OCA is pleased to announce a retrospective of Peter Watkins's films, organised on the occasion of the film-maker's participation in OCA's International Studio Programme. The retrospective reflects on Watkins's fundamental contribution to the history of film as a critical practice, and will have a special focus on his engagement with Norway through the figure of Edvard Munch, to whom he dedicated a film in 1973 titled with the artist's name. In anticipation of the 150th anniversary of Munch's birth in 2013, OCA gives a renewed look at the artist's life and work by revisiting Watkins's indispensable account.
The solo exhibition PORTRAIT PORTRAIT OF OF A A GENERATION GENERATION by artist and author Matias Faldbakken reflects Faldbakken’s continued interest in morphing a pre-existing language of forms into a deadpan vernacular. Through suspect negotiations and inferred mediations, Faldbakken sources iconic sculptures produced in the 20th century. The artist essentially de-skills modernist sculpture’s aspirations toward the aerodynamic, the minimal, and the abstract by acrobating revered works of ‘art’ into vessels for intoxication.
'Forms of Modern Life: From the Archives of Guttorm Guttormsgaard' is an exhibition taking as a starting point Guttorm Guttormsgaard's archives of printed materials and art objects. The exhibition considers the process by which the printed form becomes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a universal, egalitarian form of expression. The project explores how artists such as Thomas Bewick, Frans Masereel, Albert Jærn, Hannah Ryggen, Peder Balke and Lars Hertervig employed specific graphic forms to address the cultural and political conditions of their time.
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway presents from 15 September to 15 December 2010 'BIG SIGN – LITTLE BUILDING', an exhibition that looks at the expanded temporal and spatial field for cultural production resulting from the modern shift in the notion of landscape from the Kantian sublime to the space of leisure time. The exhibition departs from and extends beyond a seminal project developed by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, who, in their book Learning from Las Vegas (1972), drew from existing critiques of urban space at the time to explore the role that signs played in providing order to the landscape. As an articulation of a space contesting the hegemony of Euclidean space, this approach also intrigued artists such as Charlotte Posenenske, Ed Ruscha, Robert Smithson, and Jeff Wall, who further challenged such traditional notions of space in order to explore new interpretations of landscape within the fields of aesthetics, art and architecture without succumbing to any one category. Other artists, such as Claes Oldenburg and Allan D'Arcangelo, cited as inspiration by the three architects, contested the sign system altogether, which increasingly reflected an attempt on the part of capital to claim nature, landscape, and public space as commodities.
From 30 April to 26 June 2010 the Office for Contemporary Art Norway presented 'Postulates of Contiguity,' the first European solo exhibition by the Bangalore based artist Sheela Gowda. The project took the form of a dialogue between two works -And… (2007), a languorous serpentine rope produced from individual threads and needles that coils throughout the exhibition space to intercede the spectator's path and field of vision, and Best Cutting (2008), a display that combines a constructed newspaper, The Chronic Chronicle, overlaid by tailoring patterns. Both works asymptotically share the support of a material line to formulate a postulate on space that undermines continuity and coherence to instead, privilege notions of contingency making unstable logical connectives and inferred certainties. 'Sheela Gowda: Postulates of Continguity' was supported by O3-funds as underwritten by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
'The Grammar of Forms' was a series public events, workshops and presentations that took place throughout autumn 2009 and winter 2010 at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, with the aim to look at language, writing, criticism and publishing in relation to contemporary art, exploring its diverse modes of operation and possibilities within historical and contemporary practices. As a complement to this programme of events, OCA hosted a series of projects, including presentation of artworks and libraries of publications, further transforming OCA's public space into a place for production and exchange of discourse.
OCA launched its autumn/winter 2009 semesterplan with the presentation of Sol LeWitt's 'Sentences on Conceptual Art: Manuscript and Draft Materials 1968–69', and the lecture 'Fragment and Project: From Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments to LeWitt's Sentences on Conceptual Art' by Peter Osborne. The lecture linked the ideas put forth by the early German Romantics in the 18th century, principally within the Athenaeum Fragments, with the aesthetic concerns of artists within the Conceptual movements of the 1960s.
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway presents 'Nasreen Mohamedi: Notes - Reflections on Indian Modernism (Part 1)', the first solo exhibition in Europe of Nasreen Mohamedi. Curated by Suman Gopinath and Grant Watson the exhibition is part of 'Reflections on Indian Modernism', a comprehensive programme of public projects and residencies organised by Gopinath and Watson for OCA and CoLab Art & Architecture, Bangalore, India. Regarded as one of the most important Indian artists of her generation, Mohamedi (1937-1990) produced, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, paintings, drawings and photographs that constitute a key body of work within the modernist canon.
Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia?' is a research project that consists of three platforms - an exhibition, a programme of public events and a publication - examining the juncture of the political and the erotic through the work of artists produced predominantly in the context of the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 70s. Part of OCA's Verksted series, the exhibition and public programme are the result of an extensive research project about the international perception of Scandinavia during the 1950s, 60s and 70s as a utopic region of socialism and sexual freedom. This project will introduce OCA's new premises at Nedre gate 7 in Oslo.
