Norwegian artists Abroad

OCA International
Norwegian Artists and Curators Abroad
January/February 2007
Selected International Venues

Biennials

Bodil Furu, Anders Eiebakke, and Talleiv Taro Manum, are among artists selected to participate in Don't Worry — Be Curious!: The 4^th Ars Baltica Triennial as curated by Dorothee Bienert, Kati Kivinen, and Enrico Lunghi. The exhibition which "addresses the problems and fears resulting from upheavals in present day society" is launched at the Stadtgalerie Kiel in Germany on 30 March and continues thereafter with venues at KUMU — Estonian Art Museum in Talinn, and the Pori Art Museum in Pori, Finland.

Annie Anawana Haloba Hobøl has been invited to participate in the 8^th Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates from 4 April–4 June. The Sharjah Biennial curated by Jack Persekian will present various attempts in visual art and film that "address the growing social, political, and environmental challenges the world is facings due to excessive urban development, pollution, political ambitions, and thoughtless misuse, abuse and exhaustion of our natural resources".

Exhibitions and Projects

Dreamlands Burn opened at the Mücsarnok in Budapest on 7 December. The curator, Lívia Páldi, selected works by Vibeke Tandberg, Torbjørn Rødland, Maia Urstad, and Jana Winderen to be included in the exhibition. An thematic film programme running in association with the exhibition features the works of Andrea Lange and Bodil Furu. The project which is scheduled to run through 25 February, 2007 proposes a crossover of the contemporary art scenes in the Nordic countries, with an investigation of identity through the very personal. Among the works of over 50 artists, Páldi "attempts to offer a contemporary reading of the complex artistic reality of Northern Europe with the help of various concepts — identity, nation, statehood, personal versus public, questions of community". Other artists included in the project are Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Johanna Billing, Tommi Grönland and Petteri Nisunen, Felix Gmelin, Alexander Gutke, Jesper Just, Joachim Koester, Gitte Villesen among others.

Matthew Higgs will present the video work of Lars Laumann entitled Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana at White Columns in NYC on 21 February. The video, which "borrows from already established style and language of films supporting conspiracy theories circulating the internet" will be shown at the space through 21 March.

The curator Marilou Knode has included Torgeir Husevaag and Andrea Lange to participate in a group exhibition co-organized by Silvia Cubina, Director of The Moore Space in Miami. The project which will also include works by Matts Leiderstam, Egill Saebjornsson, and Ragna Robertsdottir will open at The Moore Space on 12 May and run through 2 September.

Curator Will Bradley has invited Andreas Dalen to participate in the exhibition How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later, at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, California. The project revolves around the contrasting visions of future put forward in California in the mid 1970s. It takes is title from an essay by science fiction author Philip K. Dick, in which he compares the speculative world building of artists and writers to the scenarios imagined and constructed by governments, corporations and the mass media. The exhibition opened 28 November, 2006 and runs through 24 February, 2007. Other artists participating in the exhibition: Can Altay, Nate Boyce, Rick Guidice, Shaun O'Dell, Toby Paterson, Eileen Quinlan, Eva Rothschild, Katya Sander, William Scott, Solmaz Shabazi, Bonnie Sherk, and Gitte Villesen.

As part of Documentary Fortnight Expanded: MoMA's Annual Festival of Nonfiction Film, the Norwegian filmmakers Bodil Furu and Beate Pedersen will screen Kabul Ping Pong (2005) on Monday, 12 February 12, 18:00. The documentary explores the strategies Afghani citizens are using to put their lives back together after suffering more than twenty years of continuous and ongoing war. The film focuses on three individuals who represent diverse strata of Afghani society. The programme has been curated by Sally Berger and William Sloan.

The book launch of PHILIP will take place at Dexter Sinister in New York City, Friday 9 February, 21:00. PHILIP is a novel by Mark Aerial Waller, Heman Chong, Cosmin Costinas, Rosemary Heather, Francis McKee, David Reinfurt, Steve Rushton & Leif Magne Tangen.

Harald Medbøe will participate with his photographic project Rrom — Gypsy Trips at the non profit space BWA Awangarda in Wroclaw, Poland. The project is curated by Pawel Jarodzki opened 7 January and run through 11 February.

Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst in Berlin has invited Ane Lan to participate with her video Elegi in the exhibition Sexwork — Kunst Mythos Realität. The exhibition is opened on 16 December and to be shown at NGBK through 25 February, 2007. The exhibition will explore the phenomenon of prostitution, from various perspectives and will investigate the myths and limited perceptions that have arisen around prostitution.

Yokoland (Aslak Gurholt Rønsen, Espen Friberg and Thomas Tengesdal Nordby) was invited by Robert Blackson, the curator at the Reg Vardy Gallery at the University of Sunderland to exhibit their print based work from 23 January–23 February 2007. On the opening Metronomicon Audio's Center of the Universe played. The Exhibition will also be shown in Edinburgh in June.

The Marienborg Artist Community from Trondheim will participate in a non-for-profit event SuperMarked to be held in conjunction with Marked the international art fair in Stockholm, from 22–25 February. Their participation will include a symposium containing talks, discussions, performances, group work and individual work to be located throughout the city.

Ingar Dragset and Michael Elmgreen participate in This Is Not For You: Sculptural Discourses, an exhibition that opened at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna (22 November, 2006–29 April, 2007). The exhibition "reframes sculpture, object, and sculptural installation as autonomous, contemporary forms of artistic practice" and includes among other artists, Ai Weiwei, Fiona Banner, Monica Bonvicini, Isa Genzken, Jeppe Hein, Jim Lambie, Sarah Lucas, Eva Rothschild, Andreas Siekmann.

Tom Sandberg will have a major exhibition curated by Bob Nickas at P.S.1 MoMA in New York City. The exhibition, scheduled to open 11 February, 2007, will include more than thirty photographs taken over the past ten years, this will be the photographer's first major exhibition in the United States. Nickas writes:"Sandberg has produced a remarkable body of work that is consistent in its vision, imbued with a sense of mystery and great depth of feeling ... Sandberg's work is about photography, about the act of seeing, and ultimately about being in the world."

Curator Mami Kataoka has invited Trine Lise Nedreaas to participate in All About Laughter at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan from 27 January–6 May, 2007. Nedreaas has been invited to participate with video and photographic work Forget Me Not 1, 2, 3 in an exhibition which explores the role of "humour in depicting worlds that are not possible in real life". The exhibition which is divided into three sections — 1) avant-garde and laughter, 2) laughter in everyday life and 3) laughter across different cultures — includes among others works by George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, Erwin Wurm, Peter Land, Gabriel Orozco, Damian Ortega, Mark Bradford, Carlos Amorales, Alora and Calzadilla among others.

Katja Høst has been invited to a present a project The Lonely Crowd at the artist run space Articule in Montreal Canada. The project approaches "ones visibility in public space and the impossibility of escaping ones own subject and become the other". The project will be exhibited from 2 February through 11 March, 2007.

Karl Ingar Røys participates in an exhibition Line of Play at Fabric-Berlin from 11 February. The artist participates with his work, Erna's Video from 2006, a work which "contains a series of interviews with people from the former Yugoslavia where social and structural implications of the Norwegian government's strategies to stop asylum seekers from wanting to go to Norway, are questioned". The video is filmed in Sarajevo, Mostar, Belgrade, Prishtina, Oslo and Volda.

Lene Berg has been selected to present a new work entitled The Weimar Conspiracy at the ACC Galerie, a not for profit space in Weimar, Germany. The project which opens on 30 March will use Weimar as an image, or example of established ways of presenting and remembering European history and culture.

Martin Skauen has been invited into a group exhibition entitled Whenever It Starts It Is The Right Time, by Chus Martinez, Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The exhibition scheduled to open at the Kunstverein in March 2007, explores a world run by states and corporations, in activating our immediate reality. Martinez has asked that Skauen participate with The Polarbear Split.

OCA supported Norwegian curator Leif Magne Tangen in curating a project entitled I will never make it at Kunstraum D21 in Leipzig, Germany. The exhibition, writes Tangen, is born out of the necessity of failing. Built upon an original work by Jan Christensen from 2000, the project includes artists Mikkel McAlinden, Mark Hamilton, Paolo Chiasera, and Reto Pulfer. The show will open 10 March 2007.

Frankfurter Kunstverein Director, Chus Martinez, will curate a major solo exhibition with the works of Gardar Eide Einarsson, that will open 27 July and run through 16 September 2007 at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. Martinez notes that Einarsson's work refers to the notion of utopia understood as "the impossibility of a place". On the other hand, the artist also addresses the notion of the "future" — or better, "the near future" — as the social ground we are already sharing and constructing for our collective tomorrow in the sense that we live in a permanent negotiation of different cultural and social backgrounds. Therefore, the solo presentation of Gardar Eide Einarsson should serve as a terrain to imagine this new territory. A place where different aesthetic premises co-exist.

Dr. Barbara Steiner, Curator and Director of the Galerie fur Zeitgenossische Kunst Leipzig, Germany, invited the artist Stefan Schröder to participate in a public project entitled Plagwitzer Sand in Summer 2007 in Leipzig.

Knut Åsdam was selected as the Artist in Focus as part of Rotterdam's International Film Festival. His contribution to the festival is a particularly versatile one. Not only will he be showing his own recent short films, he will also produce a large installation in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, entitled The Care of the Self Finally Edit, which will take the form of a dingy little urban park at sunset. This realistically constructed "hangout" is a synthesis of various motifs from his oeuvre: architecture, the urban setting, cinematographic mise-en-scéne and, above all, attention to mental processes (desire, politics, the everyday). In addition, Åsdam has integrated two installations — the video work Abyss and the new series of slides Smooth City, Smooth Space —in the auditorium and conference spaces of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi). In the Bilderberg Park Hotel nearby, Åsdam found the perfect context within which to integrate a small selection of his early video work. Finally, he will also participate in the exhibition Borderline Behaviour at TENT with a graffiti work. During the festival, Åsdam will not only be introducing his own work, but also a number of his favourite films.

5 February, 2007