Autumn 2024
Volt is delighted to announce its upcoming programme for autumn, consisting of new commissioned performances, talks, public artworks and a group exhibition.
September 28, 2024
Madihe Gharibi & Sahand Sarhaddi
The Jeanne d’Arc building in Tehran is a historically significant site that once housed a school and monastery run by French Catholic nuns. Since 2018, Oslo-based artist Madihe Gharibi has been researching the building and its stories. Working across various media—from performance and theatre to installation—Gharibi explores the intersection of personal emotion and socio-political reality. Sahand Sarhaddi is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Tehran. Gharibi and Sarhaddi’s first collaboration, the Jeanne d’Arc Project, will culminate in a large-scale theatre piece and installation with Volt in 2025.
October 1, 2024
Sarah Kazmi
Sarah Kazmi’s new performance work, Recipe of/for a Dream (2024), collates found texts from Urdu/Norwegian dictionaries and Norwegian-language textbooks to challenge false representations of culture. An interdisciplinary artist and writer, living and working between Oslo and Karachi, Kazmi’s artistic practice moves across research and visual production to observe the relationships between food, language and politics, often within the context of local communities.
October 17, 2024
Rehearsing the Not Yet: Ingri Fiksdal & Louis Schou-Hansen
Talk by Joel Letkemann
Rehearsing the Not Yet is a collaboration between Marie Nerland’s curatorial project Volt, choreographer Ingri Fiksdal, who works with choreography as a form of speculative fiction to propose complex interpretations of gender and history, and interdisciplinary artist Louis Schou-Hansen, who employs performance, text, installation and curation to situate the body as a domain of fiction. Rehearsing the Not Yet seeks to explore alternative histories as a means of envisioning and creating room for diverse modes of physical practice by asking: ‘What could have happened?’ Intended to unfold over the course of several years, Rehearsing the Not Yet will comprise various components—including talks, seminars and reading groups—culminating in a performance to be held in a public and/or gallery space in 2026. The third event in the series is a talk on October 17 with Joel Letkemann, assistant professor of sustainable architecture at Aalborg University, titled “Recovering Architectural Speculation: Futuring and (Science) Fictioning”.
November 2024
Randi Nygård
Skog vil seia samfunn (Forest Means Society), Randi Nygård’s long-term project for Volt, is inspired by Japanese ecologist and botanist Akira Miyawaki’s method of planting native tree varieties close together to create mini forests in urban spaces. These ‘pocket forests’ purify the air, reduce noise, bind carbon and attract animals and insects. Drawing inspiration from the variety of lifeforms these micro-habitats contain, Nygård is creating a sculpture to be unveiled in the Kronstad area of Bergen in November which will highlight how animals and plants help to shape public spaces in both urban and rural environments. During the course of Skog vil seia samfunn, a series of public events will be held relating to the project’s themes, with contributions from those working in a variety of fields, including art, philosophy, biology and cultural science. Based in Oslo, Nygård investigates humanity’s relationship to nature. Among other projects, she has worked with bogland aromas (The Gift of Scent, 2022) and explored how glaciers are responding to our way of life (Black Carbon Creates Clouds, 2019).
About
Volt is a long-term, Bergen-based curatorial project that focuses on commissioning and presenting new contemporary artworks from practitioners working across a diverse range of media. Past projects have taken the form of exhibitions, time-based media, sound art and performances, as well as publications, lectures, seminars, workshops and reading circles held in a wide variety of public venues. Founded by Marie Nerland in 2008.
Volt’s programme in 2024 has received funding from Arts Council Norway and the City of Bergen.
