Norwegian artists Abroad

OCA International — In Brief
Norwegian Artists and Curators Abroad
December 2007/January 2008
Selected International Venues

Biennials

Whitney Biennial 2008
Open: 6 March–1 June 2008

The curatorial team of Shamim Momim, Associate Curator at the Whitney, and Henriette Huldisch, Assistant Curator at the Whitney, have selected Gardar Eide Einarsson among 80 other artists to participate in the 2008 Whitney Biennial scheduled to open to the public in NYC 6 March 2008. The exhibition which runs through 1 June is noted as the Whitney's "signature exhibition as well as the most important survey of the state of contemporary art in the United States today." Other artists included within next year's Biennial include Rita Ackermann, Carol Bove, Coco Fusco, Gang Gang Dance, Rachael Harrison, Ellen Harvey, Mary Heilmann, Karen Kliminick, Louise Lawler, Spike Lee, Lucky Dragons, Corey McCorkle, Rodney McMillan, Seth Price, Frances Starck, Mungo Thomson, James Welling, among others. Tickets for the 2008 Biennial go on sale in February 2008 and are available on www.whitney.org.

16 Biennale of Sydney
18 June–7 September 2008

The 2008 Biennale of Sydney as curated by its Artistic Director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev entitled Revolutions — Forms that Turn will include a presentation of approximately 80 artists from 1913 to today. According to Christov-Bakargiev, the "exhibition will navigate in different ways artists have revolutionized contemporary art. It will explore rotating, turning upside down, shifting points of view, revolving, mirroring and reversing as formal devices, as well as charting their broader aesthetic, psychological, psychoanalytic and indirectly radical and political perspectives." Among those artists selected — aiPotu, Lene Berg, Annie Anawana Haloba Hobol, and Pushwagner, in addition to important historical works from the collection of Erling Neby in Oslo — among them works by Jesus Rafael Soto and Victor Vasarely. Although included in the previous Sydney biennale, the artistic director has also invited artists Vibeke Tandberg and Matias Faldbakken to create special projects in conjunction with the formal exhibition. The 2008 Biennale of Sydney will be held from 18 June–7 September 2008, and has been supported with a grant from OCA's International Support Programme. A portion of this grant is provided by 03–Funding*. For further developing information, please refer to www.biennaleofsydney.com.au, or contact info@oca.no.

Solo Exhibitions

Centre D'Art Contemporain Geneve will hold the first solo exhibition of work by Gardar Eide Einarsson in Switzerland as scheduled from 24 January through 16 March, 2008. The exhibition, co-produced with the Frankfurter Kunstverein, is curated by Katya García-Antón. García-Antón writes: "The theatrical vocation of the artist's practice reveals correspondence, art historically speaking, to modernity's crisis with the social". A full catalogue co-produced by the Kunstverein Frankfurt with contributions by Chus Martinez and Ina Blom among others and published by Revolver will be released in December 2007.

Straight Letters marks the first solo exhibition by the Norwegian artist Camilla Løw which is scheduled to open at Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland in February 2008. The exhibition, curated by the DCA's Deputy Director Judith Winter will be accompanied by a publication with texts by Michael Archer and Sarah Lowndes.

P.S.1/MoMA will host a solo project by Børre Sæthre scheduled to open in NYC in September 2008. The exhibition curated by Lia Gangitano, Curatorial Advisor to P.S.1/MoMA, will include the artist's various installations created specifically for his recent show under the title For Someone Who Nearly Died but Survived at the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway that evoke hybrid spaces reflecting upon the artist's own fantasies, confessions rendered in morphed interiors.

Karl Ingar Røys participates in a solo project entitled Would-be Immigrants Must Watch Kiss Video at the Het Wilde Weten in Rotterdam in Holland. The exhibition curated by Kim Bouvy will open on 17 January and run through 15 April, 2008. The artist invited by Kim Bouvy from Het Wilde Weten to discuss the the initiative of the Dutch Immigrant Authorities to use video-tests in order to implement common cultural reference points for people who wish to settle in Holland. This project is a continuation of Røys' earlier work entitled Erna's Video whereby the artist refers to the documentary format to focus in on how media is politically used by Norwegian politicians with the purpose to dissuade asylum seekers from entering into the country.

Marthe Thorshaug has been invited by the Comanche Nation and the film department of the Cameron University to screen the recently produced film, Comancheria, (2007) at the Comanche National Museum in Lawton, Oklahoma. The screenings will take place 19 January through 3 February, 2008. The film is a fiction film starring Comanche Indians in Oklahoma and combines documentary with fictional elements drawn from the film genre of Westerns and Roadmovies.

Group Exhibitions

Stefan Schröder participates in Über Tage_07, which is a site specific project, reflecting urban landscape development and site specific interventions after several decades of coalmining activities in the former East-German region of Sachsen. The project opened 1 September, and will expand into the summer of 2008. The project is curated by Susanne Altmann.

Kjersti Sundland participates in the exhibition, Rendering Video, at TICA, Center for contemporary Art in Albania from 31 January through 16 February. The exhibition, curatored by Alessandra Pioselli, Lecturer at the History of Contemporary Art at the Arts Academy in Bergamo, presents the work by Sundland entitled Hollow Void. The participation is supported with funds from 03*.

Kjersti Andvig has been invited to present her year long project entitled Knitting and Death Penalty at the non-profit Triangle Marseille at La Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille. Curated by Dorothee Dupuis, Andvig's project, which opens in March 2008, tracks the correspondence both written and visual between the artist and a convicted prisoner on Death Row in Texas.

Anne Senstad participates in a site specific project entitled The Light House through 8 March, 2008. The project has been commissioned by KK Projects, an initiative based in the st. Roch neighborhood of New Orleans in four previously abandoned structures: a former bakery and three 1800s houses. The properties sit in a one block area with each structure housing a site-specific installation for a three month exhibition period.

Jana Winderen participates with a sound project for Building Transmission scheduled to open within the context of Extra City in Antwerp, Belgium as of 6 January, 2008. The project will be a collaboration with other artists — Carl Michael van Hausswolff, Per Magnus Lindborg, Finnbogi Petusson, Mike Harding, Maia Urstad, Brandon LaBelle, and Nico Dockx. For her part in the project, Winderen will bring recordings done in Ilulissat in Greenland, at Vatnajökull in Iceland and at Briksdalsbreen and Folgefonna in Norway.

Randi Nygård will participate in European Exhibition of Young Artists at La Centrale Electrique en Brussels, European Center of Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium, 22 February–18 May 2008. The exhibition is organized by the International Association of Art Critics and it will feature newly educated young artist from all of Europe. Simon Harvey, First Amanuensis in Critical Theory at the Art Academy in Trondheim, Norway, Ph.D. from and former teacher at Goldsmith, London, UK, will write the catalogue text.

An exhibition of work by the artists Fred Ivar Utsi and Kristin Tårnesvik will be shown within a project at the independent artist collective Galleria Huuto. The project opens on 4 February in Helsinki.

Bergen based curator Mona Bentzen has been invited by the Elizabeth Foundation, NYC, to curate a complication of video works by Norwegian artists at the EFA Gallery in NYC in the last week of March 2008.

Unni Gjertsen participates in the final episode of the second edition of If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to Be Part of Your Revolution focusing on "Feminist Legacies and Potentials in Contemporary Art Practice" within a large scale exhibition at the MuHKA — (Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp). The exhibition assembles works by artists who were expressive about feminist issues during the '60s and '70s, such as Sanja Ivekovic, Lili Dujourie, Jef Geys; artists who built up a critical body of work during the '80s, such as Jutta Koether; the generation born around 1968 including Hito Steyerl, Cathy Wilkes, Karl Holmqvist, and a younger generation including Frances Stark. The exhibition is curated by Frédérique Bergholtz and runs through 6 January, 2008.

Independent curator Hanne Mugaas has been invited by Art in General in New York to curate its 10 Year Anniversary Video Marathon in January 2008. From pioneers to recent practitioners, the project will showcase work by artists who have to some degree taken up video self-consciously, interested in exploring its possibilities and its limits. Through an exhibition, screenings and lectures, the project seeks to suggests that video is an idea rather than a technology, as an umbrella term for a particular set of practices, it promises democracy while at the same time threatening to reduce images to information. Participating programmers and lecturers include, among others, Ed Halter, a frequent contributor to the Village Voice and a curator of film and media, whom from 1995 to 2005 programmed and oversaw the New York Underground Film Festival; and Thomas Beard, a writer and curator of film and video, who has organized screenings and exhibitions at venues such as the New York Underground Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Gardar Eide Einarsson participates in the exhibition Come, come, come into my world curated by Andrew Renton that runs from November 16, 2007 through 31 August, 2008 at the Ellipse Foundation Contemporary Art Collection in Cascais in Portugal. Other participating artists are: Aleksandra Mir, Anri Sala, Dash Snow, Douglas Gordon, Erwin Wurm, Francis Alÿs, Franz West, Gabriel Orozco, Glenn Ligon, Haim Steinbach, Hamish Fulton, Jack Pierson, João Onofre, João Pedro Vale, John Bock, John Stezaker, Joseph Kosuth, Jimmie Durham, Mike Kelley, Miroslaw Balka, Muntean & Rosenblum, Olafur Eliasson, Raymond Pettibon, Rodney Graham, and Thomas Schütte.

Adriana Alves at Fuzuê Arte e Cultura in Rio de Janeiro: José Loyola has invited Adriana Alves to exhibit in the new art center Fuzuê in Rio de Janeiro. In addition to Alves' two floor-exhibition there will be a Norwegian contemporary video art programme and a seminar. The exhibiton will run from January 2008. Adriana Alves will exhibit two installations and three sculptures. Her project is entitled Tragedy of the Common Man. The exhibition is supported by 03–Funding*.

Sissel Tolaas and Verdensteatret have been invited to exhibit within Synthetic Times — Media Art China 2008 at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing. The exhibition curated by the NY based media curator, Zhang Ga, is organized around 4 distinctive yet interrelated themes that testify to the incessant and obsessive pursuit of an ideal world through artistic intervention into media and communications technologies as well as bio-cultural spheres. The four themes are: "Beyond Body", "Emotive Digital", "Blur: The Recombinant Reality", and "Here, There and Everywhere". The exhibition will include approximately fifty media works and is scheduled from 5 June through 5 July, as one of the more important cultural events leading up to the Olympic Games in Beijing. The project is supported by 03–Funding*.

Karolin Tampere and Stefan Mitterer together with Camila Marambio, Head of the Residency Programme at La Peluqueria, curate Life is All About Taking Things In and Putting Things Out at Tudor Salon in Santiago de Chile from 10 through 26 January. The exhibition will take form as presentations, discussions, live sound performances, and installations. Continuing and expanding its ideas by changing the format of the event from date to date, the aim of the project is to enter into dialogue and collaboration with local artists, musicians, and cultural producers. Other participants include Chilean artist Diego Fernandez who runs a mobile artist initiative since 1999.

Norwegian curator Hans Askheim together with Claire Davies, Tom Keogh and Miranda Pope, graduates of the 2007 MA Creative Curating from Goldsmiths University of London, are developing a curatorial research project entitled Overland: London to Beijing. The curators will travel for six week in 2008, by train from London to Beijing, transporting a commissioned artwork. Along the route, the work of art will be exhibited at local venues. Through the physical transportation of the artwork Overland: London to Beijing, the curators strives to challenge the practical, geographic, historical and political connotations and value of the artwork. The project is supported by 03–Funding*.

Vibeke Jensen participates in Art and Life 266, a project organized by the Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art and installed around Peoples Square in Shanghai in January 2008. The project entitled Night_Watch consists of a video loop that is cast over the public space employing instruments of surveillance and calling into question who is protecting and who is threatening.

Marius Notvik participates in the programme One Year Project #2 of The Land in Chiang Mai in Thailand in Winter 2008. Notvik's participation evolves around cultural codes and taboos concerning the meal, specifically focusing in on the Judean Kosher cuisine and the codes against hybridization. The Land Foundation is a platform of and for social engagement and alternative education founded in 2001 by Kamim Lerchaiprasert and Rirkrit Tiravanija. One year Project #2 is conceived to support a "new generation of cultural activists interested in its principles by providing an alternative education, within a creative working atmosphere with the task of learning more about natural farming and self-sustainable living."

Other News

Annie Anawana Haloba Hobøl was accepted for a second term for her residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Hobøl was selected by an independent international selection committee together with 26 fellow artists out of approximately 1100 applications submitted internationally. Hobø will begin her second work period in January 2008 further in her video and theoretical studies. Advisors to the Rijksakademie include Charles Esche, Hou Hanru, Joan Jonas, Aernout Mik, Gerardo Mosquera, Matt Mullican, Philippe Pirotte, Marijke van Warmerdam among others.

19 December, 2007

*03-funding is a programme of grants supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for enhancing collaboration in the contemporary art field with professional artists in countries designated under the 03 — Cultural Exchange with Countries in the South.