News
Marthe Elise Stramrud in group show
The magazine “FØLGENE” is the result of Gruppe 11’s attempt to produce one common artwork and one common text by constructing a chain of art and a chain of text following these rules:
1. One person initiates the chain by making and passing on an artwork to the next person in the chain.
2. The next person puts together a work based on what is received, and then passes it on to the next person in the chain.
3. Each person is only able to see what the predecessor has done, and so it continues through the nine people in the group.
4. Meanwhile, a text is sent through a differently ordered chain, following the same concept.
5. The text should be approximately 10 sentences long, and should be inspired by the text one receives.
6. Each person has one week to complete the artwork and one week to write the text.
7. One cannot show the works to anyone in the group, besides the next person in the chain.
8. The work must be completed wherever the artist is situated at the time.
For the event at Bergen Kjøtt on the 20th of January GRUPPE 11 will continue the event presented at ONO on the 12th of december 2011 where the magazine “FØLGENE” which includes the nine artworks and the text made up of 9 paragraphs that were the result of the chain, was launched. In addition to “FØLGENE” there will be an exhibition where each of the members present what they have developed from the work they made in the chain and at ONO. In the exhibition, the artwork will take into consideration what came before them AND what came after them in the chain. By doing this, Gruppe 11 continues the chain.
Gruppe 11 was initiated in May 2011, when 9 students from Bergen National Academy of the Arts received their BFA in Photography. Eager to maintain their affiliation as a group, they created the artist collective Gruppe 11. The group functions as a platform for making art through exhibitions, publications and live events.
GRUPPE 11 consists of Audar Kantun, Carl-Oskar Linné, Arne Pedersen, Ellen Henriette Suhrke, Hedvig Biong, Eivind Egeland, Elias Björn, Marius Moldvær and Marthe Elise Stramrud.
FØLGENE ER STØTTET AV BERGEN KOMMUNE
Tracking/Tracing; Contemporary Art from Australia
Professor Jeremy Welsh is curator for an exhibition at Galleri 3,14 in Bergen where renowned Australian artists present some of their work. The public are also welcome to a one-day seminar, with Flaggfabrikken member Heidi Nikolaisen among others, concerning themes directly related to the works in the exhibition.
The Exhbition opens Friday 20 January at 1800 HRS. The seminar starts Saturday 21 January at 12. Read the seminar program here:
http://www.khib.no/norsk/kalender/2012/01/trackingtracing/
About the Speakers
Two of the seminar speakers are directly connected – Nathalie Hartog-Gautier, one of the exhibiting artists, and Cathie Payne, author of an essay in the exhibition catalogue. Cathie Payne will speak broadly of the exhibition in relation to some of the historical background that is relevant for the works, and will also discuss the theme of “Landscape and Memory” which is central to the selection of works in the exhibition and is also a philosophical enquiry with which she is engaged.
Nathalie Hartog Gautier will speak about her own work from the series “Scanning Memories”, represented by a series of prints in this exhibition. Working with archive materials as well as her own images, sher creates a visual journey that is both documentary or diaristic and imaginary or imaginative. Linking her own cultural background in France to the landscapes of her adopted home in Australia, she creates a bridge between continents.
Bergen National Academy of the Arts is represented in the seminar by artist Heidi Nikolaisen of Subject Area Photography of the Dept. Specialised Arts. Her current project involves research and travel. “We belong to the same tree” is an investigation of branches of her family who migrated from Norway to Canada at the beginning of the last century. Through photography, video and personal encounters, she explores themes of belonging, migration, distance, cultural likeness and difference.
Jill Walker Rettberg is Professor of Digital Cultures at the University of Bergen. In her lecture “Sharing photos: filtered moments of life in social media” she will examine the ohenomenon of photo-sharing sites, photoblogs and other arenas within social media, that are having a fundamental impact on the way we make, use and consume photographic images.
Steven Bode is artistic director of The Film and Video Umbrella, London, and a respected curator within the field of artists’ moving image work. In recent years he has curated and produced works by some of contemporary art’s most renowned film & video makers, including Tacita Dean, Isaac Julien, Jane & Lousie Wilson, Johan Grimonprez, AK Dolven, and many others. Here, Steven will present and discuss a number of landscape and journey-themed projects he has curated and produced.
AiR November – December
Andrea Csaszni Rygh
During the residency at Flaggfabrikken Andrea is working together with Daniel YI Andersson on the project Mount Failure and the exhibition Mount Failure – strategies of the possessed at KNIPSU. Mount Failure is a producing investigation searching for strategies for new political subjects. The starting point is Bergen as a failed city. We search for ways to empower a political consciousness that could serve as a fertile soil for the growth of a new insight and a new reality. We are on the lookout for interfaces, spaces where new agency is possible. Mount Failure is an effort to find wormholes with potentiality of escape from current political and monetary subjectification.
The exhibition at KNIPSU open November 25th 20:00. Thursday – Sunday 13 – 17 until December 3rd.
Flaggfabrikken will also present Csaszni Rygh and YI Andersson at Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall, December 15th 20:00
Toril Johannessen at Lautom Contemporary
05 – 25.11.2011
LAUTOM Contemporary
Collettsgate 6
0169 Oslo – Norway
Opening hours: Wednesday-Friday: 12-17, Saturday-Sunday: 12-16
Or by appointment
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays and between exhibitions
Nonlocality
The exhibition Nonlocality, which is actually two exhibitions, revolves around how time and place are variables that change according to technological and scientific developments. Conflicting ways of understanding the world and duality are underlying themes, and the two shows are twin exhibitions running parallel to each other.
The work Mean Time, 2011 is controlled by a computer, which continuously retrieves information about traffic on the Internet and the speed of the dials is determined by the global Internet activity. When the activity on the Internet is high, the clocks go faster, when the activity is lower, they go slower. The clocks will therefore be guided by human activity, and not be defined by an “invisible hand” or fluctuations in crystals or atoms.
The clocks are railway station clocks with two clock faces. Efforts to synchronize and standardize, not to mention establishing a global time is historically linked to the development of the railway network by the end of the 1800s, a process that is also related to the unfolding of capitalism and ideas of progress. As the railroad was responsible for an altered temporality for over a hundred years ago, from several local to one global time divided into time zones, the Internet is about to change our perception of time – both the time we use working in front of our computers and how humans in different places are connected day and night in a new time zone.
Parhelia/Bilocation, 2011 is a picture with two fronts showing a photograph of a double sun. In the photo, a crystal is placed on the sun, a double-edge calcite, which polarizes the light and thus creates a double image. Bilocation is a term used for people or things that have the ability to be in two different places simultaneously. Parhelion is a meteorological phenomenon that makes you see double or multiple suns in the sky. A series of spectacular parhelia in Rome in the summer of 1629 made the French philosopher René Descartes interrupt his work with metaphysics and go on to study natural phenomena, which led him to write the natural philosophical work “The World”. With this he set out to explain nothing less than all natural phenomena and the basis for all physics.
In the two charts Synchronicity in Psychology, 2011 and Synchronization in Technology, 2011, the terms synchronicity and synchronization are set up against each other. Synchronization means creating concurrency, while synchronicity is the psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s concept of meaningful coincidence, a theory that there exists a non-causal but meaningful connection between events in the outer reality that seems to coincide with already existing inner feelings. Communication technologies are changing how we experience time and place, and perhaps also changing our relationship to what is random and what is meaningful, perhaps they even amplify a sense of synchronicity and of being in several places simultaneously through the countless random links that bind us together. The graphs show statistics on how often these concepts have been used in two journals of technology and psychology since the 50th century.
The last work in the show is a dream Toril Johannessen had a while back, presented as a title on the list of works. This work exemplifies how Toril Johannessen tries to understand the world and its phenomena, it is not just an intellectual exercise for her, it is integral to her as a person. Her means to investigate the world around her is by looking at science through artistic explorations, maybe because art allows more mystical investigations. Like the double-edge calcite allows us to see something in a different way, art allows her to look at science and the world through a different set of eyes, and maybe get another understanding of the world than what science can give us.
The show is supported by Norwegian Art Council, Vederlagsfondet and BEK – Bergen Center for Electronic Art.
Toril Johannessen (1978, NO) has an MA from the Art Academy in Bergen. Recent group exhibitions include: Space. About a Dream at Kunsthalle Wien, The End of Money at Witte de With in Rotterdam, Run, Comrade, The Old World is Behind You, Kunsthall Oslo, all in 2011 and BGO1 at the Bergen Art Museum in 2010. She has prevously had solo exhibitions at No5 in Bergen Kunsthall in 2010, Oslo Fine Art Society and Hordaland Art Centre in 2009. Toril Johannessen lives and works in Bergen.
Flaggfabrikken residency under evaluation
Flaggfabrikken will evaluate the future form of what an Artist in Residency at Flaggfabrikken should be. Therefore there will be no announcement for residencies in 2012.
Flaggfabrikken and the Filmschool in Lodz, Poland presents Shaping Time
Please follow link: www.shapingtime.eu
In 2010 – 2011 The National Filmschool in Lodz, Poland and Flaggfabrikken Center for photography and contemporary art in Bergen, Norway have been collaborating to exchange thoughts, techniques, and experiences through a series of a workshops and events in Lodz and Bergen.
The theme and outcome of Shaping Time is open for creative interpretation with a starting point from an infrastructural approach to our cities. From photographic collodion wet plate technique to open-air workshops the result of this collaboration is a publication and an online exhibition.
Participating artists:
Anna Orlowska, Andrzej Rozycki, Ewa Ciechanowska, Karolina Bregula, Lukasz Prus-Niewiadomski, Michal Przezdzik, Ola Buczkowska, Aleksandra Hirszfeld, Piotr Zbierski, Pszemek Dzienis, Alette Schei Rørvik, Bjarne Bare, Finn Arne Johannesen, Héctor Piña-Barrios, Hilde Jørgensen, Katinka Goldberg, Kristin Tårnesvik, Marthe Elise Stramrud, Maya Økland, Géraldine van Wessem, Siri Sætre, Yamile Calderon
Flaggfabrikken guest artist Antonio Jose Guzman at KNIPSU
Yatra
A Twenty Year Journey
An exhibition by Antonio Jose Guzman
KNIPSU
10.06 – 26.06
Komediebakken 9
‘I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of humankind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context.’ Joseph Beuys
‘Let’s talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included… something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It’s a Gigantic project.’ Joseph Beuys
YATRA comprises the photographic work of two of Guzman’s latest projects: the Bas Jan Ader and Paul Gilroy inspired research project Piertopolis, and Guzman’s documentary trilogy The Day We Surrender to the Air. Both projects comprehend a search for a new (visual) definition of notions like migration, gravity, locality, ancestry and identity. Taking his own mixed background and his twenty-year experience as photographer and visual artist as an example, Guzman tries to conceive the causes and results of human displacement.
The exhibition at KNIPSU presents Guzman’s ongoing research into DNA, movement and replacement. Focusing on the pier as both a means for connection and separation, Guzman tries to capture the ambivalences that surround the act of traveling. A pier suggests nostalgia and contemplation, as well as hope and relief. The DNA-like shape of a pier expresses change, improvement, and site-specificity.
The tables, photographs and maps of the exhibition contain the material that Guzman gathered and created during his personal journeys to the places of his origin, including his two months residency here in Bergen.
YATRA, Sanskrit for ‘journey’ or ‘destination’ involves the pilgrimage to the sacred places that are associated with Hindu epics. A YATRA is a non-obligatory but yet desirable undertaking, in which the journey is as important as the destination.
Siri Driessen
Toril Johannessen at Witte de With
THE END OF MONEY
Group exhibition
22 May–7 August 2011
Witte de With
Center for Contemporary Art
Witte de Withstraat 50
3012 BR Rotterdam
The Netherlands
The End of Money is a group exhibition about time and value. Bringing together works by a host of international artists, this exhibition reflects upon the fears, hopes, and expectations associated with the end of money and its ominous consequence: the dissolution of an absolute standard of value.
What limits does the economy impose on our collective imagination, and how is the collective imagination responsible for the current economy? The End of Money focuses on the multiple relationships that could and those that should exist between culture and economy. Informing this curatorial project is the utopian notion that, in a world without money—a world where money has been factored out of the collective memory, other suppressed forms of value may emerge, leading to another social bond and a different relationship to time.
The works included in The End of Money range from reflections on the arbitrary ways in which value is ascribed to things to explorations of the absolute loss of representative value. Some of the featured works highlight time, which is a persistent corollary of money in our efficiency-obsessed culture.
Artists
Alexander Apostol; Pierre Bismuth; Peter Fischli & David Weiss; Zachary Formwalt; Goldin+Senneby; Hadley+Maxwell; Toril Johannessen; Vishal Jugdeo; Agnieszka Kurant; Matts Leiderstam; Maha Maamoun; Christodoulos Panayiotou; Lili Reynaud-Dewar; Tomas Saraceno; Tonel; Vangelis Vlahos; and Lawrence Weiner.
Curated by
Juan A. Gaitán; assisted by Amira Gad.
Publication
To accompany the exhibition, a digital publication will be made available for free download via www.wdw.nl in July 2011 and will feature texts by: Dessislava Dimova, Donatien Grau, Dieter Roelstraete, and Carolina Sanin.
Toril Johannessen, Kjetil Kausland og Sveinung Rudjord Unneland
01-30 april
Lautom Contemporary
Collettsgate 6
0169 Oslo
With this exhibition Lautom focuses on how artists today are working across genres. Artists are to a lesser degree than before limited to one medium, it is no longer as common to define the artist as a sculptor, painter, or photography artist. It is the artist’s different projects that determines the medium. Their ideas are not adapted to a medium, it is the nature of the project that determines the means of expression, as the artist seeks to find the form that visualizes the idea the best. In this exhibition, Lautom wants to present sculpture projects by three young artists who’s practices do not follow a classical sculptural tradition.
Toril Johannessen investigates how art and science affect our view of the world. She cross-connects, speculates, investigates and constructs connections between art and science, and uses her background from the arts to look at the history of science with a new approach. In Expansion in Finance and Physics she examines if the ideas of the infinite and expansion in physics have influenced economic thinking.
Kjetil Kausland is primarily known for his project in which competitors of mixed martial arts are in focus, this has primarily taken the form of photographs, intimate portraits of men in battle where the vulnerability and the concentration in their eyes have been the focus. But the project has also resulted in videos and a performance, when he entered the cage himself in a professional MMA match at the Teatergarasjen in Bergen in 2008. In this exhibition, he shows a sculpture, which is the first work in a new project where people with transformation fantasies will be in focus, fantasies that are associated with specific creatures which are always a hybrid of an animal or fantasy creature and a human. Kjetil Kausland wishes to thank Stuart Richard Land.
Sveinung Rudjord Unneland’s oeuvre is playful and complex. He works with painting and sculpture with a large variation in both expression and form. The artist’s intention is not always easy to decipher, combinations may seem strange and references may be difficult to read. Unneland’s work is often characterized by a duality, he invites us to find our own associations confronted with the work. He does rarely seek to tell us something explicit, he wants the works to enter into an intuitive dialogue with the audience. His thoughts and motivations for the works are normally not intended as a denouement, he would rather that the viewers make their own interpretations.
Toril Johannessen (1978, NO) has an MA from the Art Academy in Bergen. She is currently taking part in the exhibition Space. About a Dream at Kunsthalle Wien. In May she will participate in the exhibition The End of Money at Witte de With in Rotterdam. In fall, she will have her first solo exhibition at LAUTOM. Among previous exhibitions are the solo show Transcendental Physics at No5 in Bergen Kunsthall, BGO1 at the Bergen Art Museum in 2010 and in 2009 From Now On – New Nordic Photography at the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg. Toril Johannessen is currently at the Mountain School of Art in Los Angeles, USA. She lives and works in Bergen and LA.
Kjetil Kausland (1972, NO) has his Masters degree from the Art Academy in Bergen. This summer he will participate in Prague Quadrennial of the Performing Arts in the Czech Republic. In the autumn of 2010 was Kausland the festival artist at Trondheim Documentary Festival and he took part in the BGO1 at the Bergen Art Museum. In the coming fall a publication will be released by Teknisk Industri, in which Kausland’s MMA project is gathered. He had his first solo show at No5, Bergen Kunsthall in 2006. Kjetil Kausland lives and work in Bergen.
Sveinung Rudjord Unneland (1981, NO) is educated at the Art Academy in Bergen with a Master degree from 2007. In 2010, he had two solo shows, Palinca Pastorale at HKS in Bergen, and one at LNM in Oslo. In the winter of 2010/11, he participated in the exhibition BGO1 at the Bergen Art Museum. He has previously participated in the group exhibitions Weird Science at the Waterside project space in London, The Last Resort in the M4gastatelier in Amsterdam, the Inland Empire at Christian Kunstforening and Tempo 2008 in Skien. Sveinung Rudjord Unneland lives and works in Bergen.
Toril Johannessen at Kunsthalle Wien
April 01st – August 15th, 2011
The exhibition takes place in the Kunsthalle Wien as well as in some rooms of the Natural History Museum of Vienna http://www.nhm-wien.ac.at/
Outer space is not only a physically extending sphere, but also a symbol. For centuries, man’s dreams and visions have been concerned with conquering the “extraterrestrial zone,” with getting to know worlds beyond Earth, and even with colonizing other planets. “Space is the Place,” proclaimed the musician Sun Ra, and thousands of science fiction novels and movies testify to this yearning for the other, for the unknown, the “high frontier” that became a scene of geostrategic position fights. Both the United States of America and the Soviet Union have invested tremendous amounts to secure their dominance in space. The first manned space flight with the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961 was a key feat in this respect – and its fiftieth anniversary as a special occasion for this exhibition.
Assembling fifty artists’ positions from fifty years, the show reflects the aesthetic, metaphoric and political dimensions connected with the idea of outer space. Works in a wide variety of media – painting, drawing, film, photography, graphic art, and multimedia installation – explore the question which aesthetic and sociopolitical utopias the notion of space is still able to unleash today.
Artists:
Pawe? Althamer, Eric Andersen, Julieta Aranda, Artsat, Angela Bulloch, Björn Dahlem, Vladimir Dubossarsky & Alexander Vinogradov, Charles and Ray Eames, Sylvie Fleury, Agnes Fuchs, Daniel & Geo Fuchs, Loris Gréaud, Judith Hopf, Dona Jalufka, Toril Johannessen, William Kentridge, Lena Lapschina, Simone Leigh, Jen Liu, Basim Magdy, Mahony, Aleksandra Mir, Jyoti Mistry, monochrom, Mariko Mori, Gianni Motti, Deimantas Narkevi?ius, Katie Paterson, Simon Patterson, Amalia Pica, Christian Pußwald, Robert Rauschenberg, Pipilotti Rist, Thomas Ruff, Tom Sachs, Wilhelm Sasnal, Charles Schmidt, Michael Snow, Andrei Sokolov, Hildegard Spielhofer, Eve Sussman & Rufus Corporation, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Keith Tyson, Christian Waldvogel, Andy Warhol, Orson Welles, Nives Widauer, Jane & Louise Wilson, Virginie Yassef, Carey Young.
Curator: Cathérine Hug
Advisory board: Gerald Matt (Director Kunsthalle Wien), Walter Famler (Movement KOCMOC/Group Gagarin) and Christian Köberl (Director of the Natural History Museum Vienna).
