Verksted was launched by Office for Contemporary Art Norway in
2003 as a series of publications and seminars focused on current
discourses relating to contemporary cultural production, culture
and aesthetics. In 2006 Verksted was expanded as part of OCA's
programme with a renewed commitment to exploring the relationship
between philosophy and aesthetics in the form of interrelated
seminars and workshops, in addition to publications. The
publications explored not only the most recent tendencies in art
production but reviewed how particular points exploring political
radicality throughout the Modernist period have been looked at.
From 2006 to 2008, Verksted was organised by Marta Kuzma, Director
of OCA, in collaboration with the London based philosopher Peter
Osborne. This resulted in the publications Art of Welfare;
ISMS1: Recuperating Political Radicality; and ISMS2:
Populism and Genre. The year 2008 also saw the production of
Ü – Drawings, an artist-book
with satirical drawings and cartoons by Olav
Westphalen. In the second half of the same
year OCA was relocated to Nedre gate 7 in Grünnerløkka expanding
its premises with the opening of a public space with an extended
commitment in organising lectures, screenings, conferences,
workshops and exhibitions. Following the homonymous exhibition held
at OCA, 2009 saw the releasing of Sol LeWitt's
Sentences on Conceptual Art containing the
reproduction of the original manuscript.
In winter 2011 the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Koenig
Books, London, published the anthology Whatever Happened to Sex
in Scandinavia, addressing the representation of Scandinavia
as a sexually utopic territory constructed primarily during the
1960s and 70s in the rest of Europe and the US. In spring 2012
The State of Things will be published, bringing together
essays coming out from a series of lectures held in Venice in 2011,
as part of Norway’s official representation in the 54th edition of
the Biennale. The series of lectures aimed to tackle the ‘state of
things’ today, drawing from the speaker’ fields of activity and
research, and from what they considered the intellectual and
political priorities of today.
