OCA International — In Brief

Norwegian Artists and Curators Abroad
Selected International Venues

Biennials

Anawana Haloba to participate in
'Fare Mondi // Making Worlds...',
The main exhibition of the
53rd International Art Exhibition
La Biennale di Venezia
Preview: 4, 5 and 6 June 2009
Public opening: Sunday, 7 June, 10:00
From 7 June to 22 November 2009
Venice, Italy

Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the 53rd International Art Exhibition 'Fare Mondi // Making Worlds. . .', has invited artist Anawana Haloba to participate in La Biennale di Venezia. Within 'Fare Mondi // Making Worlds. . .', Haloba will exhibit the large-scale spatial installation The Greater G8 (GG8) AD MARKET. The work functions as an advertising market stall for the products of the so-called GG8 members as fictionalized by the artist and in the form of the collective of: Moldova, Iraq, Sudan, Colombia, Bolivia, Malawi, Philippines and Somalia. The project follows the logic and desires of a political dreamscape in which Haloba rewrites the rules of economic financial exchange by offering Third World fair-trade goods imbued with a sense of futility.

The Nordic and Danish Pavilion
'The Collectors' Curated by Elmgreen and Dragset
Press Preview: 4 June 2009
Professional Preview: 4 June 2009, 15:00
Public Opening: 7 June 2009

Exhbiting Artists:
Thora Dolven Balke, Massimo Bartolini, Hernan Bas, Guillaume Bijl, Maurizio Cattelan, Elmgreen & Dragset, Pepe Espaliú Tom of Finland, Simon Fujiwara, Han & Him, Laura Horelli, Martin Jacobson, William E. Jones, Terence Koh, Jani Leinonen, Klara Lidén, Jonathan Monk, Nico Muhly, Norway Says, (Torbjørn Anderssen, Andreas Engesvik and Espen Voll), Henrik Olesen, Nina Saunders, Vibeke Slyngstad, Sturtevant and Wolfgang Tillmans

On the occasion of the 53rd International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, the Nordic and Danish Pavilions will collaborate with a project curated by artists' duo Elmgreen & Dragset. The project was initiated by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, the hosting organisation for the Nordic Pavilion in 2009, and the Danish Arts Council's Committee for International Visual Arts, commissioners of their respective pavilions, with the intention to create a 'transnational neighbourhood' within the Giardini, an exhibition context traditionally dedicated to national representation. The project, titled 'The Collectors' is not a group show in the conventional sense. The pavilions will undergo a radical reconstruction, and more than twenty artists and designers of all ages, ranging from established to emerging ones, will contribute to creating a different kind of exhibition format, one that will appear closer to a film set than a conventional art display.

Accreditation for the press preview of the 53rd International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia must be requested directly to the Biennale Press Office. Please go to: www.labiennale.org/en/press/art/accreditation. Please note that applications for press accreditations have to be submitted by 30 April 2009. For professional accreditation please click here.

For press enquiries related to the project, and for interviews with the artists, please contact the following:
For Norwegian press: Marthe Tveitan at marthe.tveitan@oca.no
For international press: Brian Phillips/Black Frame at bphillips@framenoir.com.

Victor Mutelekesha to participate in
10th Havana Biennial – 'Integration and Resistance in the Global Age'
Havana, Cuba
From 27 March to 30 April 2009

Rubén del Valle Lantarán, Director of the 10th Havana Biennial, has invited Victor Mutelekesha to exhibit within the biennial, which takes place in Havana, Cuba from 27 March to 30 April 2009 and is titled 'Integration and Resistance in the Global Age'. According to Lantarán, the biennial will focus 'on the complexity of a real and active integration to a global order, on one side, and on the capacity of resistance in the face of the homogenising farce that it presupposes, on the other'. Within 'Integration and Resistance in the Global Age', Mutelekesha will exhibit the installation Pangea, which nostalgically refers to the hypothetical landmass that existed when all continents were joined.

Ida Ekblad to participate in
'The Generational: Younger Than Jesus'
The New Museum, New York, NY, USA
From 8 April to 14 June 2009

Ida Ekblad had been invited to exhibit within 'Younger Than Jesus' the first edition of The Generational, a new triennial established by the New Museum exploring the work of artists born after 1976 and examining the visual culture of a generation that so far has been only described by their habits of consumption. The triennial will fill the entire New Museum's building with approximately 145 works by 50 artists, among them Cory Arcangel, Tauba Auerbach, Cao Fei, Ryan Gander, and Patricia Esquivias – all of whom are under the age of thirty-three. Organised by Lauren Cornell, Director of Rhizome and New Museum Adjunct Curator; Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, New Museum; and Laura Hoptman, Kraus Family Senior Curator, New Museum, 'Younger Than Jesus' took shape through an open curatorial model in which more than 150 contributors from around the world recommended artists for the exhibition. Within 'The Generational: Younger Than Jesus', Ida Ekblad will exhibit the work Untitled (M), (2008), which consists of eight connected works produced with ink and chlorine on hand-dyed watercolour paper. She will also present works from the series On Other, in which she re-photographs ethnographical an anthropological images, overwriting them with slogans such as 'rainbow children' and 'tolerance'.

For further press information please contact Gabriel Einsohn, Communications Director, New Museum, at geinsohn@newmuseum.org or Andrea Schwan, Andrea Schwan Inc. at andrea@andreaschwan.com.

Solo Exhibitions and Projects

From 7 April to 10 May 2009, Dag Alveng holds a solo exhibition at Centro Cutural da Caixa in São Paulo, Brazil. Curated by Pieter Tjabbes and titled 'Dag Alveng – New York – Norway – 1979/2008', the exhibition is a retrospective of Alveng's works in which the artist exhibits more than one hundred black-and-white photographs produced between 1979 and 2008. 'Dag Alveng – New York – Norway – 1979/2008' includes the series I Love This Time of Year, This is MOST Important and Summer Light. This project is supported by 03–funding*.

At the invitation of Karolina Pahlén, Art Coordinator of Wip:konsthall, Stockolm, Sweden, Eva Drangsholt will include a solo project entitled 'The Public and Private Lives of Swans' at Wip:konsthall, Stockolm, Sweden, from 15 April to 14 May 2009. The exhibition will present four integrated video works dealing with different forms of private and public lives.

Until 3 May 2009, MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León, León, Spain) is presenting a solo exhibition of the artists' duo Elmgreen & Dragset, curators of the Nordic and Danish Pavillions in Venice in 2009. Curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio, Chief Curator at MUSAC and titled 'Trying to Remember What We Want to Forget', the exhibition focuses in the gap between the personal and the collective, the unbalanced of 'the private' versus the drama of 'the public' in the immediate world. The exhibition will be composed of ten installations in a display created specifically for MUSAC – six of them will be new productions and the previous works will be displayed in a new arrangement, according to the curatorial concept.

Group Exhibitions

Kristina Bræin and Lina Viste-Grønli have been invited to exhibit within 'Les Formes Féminines' at Triangle France, Marseille, France. Curated by Dorothée Dupuis, director of Triangle France and taking place from 3 April to 9 May 2009, the exhibition takes as a starting point the idea of a crude and curious parallel between the history of sculpture and those of women in the twentieth century. According to the curator, the exhibition proposes a unique landscape, where abstraction dominates and criteria crumble in order to make place for a 'queer', 'strongly objective' sensuality. Within 'Les Formes Féminines', Bræin exhibits a new site-specific installation and Viste-Grølin a new sculpture installation titled A Chance Counsel. Other artists exhibiting are Jenny Holzer and Eva Berendes.

Following a visit of Maria Lind, Director of the Graduate Program, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, USA and a guest in OCA's International Visitor Programme in February 2009, Marianne Heier has been invited to exhibit within 'Protective Coloration' at the CCS. According to the curator, NiKo Vicario, the lens-based works exhibited within 'Protective Coloration' 'engage the strategy of the monochrome but do not seek an absolute or a purely optical art, instead rendering flat spaces that camouflage representation through the shroud, the crop, or the zoom'. Other exhibiting artists are Iñaki Bonillas, Liz Deschenes and Morgan Fisher. 'Protective Coloration' takes place from 19 April to 24 May 2009.

Vibeke Tandberg has been invited to exhibit within 'Seleccion de la 28a Bienal de São Paulo' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, Chile. Curated by Francisco Brugnoli Bailoni, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago, the exhibition will present a selection of artworks and artists that participated in the 28th São Paulo Biennial. Vibeke Tandberg will exhibit the project Albert Camus, L'étranger, Roman, Gallimard 2003, Prémier dépôt légal:juin 1942. ISBN 2-07-021-200-3, in which the artist dissects an edition of the book L'étranger by Albert Camus by cutting out each of the 32,000 words comprising the text and subsequently alphabetising each onto separate formations divided into individual framed works.

From 16 to 25 April 2009 the 'Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid – Madrid 2009' is taking place in various venues throughout Madrid, Spain. Curated by Jean-Francois Rettig, the festival presents international artist working with film, video and multimedia, including the Norwegian artists Knut Åsdam, Crispin Gurholt, Anne Lan and Inger Lise Hansen.

Sissel Tolaas has been invited to exhibit within 'sk-interfaces', at Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg from 25 September to 10 January 2010. Curated by Jens Hauser, 'sk-interfaces' features works by artists reflecting on the way current technologies are changing our lives by progressively replacing natural interface in the skin. Within the exhibition, Sissel Tolaas will present the project Fear, in which she collects and displays the smell of different men who have nothing in common but the fear of body contact.

At the invitation of Suzan Rosseler, Conservator of Exhibitions, Audax Textile Museum Tiburg, the Netherlands, Heidi Kennedy Skjerve is currently exhibiting within 'Knitted Worlds'. The exhibition, which takes place at Audax Textile Museum Tiburg until 4 June 2009, presents artworks where knitting is used to express social, political and formal artistic questions. Within 'Knitted Worlds', the artist exhibits the works Grunn/Ground and Sommer/Summer II.

Kaja Haugen Leijon has been selected to partake in Videonale 12, a biennial festival for video art at Kunstmuseum in Bonn, Germany. Curated Georg Elbenby and open until 26 April 2009, Videonale 12 presents 43 works focusing on current tendencies in video art. Within the festival, Kaja Haugen Leijon will exhibit Turning Trick (2008), a film inspired by Truffaut and film genres, such as western. Other participating artists are Charlotte Ginsborg, Reynold Reynolds and Pia Greschner.

Hanneline Røgeberg is currently exhibiting within 'Form and Story: Narration in Recent Painting', at University of Richmond Museums, Richmond, USA. According to the curator Elisabeth Schlatter the exhibition 'includes approximately forty paintings by four artists who convey narrative content in their work through a synthesis of representational subject matter and the materiality and application of their medium'. 'Form and Story: Narration in Recent Painting' is on view until 15 May 2009.

Peter Zorn, EMAN Coordinator and Chairman of Werkleitz – Centre for Media Art in Halle (Saale), Germany has invited Helene Sommer to exhibit within '.move' at the European Media Art Network in Halle (Saale), Germany. The artist will exhibit the video installation The Memory of the People Narrates. A Tale of Stone and Wood and also present a talk. Helene Sommer's participation within the exhibition is linked to her residency at InterSpace in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Inger Lise Hanse has been invited by independent curator Paolo Bianchi to exhibit within 'Höehenrausch', a public art project organized by OK Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, Austria and taking place until 27 September 2009. Part of 'Capital of Culture Year Linz09', the exhibition proposes a tour along a cleverly designed system of routes in which the visitors will experience the highpoints of Linz. For 'Höehenrausch' Hansen will develop a new film work where the artist investigates the roof surface to present the viewer with a different experience of the site.

Curators Anna Martine Nilsen, Kalle Brolin and Graciela Taquinu, professor at the University of Buenos Aires have invited Sabina Jacobsson, Birgitte Sigmundstad, Astrid Johannessen and Lotte Konow Lund to participate in 'Paralelos y Meridianos' at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 'Paralelos y Meridianos' consist of two platforms – a screening of video works from Argentina, Sweden and Norway – and takes place from 20 to 25 July 2009.