken in times of online communication, financial capitalism, and pandemic contamination.

Tuleubek (b. 1985) has recently exhibited at, among other places, Ca’ Foscari, Venice (2019); the Göteborg International Biennial (2019); and Akershus Kunstsenter, Lillestrøm (2018). An alum of the Oslo Academy of Fine Art, Tuleubek co-directs the artist-run venue Podium in Oslo.

UKS’ core team consists of Director and Curator Rhea Dall; Office Manager Kaja Breckan; Press Officer Live Drønen; and Installation Manager Roderick Hietbrink.

UKS’ main funder is Arts Council Norway. Arnell’s exhibition is supported by The Mondriaan Fund.