Beier Lund

April 2007 @ Landmark 21:00

Nina Jan Beier and Marie Jan Lund –
Throw the stones back into the sea

Flaggfabrikken has invited artists Nina Jan Beier og Marie Jan Lund to make a new work in The Play Me Series, an ongoing series of videos. Throw the stones back into the sea has been made in collaboration with employees of the enterprise Norsk Stein AS (Norwegian Stones Inc.) in the municipality of Suldal, Ryfylket and Kunstnarprosjekt Suldal.

The video is premiered in Landmark and the artists will be present.

About
In their ongoing video work the Play me series Nina and Marie set up abstract games for different groups of people to play out. Each situation is initiated by the artists but has its own internal logic and set of rules that reveals itself to the participants as they launch into the tasks. Be it asking a big group of people to place themselves according to the length of their hair, exchanging clothes in the snow or breathing in time, they all focus on the space between the individual and the group.

Based on references to social games, customs and mannerisms, most of the instructions impose certain limitations onto the individuals by challenging their sense of personal space and free will. In doing so they provoke the competitive drive in the participants and their reactions to being part of a group. Each situation springs from the actual setting of the group in question, enhancing the tensions that are already present in the context and runs for however long the
participants can bear to hold the moment.

When asking all of the administrative staff, builders and exhibiting artists, on the first day of working together to hide in the woods behind the gallery, the situation becomes an invisible confrontation between the individual capacities and the peer pressure in the forming phase of a new group. Likewise the artists have asked a large group of friends, who have volunteered to help moving house, to hold up a heavy box for as long as they can hold it. The strain of the favor becomes apparent in the quivering determination, who will be the first to give up? This way Beier and Lund make almost ritual actions for the participating groups, like asking all the employees of Norwegian Stone, a mineral-extracting company, to stand closely together on a beach and throw the stones back into the sea.

When compiled, the repetitive attempts to create collective actions and the constant hopelessness of the same objective, become a strong statement of the forced naïveté or conscious utopia of the two artists’ praxis.