Elisabeth Harr: The Festival Exhibition / Hana Miletić: Patchy

For more than 50 years Elisabeth Haarr has been one of the most significant artists in Norway, working since the end of the 1960s with textiles in a number of different idioms. From early experimentation with the potential of tapestry as modern visual art to political works with an activist message in the 1970s, and later sculptural installations of rugs, banners, figures and drapes, Haarr’s oeuvre made important contributions to the reception of textiles as material in the art of today. Tackling topics such as feminism, antifascism and environmental protection, Haarr’s works are at least as relevant today as 40 years ago.The Festival Exhibition will be her largest exhibition to date and will feature new works in combination with a selection of central works from different moments in her career. 

Haarr’s art is both anti-elitist and avant-garde, at once eminently recognizable and experimentally transgressive. She combines an interest in the materiality and history of textiles with a critical feminist approach. In this way Haarr helps to bring out “a different history,” pointing to the knowledge of textile fabrication as historically gendered, and to women’s often overlooked contribution to cultural history. As with her predecessor in the textile field, Hannah Ryggen, the political protests were clear in many of Haarr’s early works, circling around the women’s struggle, environmental protection and a critique of power. Today the political causes feature just as strongly, but the expression is played out to a greater extent with symbolically charged, materialspecific resources. 

In a new series of works with the title Refugee Blankets Haarr’s political commitment comes to the front through materials connoting care, warmth and protection, created as a response to the current refugee crisis and the media reports from among other places the Moria camp on Lesbos. But the works are also an expression of a more general reflection on the ongoing imbalance between our affluent part of the world and poorer regions. Like many of Haarr’s earlier works, the Refugee Blankets express a fundamental humanism and a social commitment that urges us to face injustice with both collective anger and love. 

The protest banner is an artistic format Haarr has cultivated and developed throughout her career. The exhibition will include several new banners, architectural columns and figures, as well as sculptural draperies that engage in dialogue with the architecture of Bergen Kunsthall. The new works will join a selection of older works and the exhibition will include several works that were shown for the first time in the same rooms at Bergen Kunsthall (at that time the Bergens Kunstforening) in 1983. The personal and intimate also play a central role, and themes like loss, memory and grief are expressed in several of the new works, which are kept in a sober palette of white, black and earthcoloured textile.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a new book with new texts by Are Blytt, Elisabeth Byre, Cecilie Løveid, Steinar Sekkingstad, and a conversation with Elisabeth Haarr and Eline Mugaas. Published by Bergen Kunsthall and Sternberg Press.

Elisabeth Haarr (b. 1945, Hamar) lives and works in Kristiansand.

Also opening:

Hana Miletić
Patchy
A new exhibition by Brussels and Zagreb-based artist Hana Miletić consists of a series of small handwoven textile works from her ongoing series “Materials” (2015–), together with a larger work with knitted elements that covers in an almost architectural way a large part of one of the exhibition space’s walls. 

Hana Miletić has in recent years developed a distinct approach to textile work in which her delicately crafted objects write a different, feminist story of technology and progress stemming from the loom (the forerunner of the computer). Miletić has a background in documentary photography, and she is a keen observer of the social realities that often go unnoticed in public space. While the shapes of her textile works, often described as “patches”, might at first glance seem abstract, they are in fact based on photographs of makeshift repairs that Miletić takes in urban spaces. In this case, the works are based on found repairs of infrastructure, vehicles (such as mirrors, headlights and windows) and architectural elements that were mended in creative, improvised ways.

The reproduction of repairs and the weaving of “patchy assemblages” (Anna L. Tsing) are part of Miletić’s awareness for care and reproductive work, which are still undervalued in contemporary societies. Increasingly incorporating recycled fibres to produce her work, most materials that Miletić used for the works are traditionally found in Norwegian crafts (raw wool, flax and hemp), while others have been historically imported (metals and plastics), pointing to the century-old networks of exchange in which textiles are embedded. With the merging of natural and artificial materials the artist explores ideas surrounding capitalist production and desire, complicating claims that nature is separate from culture, while acknowledging the non-innocence in which she lives and works.

Hana Miletić (b. 1982, Zagreb, present-day Croatia) first came to Belgium in 1990 and lives and works today in Brussels and Zagreb. Besides exhibitions, she facilitates collaborative workshops and organises programmes of talks and screenings with individuals and groups that share these concerns.

Events
Online opening ceremony
Thursday, May 27, 12pm CEST

Platform: Elisabeth Haarr, Eline Mugaas and Steinar Sekkingstad 
Saturday, May 29, 2pm CEST
Conversation 

Bergen International Festival: Amalie Stahlheim
Wednesday, June 2, 2pm, 4pm CEST
Concert, Arne Nordheims Clamavi

Zoom: Art on Screen
Krešo Golik: Od 3 do 22 (From 3 to 22)
Vera Jocić: Najbolji muž (The Best Husband)
Tina Keane: In Our Hands, Greenham
Wednesday, June 9, 8pm CEST
Film screening

Platform: Marte Danielsen Jølbo, Between tradition and innovation – perspectives on textile art in Norway today
Saturday, August 7, 2pm CEST
Talk

Platform: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Textiles and Tensility
Saturday, August 14, 2pm CEST
Talk

The Festival Exhibition  
Bergen Kunsthall´s flagship exhibition was established in 1953 and presents each year a large-scale exhibition with new work by a Norwegian artist, in connection with the Bergen International Festival (Festspillene i Bergen). The exhibition is considered the most important solo presentation for a Norwegian artist in their home country and creates a national debate about the state of the art, similarly to the Turner Prize in the UK.

Supported by the Department of Culture, Bergen City Council, Vestland County Council, Kulturrådet, Fritt Ord, Sparebanken Vest, H. Westfal-Larsen og Hustru Anna Westfal-Larsen’s Almennyttige Fond, Familien Brynildsens Legat, Grieg Foundation.

Press Requests 
Alexandra Saheb 
ARTPRESS – Ute Weingarten 
T +49 (0) 30 4849 6350 / saheb.artpress [​at​] uteweingarten.de 

Stein-Inge Århus 
Bergen Kunsthall 
T +47 45 24 00 92 / stein-inge [​at​] kunsthall.no