ANDERS DAHL MONSEN
On display in the 'Månedens bilde' bulletin board in Jernbanetorget, Oslo.
Opening reception Friday 22nd March 17.00
(in Kristiania bar & café, Jernbanetorget 1)
The artist Anders Dahl Monsen began his campaign for a 0-hour working day with an exhibition in Stockholm in 2009. Now he is bringing it to the people of Oslo with a display in the new 'Månedens bilde' bulletin board in Jernbanetorget, as well as a free poster edition of the work which is also available as a digital download.
You can find the bulletin board outside the Østbanehalle in Jernbanetorget; collect a free poster at Oslo S; at Kunsthall Oslo in Trelastgata or at UKS in Lakkegata; and download a digital version of the work at www.romforkunst.info
Dahl Monsen writes: In 1930 the famous economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a hundred years human beings would freed from work, "lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin". It is now 2013, and so far there is no sign of Keynes's prediction coming true. The once-spirited movement for the 6-hour working day is being abandoned by the Left in most countries; intensified exploitation and the eradication of labour rights in the name of productivity and competitiveness accompany a global economic system out of control. The Zero Hour Day is about refusing to contribute to this system. It's about spending time living instead of working, spending time with friends and family, not simply working to consume and being consumed by work. The logo is an altered version of the six-hour day campaign, and the text is based on an 1856 banner calling for an eight-hour working day.
About the artist:
Anders Dahl Monsen (born 1980) lives and works in Oslo. He was educated at Kunstakademiet i Bergen (2001-05) and has exhibited widely in Norway and abroad, with recent solo exhibitions at Gallery D.O.R. in Brussels and NoPlace, Oslo. Hs interests include strenuous lethargy, serious partying, and self-imposed narcolepsy.
About Månadens bilde:
In the past UKS disposed a glass vitrine outside the Norwegian Parliament where members took turn showing new works.
In 1965, as a reaction to the exhibit of young Kjartan Slettermark’s collage in that vitrine, entitled: “A Report From Vietnam, Children are Washed by Burning Napalm, Their Skin Burns to Black Sores and They Die” a provoked citizen armed with an axe vandalized both the vitrine and the work. His rage came to mark the beginning of violent riots and crated an extensive public debate about weather art could or should be political in mass media.
UKS is now, some 50 years later asked to re-animate the glass vitrine as part of a public art program, “Rom for kunst” produced by Kunsthall Oslo at the Oslo central station. Rather than repeating history and producing works for this specific format we are looking into the format of a bulletin or wall journal to be displayed in the vitrine as well as freely distributed in a small edition.
About Rom for kunst:
Rom for kunst (Space for Art) at Oslo Central Station is a public art initiative run by Rom Eiendom AS. Kunsthall Oslo and Hovind AS are currently the commissioners for Rom for kunst.
IMAGE FAMILIES
curated by Linus Elmes
Presented with a photo, a machine can determine what it is looking at. Machines can now see INSIDE images.
Extract the physicality of objects within images (there is the object elevator inside the photo of an elevator), detect symbols (upward arrow means going up) and associate words (lift, metal, rectangle, sliding doors).
A machine confronted with an image or a scenery now knows how to place it. It’s another step towards machines autonomy, that enables navigation, within both virtual and real world.
If human’s unconscious is more of a factory than a theater*, how does it work in machines little electronic cogs? Image Families is an assembly line of an exhibition, an exploration to figure out what’s really inside an image.
* Deleuze et Guattari “l'inconscient n'est pas un théâtre, mais une usine, une machine à produire”
PERFORMANCE at 8 pm
Osterhausgate 12, OSLO
The eighth FRANK salon is held in collaboration with UKS and the exhibition POSSESIONS.
Lars Laumann (NO) has invited Daniel Barrow (CA) to perform Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry.
Winnipeg-born, Montreal-based artist DANIEL BARROW uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Since 1993, he has created and adapted comic book narratives to "manual" forms of animation by projecting, layering and manipulating drawings on overhead projectors.
“...From a position amongst the audience, he recites live narration while manipulating layers of transparencies in continuous motion. Accentuated by interference patterns and sleight-of-hand trickery, Barrow's hand-drawn images contrive an absorbing tale of comic book grotesques. Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry is a bizarre confessional detailing the grand but hopeless scheme of an estranged garbage collector and failed art student. Unloved and rejected by society, the protagonist begins a universal art project in the form of a telephone directory of 'profound and intimate insights' to chronicle the lives of those around him. As he snoops through the windows and waste bins of fellow citizens, his survey is rendered futile by a maniacal killer who follows in his wake, picking off subjects one by one. Invoking introspection, pathos and dark humour, this award-winning performance piece is accompanied by an unassuming Beach Boys-inflected score recorded by Amy Linton of The Aislers Set.” - Mark Webber
DANIEL BARROW has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad. He has performed at The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), PS1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), The International Film Festival Rotterdam, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the British Film Institute (London). Barrow has supported acts such as Antony and the Johnsons, The Hidden Cameras, and Miranda July. Barrow is the winner of the 2010 Sobey Art Award and the 2013 winner of the Glenfiddich Artist-In-Residence Prize. He is represented by Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto.
AMY LINTON is the chief songwriter and lead singer of the bands Henry’s Dress and the Aislers Set. High praise follows the Aislers Set on lengthy tours, supporting acts such as Sleater Kinney, Bratmobile, Yo La Tengo and Belle and Sebastien. Amy is currently living, writing and recording in Brooklyn, NY.
LARS LAUMANN draw inspiration from the outskirts of popular culture, mixing different media and techniques to create works explores ideas of fandom, obsession, conspiracy and love, both romantic and divine. Laumann’s work has previously been exhibitions at White Columns, Marian Goodman Gallery, New Museum and the MoMA, at the Kunsthalle Winterthur and Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland), and at the 5th Berlin Biennial and, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Liverpool Biennial, Whitechapel Gallery, Hayward Gallery, Tate Modern.
FRANK is a platform run by Liv Bugge and Sille Storihle. It was established in April 2012 to nurture art and critical discourse revolving around gender issues, desire and sexuality. The platform operates in different locations and with various co-curators
It is with great excitement UKS Unge kunstneres samfund presents a talk by artists Amy Lien and Enzo Camacho at Lakkegata 55, Oslo. The artists will deliver a paper approaching the network discourse within contemporary art through an analysis of one of its prevalent motifs: self-cannibalism.
Self-cannibalism may be thought of as a distinct outgrowth of critical strategies and impulses, suited to the conditions of hyper-connectedness, but perhaps no longer even recognizable as critique. By giving examples of self-cannibalism in artistic practices including Merlin Carpenter’s, Jana Euler’s, Michael Krebber’s, David Lieske’s, and Jerry Magoo’s, the paper links these to a spectrum of negative or dysfunctional emotional registers, including rage, depression, heartbreak, and frigidity. Rather than understanding these emotional drives as puncturing through the entrapments of the network, they argue that damaged emotions are just as much produced by the network, and operate as its descriptive vectors, as fluidly as socially affirmative artistic practices do.
Lien and Camacho then offer another proposition: That negativity is in fact inherently a part of the network, and lies in the empty spaces that exist between connections. By approaching a proximate conceptualization of the negative already implied by network discourse, one runs greater risks than with tactics of self-cannibalism.
After the presentation a discussion with Qs and As will follow, moderated by UKS coordinator Mikael D. Brkic.
Enzo Camacho (b. 1985, Philippines) and Amy Lien (b. 1987, USA) are collaborating artists currently based in Berlin, Germany. They both graduated from Harvard University with a BA degree in Visual and Environmental Studies in 2007 and 2009, respectively and are currently attending the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg for a Masters in Fine Arts. Recent activity includes the solo exhibitions Abuses at MoSpace, Taguig, Philippines, 2012; Your body is not an implement but a ballistic at Pablo Fort, Taguig, Philippines, 2012; Witnesses in the Garden at Republikha Art Gallery, Quezon City, Philippines, 2011; and Café by the Ruins at 47 Canal, New York, USA, 2011; along with the performance Café by the Ruins Tour at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA, 2011. They have recently contributed to the publications Provence Magazine, edited by Hannes Loichinger and Tobias Kaspar, and 2012 (you were always on my mind), a 47 Canal publication edited by Margaret Lee and Domenick Ammirati, soon to be released.
TINDERS:
With a shared interest in humans relationship to fire, Futurefarmers and Erik Sjödin assembles as Flatbread Society to host a program of short films, baking, music and workshops. A boat-oven will be docked for the evening for all to make flatbread, share recipes and contemplate flatbread.
More about Flatbrea Society:
www.flatbreadsociety.net
From May 20 - June 23, 2013, Flatbread Society will take the form of a program of events, a mobile oven tour and hands-on workshops. The program will be geared towards co-defining the function, form and community of a public Bakehouse to be built in Bjørvika*. Flatbread Society will circulate through Oslo and surrounding areas linking existing programming, projects and institutions with a common curiosity in the three mysteries of life; cosmos, human and soil. Flatbread will be baked and shared as means of exchange and invitation to convene on June 23 on the waterfront at Bjørvika to celebrate midsummer, fire the bread ovens built and inaugurate the location of the future Bakehouse Bjørvika.
*Bakehouse Bjørvika is part of the Slow Spaces public art program initiated by Claire Doherty of Situations, Bristol. This program is funded by Bjørvika Infrastructure.
“Far from being simply an object, the bread oven reflects a technique, a physical environment, a standard of living, a spatial organization, indeed a whole a way of life. It reveals a great deal about the perceptual and conceptual schemes of the people using it. The oven may therefore be considered a total cultural fact.
-Jean-Francois Blanchette
About the artists:
Futurefarmers, US/Belgium
Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an open practice of making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding them. Founded in 1995, their design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and their research interests. Futurefarmers create frameworks for exchange and tactile forms of inquiry that provide playful entry points and tools for participants to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry – not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.
Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems as a means to understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation, education. Through this disassembly they find new narratives and reconfigurations that form alternatives to the principles that once dominated these systems. They have created temporary schools, bus tours, urban agriculture policy and large-scale exhibitions internationally.
Collectively, they teach in the visual arts graduate programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Mills College in Oakland, and the University of California at Berkeley. Their work has been exhibited at the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, NY Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York and the New York Hall of Sciences. They have received grants from the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Work Fund and the Graham Foundation.
Erik Sjödin, Stockholm, Sweden
Erik is an artist and researcher based in Stockholm and Bergen. His practice explores interdependencies and interrelationships between humans and non-humans as well as questions of being and becoming.
Erik's work is primarily constituted of transdisciplinary research, production of situations, interventions in the public realm and exhibitions. The projects he pursues are often of an exploratory nature and take shape over several years.
He frequently collaborates with and consults experts such as scientists, farmers, chefs and craftspeople.
2013
IMAGE FAMILIES
curated by Linus Elmes
Presented with a photo, a machine can determine what it is looking at. Machines can now see INSIDE images.
Extract the physicality of objects within images (there is the object elevator inside the photo of an elevator), detect symbols (upward arrow means going up) and associate words (lift, metal, rectangle, sliding doors).
A machine confronted with an image or a scenery now knows how to place it. It’s another step towards machines autonomy, that enables navigation, within both virtual and real world.
If human’s unconscious is more of a factory than a theater*, how does it work in machines little electronic cogs? Image Families is an assembly line of an exhibition, an exploration to figure out what’s really inside an image.
* Deleuze et Guattari “l'inconscient n'est pas un théâtre, mais une usine, une machine à produire”
One Night Only (ONO) is moving to Kunstnernes Hus!
February 25th we hosted the last One Night Only at UKS. ONO is now taking a short break, and will have a grand re-opening Monday April 15th in their new space at Kunstnernes Hus.
We wish ONO all the best, and we are forever grateful for the times and exhibitions they put up at UKS.
Thank you!
For a full program, applications and newsletter see: www.onogallery.com
UKS originated from an ideological struggle, a self-organised, artist initiative with the goal to gain bearable living conditions for artists in a time when Norway was still a poor country on the periphery of the world.
In 1921, before oil, before nouveau riche, before governmental grants and generous cultural policy, the organisation was founded as an exchange central where art could be traded for goods and services.
Since then the identity of UKS has changed to reflect the numerous shifts in the art world and society as a whole. Today we represent Norwegian artists and curators’ ideological principles and their political, economic, social and artistic rights. We are political lobbyists. We produce exhibitions and involves in external and internal collaborations. We make publications. We are running a residency program. We make seminars and as host a diverse local community.
UKS main exhibition program is selected in collaboration between the Director and the members of the Board, all decisions are made on a consensual basis.
UNGE KUNSTNERES SAMFUND
Lakkegata 55D
0187 Oslo
Norway
tlf: 22195050
www.uks.no
Opening hours:
10.00-17.00 Tuesday – Friday
(Closed Mondays)
12.00-17.00 weekends
(during project periods)
EMPLOYEES
Director:
Linus Elmes
Project Leader:
Graham Alexander Hayward g.hayward@uks.no
Coordinator:
Mikael Damstuen Brkic
Gallery Assistent:
Kaja Paulsen Breckan
BOARD
Chair (on leave):
Marianne Hurum
Deputy Chair:
Ruben Steinum
Board members:
Marte Johnslien
Øyvind Aspen
Arne Skaug Olsen
Karolin Tampere
Nomination Board:
Monica Winther
Arild Tveito
Anngerd Rustand
UKS FORUM EDITORIAL GROUP
Mikael Damstuen Brkic
Geir Haraldseth
COLOPHON
Editorial:
Linus Elmes
Graham Hayward
Design:
Programming:
INNKALLELSE
Velkommen til UKS` generalforsamling 2013 fredag 22. mars kl. 18.00 i Lakkegata 55d.
Sakspapirene er tilgjengelig her
Dersom du ønsker å motta sakspapirene via post, ring oss på telefon 22195050.
For å ha stemmerett under generalforsamling må du ha betalt medlemskontingenten for 2012. Vedtekter finner du her.
Vi minner for øvrig om § 4.5 i vedtektene:
Medlemmer som er forhindret fra å møte på årsmøtet kan forhåndsstemme på saker meldt i sakspapirene eller ved skriftlig erklæring overdra sin stemme til et navngitt annet medlem med stemmefullmakt. Max 2 pr. medlem.
Forhåndsstemmer og stemmefullmakter må meldes til styret senest 24 timer før årsmøtet. E-post en scan eller fax (22195054) en fullmakt med underskrift.
DAGSORDEN
1. Valg av referent og tellekorps
2. Godkjenning av innkalling og dagsorden
3. Gjennomgang av årsberetning 2012
4. Gjennomgang av regnskap 2012
5. Godkjenning av regnskap
6. Gjennomgang av årsrapport 2012
7. Gjennomgang av budsjett 2013
8. Godkjenning av budsjett 2013
9. Gjennomgang av handlingsprogram for 2013
10. Godkjenning av handlingsprogram 2013
11. Presentasjon av ny daglig leder
12. Presentasjon av vedtektsendringer
13. Godkjenning av vedtektsendringer
14. Valg av delegater til NBK landsmøte.
15. Innkomne saker
16. Nominasjonskomiteen presenterer innstilte 2 styremedlemmer og 1 vara.
17. Eventuelt presentasjon av andre styremedlems kandidater.
18. Valg
Being a member is primarily an action of solidarity. Organised together as a collective we have the power and ability to proactively influence and shape the Norwegian art scene of tomorrow.
Our demands change with socio-political shifts in society, in the 70’s our predecessors organised to fight for working grants. This historic reform totally changed the conditions of artistic practice in Norway and marked the beginning of the situation we live in today.
We continue this work, constantly re-thinking the fundamentals that govern artists and curators contemporary situations. A recent example of our achievements has been the financing reform of artist-run spaces. As a direct result of our activities a new scheme has been established, which currently provides full financial support for five non-profit galleries with funding through Arts Council Norway. This scheme is under continual observation and evaluation, with an expectation for continued expansion over the coming years.
As a member you support us in our work striving for a more professional and international art community in Norway. Would you like to be a member? Apply here
Download constitution (in Norwegian) as PDF here
§1. Formål
UKS er en frittstående forening som jobber for samtidskunsten og for medlemmenes politiske og sosiale rettigheter og interesser. Organisasjonen er landsdekkende og jobber internasjonalt for å fremme samarbeid på tvers av nasjonale, etniske og andre tradisjonelle avgrensninger. Medlemmene i UKS er kollektivt representert av UKS i forhandlinger med offentlige organer. Alle kan søke medlemskap på like villkår. Foreningen er tilsluttet Norske Billedkunstnere. Som UKS medlem er det valgfritt om man ønsker NBK medlemskap.
§2. Medlemmene er ikke ansvarlige for foreningens gjeld.
2.1 Yrkesaktive kuratorer kan få søke medlemskap hos UKS.
2.3 Studerende ved Mastergradsstudiet i billedkunst kan søke om gratis studentmedlemskap.
§3. Foreningens organer
Generalforsamlingen
Styret
Valgkomiteen
§4. Generalforsamlingen og årsmøtet er foreningens høyeste organ, og arrangeres vekselsvist hvert 2. år innen 31.mars og innkalles med minst fire ukers varsel. Årsberetning, regnskap, budsjettforslag og andre sakspapirer samt eventuelle lovendringsforslag skal gjøres kjent for medlemmene senest to uker før GF.
4.1 Generalforsamlingen og årsmøtet er åpent, men kun medlemmer som har betalt kontigent for foregående år har forslags- og stemmerett. Alle medlemmer som har betalt kontigent for foregående år har talerett.
4.2 Revidert regnskap, årsberetning og budsjettforslag fra styret skal legges frem på GF. GF velger styre, valgkommite og revisor.
4.3 Avstemningene skjer ved håndsopprekning. Skriftlig avstemning avholdes dersom noen krever det.
4.4 Alle vedtak fattes med alminnelig flertall. Untatt er lovendringer som krever 2/3 dels flertall
4.5 Medlemmer som er forhindret fra å møte til årsmøtet kan forhåndstemme på saker meldt i sakspapirene eller ved skriftlig erklæring overdra sin stemme til et navngitt annet medlem med stemefullmakt med max 2 pr. medlem
4.6 Ekstraordinær GF skal innkalles etter vedtak i styret, eller dersom minst 100 betalende medlemmer for foregående år krever det. Ekstraordinær GF innkalles på samme måte som GF, men senest to måneder etter vedtak/krav. Ekstraordinær GF kan kun behandle saker som er nevnt i innkallingen.
§5. Styret består av styreleder, nestleder og tre ordinære styremedlemmer samt to varamedlemmer. Styreleder, to styremedlemmer, samt en varamedlem velges på GF. Nestleder, en styremedlem og en varamedlem velges på årsmøtet. Alle valg skal skje separat. Styret er forpliktet av vedtak fattet på GF. Styreleder innkaller til styremøter og leder disse. Styret er vedtaksdyktig når minst tre medlemmer er tilstede. Vedtak fattes ved alminnelig flertall. Styreperioden er på to år. Ingen kan sitte suksessivt i flere enn to styreperioder.
§5.1 Juryen dannes av styret. Styreleder er leder av juryen. Juryens oppgave er:
1. å arbeide tverrfaglig
2. å ta opp nye medlemmer
3. å juryere utstillingsprogrammet
4. å delta aktivt i arbeidet med foreningens utstillingsvirksomhet
Medlemmer i styret eller styrets vararepresentanter kan ikke juryeres inn i utstillinger/prosjekter i UKS regi eller motta midler fra fond UKS forvalter i perioden man sitter med verv.
§6. Årskontigent fastsettes av GF.
§7. GF nedsetter valgkomite med tre medlemmer. Komiteen konstituerer seg selv og svarer kun til GF.
§8. Daglig leder, sekretær og annen arbeidshjelp annsettes av styret. Daglig leders stilling er på åremål for 4 år i gangen. Lønn til ansatte og honorar til tillitsvalgte vedtaes av styret. Ingen kan sitte suksessivt mer enn to perioder.
§9. UKS forum for samtidskunst utgis av UKS med styret som ansvarlig utgiver. Styret engasjerer redaktør som utarbeider den redaksjonelle profilen etter samråd med styret. Redaktørens åremål følger styreperiodene, men kan forlenges av neste styre.
§10. Utmelding av foreningen skjer skriftlig.
§11. Medlemmer av rasistiske eller fascistiske organisasjoner kan ikke være medlem av UKS.
§12. Oppløsning av foreningen krever 2/3 dels flertall på ekstraordinær generalforsamling innkalt med tre måneders varsel. Ved oppløsning avsettes foreningens midler i et fond i overenstemmelse med formålsparagrafen.
Disse lovene er vedtatt på generalforsamlingen i 1946. De er senere revidert i 1948, 1960, 1964, 1972, 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2008 og 2010
# 10.04.13
The board is currently preparing for an extraordinary general assembly to present, discuss and vote on a comprehensive restructuring of the UKS' Statute.
In addition we follow-up on previously started projects:
-Preparation for a survey on the studio situation in the largest cities in Norway.
-Working on a manual for artist run spaces.
-Continue the effort to establish an assistant grant.
# 07.02.13
#get a new manager/director
#decide upon a revised and updated constitution
#have the Ministry of Culture work on implementing the assistant grant
# 05.10.12
ASSISTANT GRANT / THE NORWEGIAN PARLIAMENT REPORT 23 (STORTINGSMELDING 23)
UKS continue the effort to establish an assistant grant funded through the increase in funds that is promised in The Norwegian Parliament report 23 of this year. In this effort UKS is in dialogue with the Culture Department and Arts Council Norway. The next step in this process is the Open Hearing at the Norwegian Parliament in mid October. Arts Council Norway recently launched ”Aspirantordningen” an internship program that is to cover the cultural field nationwide. This internship program is first and foremost aimed at integration of minorities, and is not the same as the assistant grant proposed by UKS. UKS´ proposal has had good media coverage recently thanks to a good dialogue with the press on this matter.
# 05.10.12
CONCORDANCE ON THE NORWEGIAN PARLIAMENT REPORT 23 (STORTINGSMELDING 23)
Towards the open hearing and the on-going political dialogue regarding Stortingsmelding 23, UKS and the other artist associations (NBK, FFF, NK and The Sami Artist´s Union) emphasize the importance of strengthening and expanding the exhibition grants, establish a new system for exhibition fees and increasing the number of artist grants as well as establishing new grants for established and senior artists. Read Stortingsmelding 23 here (Norwegian only):
http://www.regjeringen.no/nn/dep/kud/dokument/proposisjonar-og-meldingar/stortingsmeldingar/2011-2012/meld-st-23-20112012.html?id=680602
# 05.10.12
THE STUDIO SITUATION
UKS is happy to announce that during the spring of 2013, we will give a six months studio grant for a young artist who will have the opportunity to use UKS studio at Olaf Ryes Plass 2 in Oslo.
City of Oslo has also announced new subsidised studios with application deadline 31 October. HERE: http://www.kulturetaten.oslo.kommune.no/article234363-6863.html
# 05.10.12
STATUTES
We are currently in the process of proofing UKS´ statutes. This will be done by mid October and presented to UKS General Assembly in 2013. NBK´s lawyer Hilde Skjeggestad assists UKS in this process.
# 05.10.12
TRAVEL SUPPORT
On request, UKS has given a statement to The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the administration and management of travel support for visual art. You can read our four points here
# 05.10.12
VENICE BIENNALE / OCA
UKS are in meetings with OCA concerning strategies towards Norwegian participation at the Venice Biennale. Our letter to The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (above) reflects UKS position in this matter.
# 30.08.12
We are currently lobbying the Ministry of Culture for the creation of an assistant grant, based on the established Swedish model. Our proposal is supported by all the other artist organisations in Norway
Download our proposition here
# 30.08.12
We are researching the possibility of producing a detailed survey that will document and evaluate the current studio situation for artists in the four major cities of Norway.
Our aim is to produce adequate statistics that can function as the foundation for a forthcoming debate.
Here is a list of UKS’s members whose work you can find on the internet, they are organised according to the artists' last names, the list does not constitute a full list of all of our members.
In this section we aim to inform and enlighten by sharing relevant information concerning the social aspects of artists living and/or working in Norway. The subjects are diverse and if you think something is missing please let us know. We are happy to receive further suggestions here
Innkallelse
Velkommen til UKS` generalforsamling 2013 fredag 22. mars kl. 18.00 i Lakkegata 55d.
Sakspapirene er tilgjengelig i nedlastingsfeltet øverst
Dersom du ønsker å motta sakspapirene via post, ring oss på telefon 22195050.
For å ha stemmerett under generalforsamling må du ha betalt medlemskontingenten for 2012. Vedtekter finner du her.
Vi minner for øvrig om § 4.5 i vedtektene:
Medlemmer som er forhindret fra å møte på årsmøtet kan forhåndsstemme på saker meldt i sakspapirene eller ved skriftlig erklæring overdra sin stemme til et navngitt annet medlem med stemmefullmakt. Max 2 pr. medlem.
Forhåndsstemmer og stemmefullmakter må meldes til styret senest 24 timer før årsmøtet. E-post en scan eller fax (22195054) en fullmakt med underskrift.
DAGSORDEN
1. Valg av referent og tellekorps
2. Godkjenning av innkalling og dagsorden
3. Gjennomgang av årsberetning 2012
4. Gjennomgang av regnskap 2012
5. Godkjenning av regnskap
6. Gjennomgang av årsrapport 2012
7. Gjennomgang av budsjett 2013
8. Godkjenning av budsjett 2013
9. Gjennomgang av handlingsprogram for 2013
10. Godkjenning av handlingsprogram 2013
11. Presentasjon av ny daglig leder
12. Presentasjon av vedtektsendringer
13. Godkjenning av vedtektsendringer
14. Valg av delegater til NBK landsmøte.
15. Innkomne saker
16. Nominasjonskomiteen presenterer innstilte 2 styremedlemmer og 1 vara.
17. Eventuelt presentasjon av andre styremedlems kandidater.
18. Valg
Curated by FRANK
With works by Serina Erfjord, Klara Lidén, Sidsel Paaske, Tove Pedersen, Roee Rosen and Martin Skauen.
The exhibition takes “Possessions” as starting point to address the complexities of the term: as an act of taking control, claiming ownership, and a state of being possessed by demons and emotions. The selection of artworks evokes ambiguities of gender, desires and complex power relations, to allow for contradictions and collisions of the past and present to surface. It presents various explorations of the operations of power, identity construction and dominant ideologies, confronting solidified modes of thought that oppress the possibilities of ambiguity and paradox.
Klara Lidén’s video work, The Myth of Progress, functions as an allegory of the show as a whole, questioning the understanding of Western advancements. In it, the artist glides backwards through a cityscape, moving at her own pace as the world around her continues its course. Roee Rosen’s Out (Tse) is another central work. It presents a possession episode in which Israeli right-wing ideology is internalized within the body of a woman and exorcized through a domination/submission scene. The complexities of possessions are extended to erotic tapestry from the 70s, a drawing of a mother and child, a symbolic sculpture, a found object and an intervention in the “watchtower” in the exhibition space.
FRANK is a platform run by Liv Bugge and Sille Storihle. It was established in April 2012 to nurture art and critical discourse revolving around gender issues, desire and sexuality. The incentive to form such a platform came from the realization that Oslo, to a large extent, lacked a scene that critically addressed gender issues. The platform operates in different locations and with various co-curators, Possessions is the first major curatorial work by FRANK.
Artist talk by Roee Rosen
Osterhausgate 12
Roee Rosen (b. 1963) is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. He will present two fictive identities, The Jewish Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank (1900-1943), and the young Russian Poet and artist Maxim Komar-Myshkin who committed suicide in 2011
Rosen’s painting and text installation, Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995-1997), stirred a scandal when first exhibited at the Israel Museum. Eva Braun was later recognized as groundbreaking in its approach to the representation of the holocaust, and was exhibited in Berlin and in New York and Warsaw. In 2012 the project was part of Rosen sole exhibition Vile, Evil Veil at the Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA), London.
Rosen dedicated many years to his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as writing biographical and theoretical text about her, and the novel she supposedly authored. Rosen's book, Justine Frank, Sweet Sweat (Sternberg Press) was listed as one of the best books of 2009 by Artforum magazine. In 2008, Frank's “retrospective” was exhibited at Extra-City, in her native town, Antwerp (an exhibition curated by Hila Peleg).
ART ART HISTORY HISTORY AGAIN AGAIN is an open forum for dialectical discussion and interpretation of the historical preconditions for art. During this forum we will develop our main tool; a timeline that will manifest the discussed history. In the form of a classical symposium the participants are encouraged to actively involve themselves in the material as well as additional resources available at UKS. With the idea of man's separation from nature, through the Dionysian return via utopian ecstasy, and up to heroic materialism, we will present an eclectic array of narratives and action.
Covering 202 013 years, the symposium will be held over three weeks, and culminates in an exhibition Thursday January the 24th at UKS. The participants are then assigned to unique artistic eras that they will interpret, both conceptually and stylistically.
Silenus claimed that "It is best not to be born, second best to die young". Let's rephrase this to "best is not knowing anything, second best is it to know it all".
Welcome to the opening of ART ART HISTORY HISTORY AGAIN AGAIN Thursday January 24th at 7.00pm in the main hall of UKS.
Gesticulators: Vilde von Krogh, Mikael D. Brkic, Sebastian Makonnen Kjølaas
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A film program put together by the gesticulators will be shown in relation to the discussed topics.
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ART ART HISTORY HISTORY AGAIN AGAIN is initiated by Prosjektskolen AS in conjunction with UKS. www.prosjektskolen.no
Edited by Gjertrud Steinsvåg
Published by www.feilforlag.no
Free download: www.nevermindthebenefits.no
How does money influence integrity of artists and relevance of their work? In which way does funding influence artist’s motivation? Is there a difference between public and private funding? These and other questions are attempted be answered in the anthology Never mind the Benefits.
With essays by: writer and senior advisor in KORO, Dag Wiersholm, critic André Gali, art sociologist Sigrid Røyseng and critic/curator Erlend Hammer.
Additional contributions by: artists Marianne Heier and Marius Martinussen, former director of Kunsthall Oslo, Per Gunnar Eeg-Tverbakk and gallerists Randi Thommessen (Lautom Contemporary) and Randi Grov Berger (Entrée).
In a series of informal events, Mikael D. Brkic gathers temporary visitors and local voices together in informal constellations to reflect and elaborate on relevant topics.
In this second edition Lindsay Lawson, one of the initiators of Times Bar, Berlin and Esperanza Rosales founder of VI, VII, Oslo join in for a discussion about possible "alternative" structures for mediation of contemporary art.
Times Bar was located in Hermannstrasse 16, Neukölln, Berlin. As a short-lived phenomena lasting between July 1, 2001-September 7, 2012 it is both famous and infamous. The bi-monthly "hanging" of a single work of art behind the bar served as an exhibition format for young, emerging to mid-career artists in and around Berlin.
The newly opened VI, VII is a gallery and exhibition space that represents international artists, but withdraws from obvious categorization, refusing to be trapped in a particular format.
Times Bar primarily attracted a vast ex-pat audience and the current location of VI, VII unavoidably raises questions of involvement in gentrification – is this a relevant critique today or has the idea of negotiating the institution lost much of its validity?
Doors open 5 pm.
Liz Glynn, William E. Jones, Christine Rebet, Emily Roysdon, Jumana Manna and Wu Tsang
with Nana Oforiatta-Ayim
curated by Shoghig Halajian and Suzy M. Halajian
Nothing is forgotten, some things considered explores the politics of image-making and its impact on individual and collective identity. At a moment when the dominance of neoliberalism and its attending crisis questions the smooth image of corporate capitalism, the exhibition brings together artists who challenge dominant modes of representation within historical and political discourses. It investigates the multifarious sites of power that construct identity, ranging from national archives to media coverage of protest, and consequently presents a generative tension between ideology and experience.
Acknowledging that history is representational and the images that constitute it mediated, the exhibited artists investigate identity-forming narratives within culture. Across their use of video, sculpture and performance, they explore a broad spectrum of issues, including the Farm Security Administration archives of American society during the Great Depression and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Hellenistic antique collection, to problematize the objectivity of visual and canonized information. The artists reconfigure, decontextualize or abstract key elements within these sites in order to disclose gaps in narratives and open up space for improvisation, misreadings, and awkward tension. The project explores the paradoxes inherent in producing identity and the critical potential of images. It reconsiders the status of the subject by re-aligning the visual with physical lived experience. In doing so, it emphasizes the significance of claiming space – both the poetic and the actual – and looks for alternative ways of inhabiting public and political sites. The body within environments of collectivity takes priority, underscoring the significance of how one feels in the world and how one can feel in the world.
The Artist is Present is a feature-length documentary about Marina Abramović and her preparations for her 2011 retrospective at MoMA. Abramović is portrayed as a glamorous art-world-icon and myth of her own making on the verge to take the leap into – what under these pre-set conditions only can be understood as – the exhilarating milestone moment of desire for any living artist, a major solo at a premium museum. While the installation and exhibition period serve as a narrative spine, the strategic game played between Abramović and her long time friend, MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach also reflect upon constituting factors in the intricate web of legitimating a legacy.
Abramović’s ambitious plan seems to be that of securing a future understanding of performance as a legitimate art form and thereby also her own importance in art history, and the MoMA show is the vehicle to achieve it – once and for all. An ambition seemingly far from Abramović’s own device “The hardest thing is to do something which is close to nothing”. While the context and the institution serve as tools for her agenda, the film also allows us to follow Abramović's sketches for the new work that will be the centrepiece of the exhibition. As such, the work is perfectly scripted for her purpose. It is not only the longest-duration work in her career, it is also claimed to be the most physically and emotionally demanding one. Only the thought of it “made me nauseous” Abramović says in the film.
The work that also lends the title to the film – The Artist is Present – consists of Abramović herself, sitting at a table in the museum’s atrium while individual members of the audience are invited to join her – one at the time – at the opposite end of the table. The conditions are simple; no talking, no touching, no overt communication. Abramović’s goal is to achieve what she refers to as a “luminous state of being” and to transmit this in “an energy dialogue”. In the film Abramović’s performance of presence becomes a metaphoric manifestation where she returns to her roots in order to crystallize her own simplicity and purity – the moment where life becomes art and art becomes life – or is it, art becomes documentary film becomes advertising?
(doc.lounge is a colaboration with Oslo Dokumentarkino and Moloch)
No Gods, No Parents will be on display during Art Berlin Contemporary, participants may contribute new content.
Bazaar is part of abc, Artists Space has selected an additional 20 international organizations and initiatives – from publishers to architects, record labels to fashion designers – to present their projects on over 3000 square meters in the entrance hall. The diversity of this section suggests the expanded yet interconnected field of contemporary cultural production, and the varied forms of distribution and exchange that these activities engage in.
Artists Space (NYC) has been invited to organize two artist “interventions” and the “bazaar” as part of abc 2012. Founded in 1972 in Downtown Manhattan, Artists Space has since successfully contributed to changing the institutional and economic landscape for contemporary art, by lending support to emerging artists and emerging ideas alike, and often controversially and critically challenging the intellectual and artistic status quo in New York City and beyond..
Nordic Focus
Kaffebord at den Frie Udstillingsbygning – Common histories and artist initiatives.
The Visual Arts Focus of the Reykjavík Arts Festival 2012, (I)ndependent People: Collaborations & Artist Initiatives, which officially ends on September 2nd, conceptually holds many points of correspondence to both the theme of Copenhagen Art Festival and the history of the venue and working methods employed by Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Center for Contemporary Art.
(On display during the conversation: No Gods No Parents. Participants are encouraged to contribute.)
In Reykjavík, several of the trajectories of artist-initiated practices from the Nordic region – spanning the past forty years – served as a genealogical background to questions posed in both the exhibitions and an international seminar, such as: Do we share common, ‘alternative’ histories in the Nordic region? If so, what are they and is it relevant to peruse these connections today? How have these networks changed over time? Is it possible, or even desirable, to create dynamic and sustainable collaborations?
Trajectories from this on-going investigation will be presented at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning / Centre of Contemporary Art is staged as an open conversation, echoing Den Frie´s Projekt Kaffebord. Our point of departure is The Living Art Museum´s Archive of Artist-Run Initiatives, who opened an office in the main exhibition hall at the National Gallery in Reykjavík between May and September 2012, housing a research on an archive of artist-run projects in Iceland from the past five decades. They presented objects and documentation from conceptual galleries like Gúlp! (contained within a shoe box) and Gallerí Barmur (a wearable badge in which exhibitions took place) to artist run venues like the Living Art Museum itself (founded by twenty artists in 1978 and still today key to Icelandic art history and international exchange).
One of the Kaffebord is a seminar-format that takes the 1800´s salong conversation as
it´s point of departure, with a specifically invited group of experts on the subject to be discussed. Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, have released 2 books documenting their experimental projects by transcribing several Kaffebord conversations.
Confirmed participants (more to be confirmed): Jonatan Habib Engqvist, curator of (I)ndependent People, Stockholm, Linus Elmes, director UKS, Oslo, Gunnhildur Hauksdottír, director of the Living Art Museum; Reykjavík, Kirse Junge-Stevnsborg, director of Den Frie Udstillingsbygning
In a series of informal events, our new member of staff Mikael D. Brkic gathers temporary visitors and local voices together in informal constellations to reflect and elaborate on relevant topics.
The first event covers topics located within and between art and fashion. Agatha Wara gives a presentation based on her text What Does Nike Want?, suggesting a new approach to art criticism that is underpinned by materialist philosophy, taking cues from advertising and brand-culture. With the Swiss Masai shoe as an example Ragnhild Brochmann talks about the classical dichotomy of form and content. Halvor Rønning introduces us to his practice and talks about how he arrived at appropriating brands in his work. With this as a backdrop, Ida Eritsland moderates a conversation between the participants and audience.
Tora_Dalseng_2012_Press.zip (3.1mb)
Tora_Dalseng_2012_Production.zip (0.2mb)
Of these works we cannot speak
Approaching something with the ambition to explain it can be precarious. At every attempt one finds oneself defenceless against a linguistic-philosophical query, regarding of the possibility to create a representation of the impossible and unnameable in order to render the unintelligible intelligible.
SYMMETRY is a series of drawings, an object and three publications of a future where a life without work-work is possible and there is nothing to regret.
Two of the publications reside from the process up until the realization of the exhibition, they co-exist without no specific inter-mutual order. CITY is a polyglot exercise and KATT is a correspondence between the artist and Stian Gabrielsen.
The third book is developed in collaboration between Johan Hjerpe and Linus Elmes. Through grammar, rhetoric and polemics it ends up in SYMMETRY.
Curated by Linus Elmes
aiPotu, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Axel Linderholm, Five oclock shadows, Idan Hayosh, Joanna Malinowska, Julien Berthier, Kunstverein St. Pauli, Maria Hlady, Mercedes Mühleisen, Miks Mitrevics, Roman Singer, Serina Erfjord, Sigmund Skard, Siri S. Skaard, Tori Wrånes, Øyvind Aspen
FTG takes place in the archipelago of Fitjar consisting of 381 islands, isles and reefs off the West Coast of Norway. The project is located on the Island of Smedholmen, together with a number of the surrounding islands. Each invited artist will have access to their own island to produce a temporary and site specific work in relation to topography, vegetation, weather, tides and light conditions.This is a collaborative production with the artists and initiators Silje Linge Haaland and Andrea Bakketun.
BABY SNAKES HATCHING. RUINS. RUINS.
Curated by Erlend Hammer
The surface seems to be made of a soft leathery material. In 1923 Aby Warburg gives a lecture on the Serpent Ritual. The different units stick together. As the baby snake uses its tooth to slice open the membrane, the East Wing of the Naturkunde Museum in Berlin is bombed into ruins. The hatching process takes up to two days from it starts until the snake has managed to leave the demolished edifice behind. The structure then deflates like a punctuated ball, and is left to decompose. In 1979 Frank Zappa’s single Baby Snakes is released.
For the exhibition Baby Snakes Hatching. Ruins. Ruins. Mai Hofstad Gunnes presents new works including a 16mm film, collages and a series of unique silkscreen prints. The project draws on references from psychoanalysis, zoology, Indian animal mythology and architecture, becoming a labyrinthian semiotics in which architecture and the life cycle of snakes connect through magical assimilation. An artist book is launched during the exhibition. The book, produced by UKS and published by Torpedo Press, contains essays by Erlend Hammer and Emily Verla Bovino.
Works of students, teachers and aluminis of KHiO is for sale
- remember to bring CASH
Any artist who expands their practice to encompass a wider audience, as opposed to create with integrity, may be disdainfully labeled as a “sellout”.
The rent boy bro-ho’s and alley cats of the Academy of fine Arts in Oslo together with allied anonymous sympathizers have simultaneously gone down that road before to sell their souls, and this year they turn tricks again for 1000 NOK only.
They defend it with the noble aim of raising funds for the 2012 yearbook but we all know that they are in it for the money …
Regnskap_Balanse.pdf (7.5mb)
Styreberetning_dagsorden_nominasjoner.pdf (0.2mb)
Yo can download all the neccessary paperwork for the Annual General Meeting 2012 in the downloads section above.
Unge Kunstneres Samfund
Generalforsamling 2012
Wednesday 21st March 18:00
Lakkegata 55 D
Dominique Buchtala (DE), Vesna Bukovec (SI), Ana Grobler (SI), Guerrilla Girls (US), Michelle Handelman (US), Kika Nicolela (BR), Grace Graupe Pillard (US), Angelika Rinnhofer (DE/US), Duba Sambolec (SI/NO), Evelin Stermitz (AT/SI), Alison Williams (ZA), Liana Zanfrisco (IT)
In a collaboration between UKS and Oslo Screen Festival 2012 Austrian artist and curator, Evelin Stermitz presents a film program and a lecture.Stermitz graduated with a MA degree in new media art from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and is holding a Master degree in philosophy from media studies. Besides her artistic work, Stermitz's research focuses on women artists in media and new media art. In 2008 she founded ArtFem.TV, an online television program presenting art and feminism, with the aim to foster women's media works, their art and projects, to create an international online television screen for the images and voices of women.
The program CONTEXTUAL FACE (48 minutes) addresses variant meanings of the woman's face in the context of women's issues when embedded in a socio-cultural heritage.
Klassekampen - Gaven som fortsetter å GI
published: 25.02.12
Garantiinntekt
Anders Dahl Monsen
Marte Ramm Fortun
Victoria Pihl Lind
Click in the downloads section to download and read the article.
UKS supports the preservation of GI and is working towards a resolution of this issue. We believe it would be a mistake to remove a scheme that has served the needs of artists so well without a thorough review in relation to artists other sources of income and scholarships.
During the exhibition four of Vitales videos are screened in the cinema; Patron – 2010 (8:38), That Brute Beasts Make Use of Reason - 2007 (2:27), I Know Who I Am (with M. Portnoy and T. Fivel) - 2005 (19:23) and Battle for the Hurled - 2009 (2:29)
UKS participates in Condition Report, a 3-day international symposium on building art institutions in Africa organised by Raw Material Company in cooperation with the Goethe Institut and German Federal Cultural Foundation. The symposium takes place in Dakar, Senegal, from 18-20 January 2012.
According to the organisers, ‘Condition Report aims to address the changing role of art institutions and initiatives in relation to the broader artistic urgencies, and in relation to the society in its whole. The symposium is organised to evaluate a founding principle of many independent organisations that have emerged in recent years – namely that independent contemporary art institutions are an important voice in the construction of a strong cultural private sector as well as in forging a critical opinion from an open civil society. The importance of issues of action, space, power, control and quality will be covered. The sessions will also provide a platform for discussing case studies and experiences accompanied by an informed interpretative analysis’.
The symposium is divided into three leading chapters broken down into multiple sessions. In an effort to contextualise the African art scene and facilitate access and exchange to international participants, site visits to local art institutions are an integral part of the programme.
The first chapter, Actors, Agents and Mainstream, ‘looks at existing institutions and how they work to build a shared understanding of artistic agency’. The second chapter, Remains of the Days, ‘discusses how former colonial powers define and implement their strategies of cultural representation and exchange in post-colonial areas’.
The Norwegian delegation will participate in the third chapter titled Area Studies, which ‘investigates models and profiles of art institutions developed in other regions of the world with similar historical and contemporary settings’. The session scheduled on Friday, 20 January, titled Case Study: Norway, will elaborate upon a grass roots impulse that is assuming the scene of contemporary art and how it relates to international exchange.
Other international participants in the symposium include Abdellah Karroum (Appartement 22, Rabat, Morocco); Yto Barrada (Cinémathèque de Tanger, Tanger, Morocco); Oyinda Fakeye (Center of Contemporary Art Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria); Juan Gaitan (Witte de With, Rotterdam, the Netherlands); Livia Paldi (Baltic Art Centre, Visby, Gotland county, Sweden); Kerstin Pinther (Free University, Berlin, Germany); Dirk Snauwaert (Wiels Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, Belgium); Ousseynou Wade (Dakar Biennale, Dakar, Senegal) and Marie-Cécile Zinsou (Fondation Zinsou, Cotonou, Benin), among others.
THE PRINCESS AND THE MONOLITH
In 1656, Diego Velázquez painted Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor) in the court of King Philip IV. The painting extends the illusionary space of its image by establishing a fixed position for the live viewer in relation to the work's flat surface. In 1672, at the age of 21, Princess Margarita died. In 1968, Stanley Kubrick released the science fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film centers on the interactions between human beings and a group of scaleless, though consistently proportioned (9:4:1), black magnetic monoliths. In 1999, at the age of 70, Stanley Kubrick died. In 2001, The Bruce High Quality Foundation was formed in New York City. The Foundation honors the legacy of the social sculptor, Bruce High Quality, through the instigation of confrontations between cold hard fiction and cold hard fact. In 2001, Bruce High Quality died.
The Bruce High Quality Foundation, the official arbiter of the estate of Bruce High Quality, is dedicated to the preservation of the legacy of the late social sculptor, Bruce High Quality. In the spirit of the life and work of Bruce High Quality, we aspire to invest the experience of public space with wonder, to resurrect art history from the bowels of despair, and to impregnate the institutions of art with the joy of man’s desiring ...
Professional Challenges. Amateur Solutions
In conjunction with Belgian artist Sven Augustijnen residency at OCA’s International Studio Programme we are happy to, in collaboration with OCA, screen three of his films:
L’École des Pickpockets (2000, 48 min)
The film unfolds as kind of documentary around two professional pick-pockets who give a master-class in their craft.
Le Guide du Parc (2001, 44 min)
A film centred on one individual, a middle-aged businessman who incessantly speaks into the camera in a guided tour through a park located in the centre of Brussels. He brings the viewers' attention to the instruction inscribed on the palace wall that informs in detail of how it is possible to sexually solicit another individual in the park, and the film proceeds according to this narrative.
Une Femme Entreprenante (2005, 72 min)
A film that documents how a museum for contemporary art is literally talked into existence. The film follows the accounts of several people as they meet to speak about plans for the development of a contemporary art centre on the site of a disused and more or less derelict brewery in Brussels. The central figure in the story is a real estate developer who has decided to support the plans for the redevelopment of the brewery into a place for art. A story evolves around the evolving inclusion of other characters: advisers, wealthy patrons and art professionals who convene at the site, standing upon its ruins and projecting its future.
Eva_Drangsholt_2011_Press.zip (5.8mb)
Eva_Drangsholt_2011_Documentation.zip (94.8mb)
THE NEW LANDS
EVA DRANGSHOLT (NO)
feat. Paul Gauguin (FR) & George Kuchar (US)
Curated by Linus Elmes
Sailing is not only about leaving it is also about returning …
In the autumn of 1968 Donald Crowhurst set out from England in a plywood trimaran to take part in the first single handed non-stop round-the-word sailboat race. With little previous sailing experience, Crowhurst’s boat was badly equipped and his homemade electronic gadgets unreliable. Only through persistence had he managed to persuade the judges to give him permission to take part in the race.
Stolen_Apples_2011_Press.zip (0.4mb)
Stolen_Apples_2011_Documentation.zip (29.8mb)
One night we jumped fences and climbed fruit trees. We redistributed about 20 kilos of stolen fruit - mostly apples, but also some pears - at OCA for their green gathering.
Stealin' Apples - Benny Goodman
THE BRUCE HIGH QUALITY FOUNDATION
SCREENING PROGRAM (on loop during opening hours)
Art History with Food” – 2008 (17 min)
The Gate: Not the Idea of the Thing But the Thing Itself” – 2006 (11 min)
Public Art and Collaboration” – 2008 (7 min)
We Like Amerika” – 2010 (22 min)
2001: Art History with Metaphor” – 2010 (16 min)
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
BHQFAQ is a talk on ... the Paradoxes of working simultaneously as an organization and an artist, the construction of history, the progress of garbage, the politics of specificity, how to run a free art school, how to get rich, the auction market from 1973 to present, community spirit, drinking in public, the individually momentous, momentary solidarity, and how to build a better tomorrow.
In collaboration with Harpefoss Hotell and Torpedo, we invite you to join us for a summer festival with concerts, food, self-brew, plays and poetry.
Harpefoss Hotell opens WunderbaumWanderlustWunderkammer on the 1st of July with a 2-day festival, UKS is organising a road trip to the festival.
Dronebrygg_2011_Documentation.zip (215.8mb)
Dronebrygg_2011_Press.zip (19.9mb)
DANIEL TEIGEN, STEINAR BRAA, ANDREAS HEGERMANN RIIS
CURATED BY: ANDERS DAHL MONSEN
As an UKS one-shot venture Dronebrygg microbrewery will present their latest experiments in contemporary beer production. Infamously known for their previous brews Crystal Mesk and Busty Milf Dronebrygg’s maiden public appearance carries a promise of divine proportions for all and every thirsty throat.
Try_Again_2011_Production.zip (3.8mb)
Try_Again_2011_Documentation.zip (350.3mb)
CHARLOTTE THIIS-EVENSEN & EIVIND BUENE
Try Again is a one-night venture following a strict script. The artists have chosen to perform this as a public event within the realms of the exhibition room at UKS. It is an attempt to test the conditions of a social contract within the institution and at the same time perform an act that will have real effect outside the institution, legally and socially.
Curtator: Linus Elmes
Maids: Ivan Galuzin and Anders Dahl Monsen
Entrance Music: Lars Petter Hagen, performed by POING
Speech: Trond Reinholdtsen
Performance: DJ Gud Junior
Exit music: Øyvind Torvund, performed by POING
Architecture: Siri Liset
Design: Iselin Engan and T-Michael
Photo: Signe Marie Andersen
Party music: DJ Kavalér
Brune_Manum_2011_Documentation.zip (36.7mb)
Brune_Manum_2011_Production.zip (182.7mb)
This presentation of the works of Øivind Brune and Talleiv Taro Manum marks a point in history where multiple timelines meet in order to manifest themselves again. The exhibition is an intersection between now and then, and an obligatory right of passage between two artists linked to each other beyond formal expressions and aesthetic values.
Øivind was part of the infamous GRAS-group in the 60’s and Talleiv has over the past ten years established a unique position within the Norwegian art scene. With their individual works now presented side by side for the first time we are happy to be the same institution where they both once debuted, Øivind in 1971 and Talleiv in 1997.
In a search for fragile dialogical connections between generations we discovered an interrelationship fundamentally based upon their characters. Both Talleiv and Øivind are stubborn individuals who in a search for autonomy have developed deeply personal agendas that are to be found in their work.
The exhibition is curated by the UKS director Linus Elmes. In conjunction with the exhibition we have produced a publication with contributions from: Talleiv Taro Manum, Geir Tore Holm, Morten Krogh, Peter Amdam and Linus Elmes.
NEW AUTHORS / NEW VISIONS UKS FILM SCREENINGS
The French director Francois Truffaut once famously said, "I demand that a film express either the joy of making cinema or the agony of making cinema. I am not at all interested in anything in between." Truffaut's words best describe the selection of films presented at the NEW AUTHORS / NEW VISIONS film screenings 2011. None of these filmic works are in between, instead they are all a result of a personal endeavor, a vision, a need to tell a story, convey a mood or present a situation in a certain way, without compromises and often by going through both the joy and agony of filmmaking. In all, NEW AUTHORS / NEW VISIONS pays tribute to the idea about the director as the main creative force behind a filmic work. Each of the selected films reflect a strong personal vision and present a unique artistic viewpoint of the world.
While many of the films utilize a variety of filmic strategies to exploit the narrative and formal potential of film, others delve into sensations and feelings, rather than a story. Yet some use low-fi animation or advanced stage design to get their message across. The filmic works are all bound together by a certain seriousness and devotion toward their subject and center around reoccurring themes such as isolation, adolescence, longing and relationships.
Curated by Carolina Hellsgård and Astrid Rieger
COLUMN AND CORRIDOR
Serina Erfjord [1982] lives and works in Oslo, Norway. She graduated from the Art Academy in Oslo in 2008. Her works are within a sculptural field and they usually reflect and include their surroundings, as they often constitute interventions within the gallery space or the public realm. The works are often simple and minimalistic, but have a character of being both subtle and monumental. Her interest in movements within a material is shown through her use of electromagnets, gravity, freezing elements, motors, sound light and different kinds of liquids.?
It is with great pleasure that we present Serina Erfjord’s research project Column and Corridor here at UKS.
After a three week long workshop; Demanding the impossible; the structural transformation of the public sphere and civil obedience, the students from Prosjektskolen in collaboration with Leander Djønne and the director of UKS, Linus Elmes are pleased to invite you to the release of a publication made during the workshop, and a one night only show at UKS.
Together we have investigated different ideas concerning that of the state, the public and private sphere, civil obedience, anarchy, the potential of escapism and different forms of autonomous communities. We have been questioning individuality, the embodiment of our common dispossession in post-fordist society and the possibilities of removing every obstacle one by one.
When the very sign of resistance or just a word of complaint is repressed, fined, despised, vexed, pursued, hustled, beaten up, garrotted, imprisoned, shot, machine-gunned, judged, sentenced, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to cap it all – ridiculed, mocked, outraged, and dishonoured. That is governing! That is society! That is our acceptance of justice and morality!
We claim that power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.
This universal TAKING OVER within all fields of human activity, bringing with it its wars and its domestic struggles of power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development there is… DEATH! In this struggle over death we must multiply new zones of opacity!
Contributers:
Afarin Alsharif / Alex Wengshoel / Anders Emìl Våge / Andrea Furberg / Ane Kvåle / Stian Stahl Sørensen / Christina Butler / Anders Dahl Monsen / Arild Tveito / Eskil Bast / Grevlingbanen / Hedvig Heggem Nergaard / Henrik Sørlid / Ida Kristiansen / Ivan Galuzin / Inger Zivana M Torvund / Top-Z / Jumana Manna /Karima Andrea Furuseth / Christian Bould / Sebastian Helling / Leander Djønne / Lene Berg / Steinar Haga Kristensen / Lina Grenaker / Linus Elmes / Lisa Størseth Pettersen / Maja Haugsgjerd / Maren Serine Andersen / Maria Fallmyr / Marlene Mccann / Ola Braadland / Sara Fargam / Toril Strøm / Simon Daniel Tegnander / Snorre Hvamen / Anders Smebye / Ingrid Sofie Ofstad / Vilde Von Krogh / Vemund Thoe / Sven Roald Undheim / Thora Dolven Balke/ Kristian Skylstad / Tine Katrine Rønningsen / Tom Even og Therese Johnsen / Øivind Andreas Frydenberg / Øyvind Lind / Cara Lien / Øyvor Engen / Bendik Aalborg
Munan_Ovrelid_2010_Press.zip (1.3mb)
Munan_Ovrelid_2010_Documentation.zip (354.8mb)
AN ENCOUNTER LIKE A FLASH, FROM NOW TO THE END OF CONCIOUSNESS
"Munan Øvrelid’s exhibition at the Unge Kunstneres Samfund mostly dwells in silence, it seems to breathe with anticipation for a crashing sound brought about by boldness and by a moment of action, perhaps even revolutionary action.
The installation "An encounter like a flash", from now to the end of consciousness (2010) captures such a moment, whether through a video of toppling objects from windows, or the marks of fallen objects on the face of a slab of concrete. However, the sound that is most important to the exhibition is the almost inaudible, hissing, which wavers, between sound and silence, which is about to become something elevated, something important, historical, only to fall back into an abstractness. But even this abstractness is dripping with possibility, with a sense of urgency, one must practice acute sensitivity, acute awareness, one must listen first. Speak later."
Wojciech Olejnik
Warren_Neidich_2010_Production.zip (78.1mb)
Warren_Neidich_2010_Documentation.zip (2.1mb)
IN THE MIND'S I
Three evenings, one talk, two performances (and then a show):
Thursday September 30th, 7pm: Warren will be in conversation with Ina Bloom on the subject: Tertiary Economies, Power and Neuromodulation
Friday October 1st, 7pm: Warren Neidich with A K Dolven and Fadlabi Mohamed
Saturday October 2nd: 7pm Warren Neidich with Stian Ådlandsvik and Tori Wrånes
In the Mind's I derives its meaning from two complementary streams of thought. The first designates that place, so eloquently described as the mind's eye by the famous psychologist William James, inside the skull where the cinema of the life/world is projected and inspected. The second refers to the work of Robert Morris entitled the I-box in which a totally nude portrait of the artist is displayed beneath a capital I.
In the Mind's I is a collaborative spoken word artwork in which an imaginary art exhibition - consisting of three or four imaginary works - is created and installed in a make-believe gallery space inside the head. In the end what is created is a totally conceptual and immaterial work of art, which persists in the memory of Warren and his collaborators, which leaves no real object to sell, distribute or gaze upon. The audience is privy to this private conversation transmitted through a microphone and witnessed as a dance of shadows displayed on a translucent screen.
THE SCULPTURES
UKS presents Anna Daniell who presents her new series of sculptures Skulpturene (The Sculptures). Anna Daniell explores a way of looking at the process of looking at the documentation of sculptures documented as photographic or cinematic subjects. This is the first in a series of individual informal projects at UKS. We have invited emerging artists for presentations of individual work, work in process or research projects.
About the artist: Anna Daniell lives and works in Oslo. She has a master from the academy in Oslo 2007. She divides between curatorial projects and her artistic practice. She is running "Planka" and did ”Giant Bowl” together with Sverre Strandberg and has among other places exhibited at Myymälä2, Helsinki and Total museum of contemporary art, Seoul.
VALENCIA
"Stupid as a painter" is a famous French proverb. It was a favorite of Marcel Duchamp, for whom it expressed the dead end that a mimetic artistic practice represented, an art that pleased the eye, not the intellect. But one could read it also to indicate less the literal stupidity of the painter, but the very reason he or she picks up a brush and paints. The tool in question is not used to articulate in words, but to create a visual language, to examine and structure the world. That is why painting is a rather heavy discipline, weighed down by it‘s own history. Jorunn Hancke Øgstad takes on this quality of painting in her own way, reinterpreting its history as an empowering back catalogue of painterly possibilities, while at the same time maintaining independence: "Being a painter today, means trying to forget."
INVITED TO INVITE
Fukt is an international magazine, inviting the most interesting artists and writers to present their views on contemporary drawing. The Issue 8/9 was created during Hegardt’s residency at Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw during spring 2010. The largest so far double issue of the magazine comprises works of as many as 32 artists. The section FUKT IN FOCUS presents the work of artists invited by Bjørn Hegardt. In the part INVITED TO INVITE the selection was made by thirteen curators invited by the editor.
UNFINISHED SYMPHONY
THE OBJECT IS THAT WHICH IS OBJECTED AGAINST ME (PROLOGUE)
TWO TREES
First out this semester in the main gallery is Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen who shows three lens-based works. This is his first major presentation in Norway and UKS has the great pleasure to present two new works: Two Trees and The object is that which is objected against me (prologue) are both produced for the exhibition.
Tarje Eikanger Gullaksen lives and works in Berlin. His artistic practice includes text, photo, film, installation and sculpture. In his art he investigates objects and signsin relation to language, transgression, representation, transformation and loss. Recently his work has been shown at Artspeak, Vancouver, The Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Galerie Medhi Chouakri, Berlin and Krome gallery, Berlin.
TROMSØ ART ACADEMY BA SHOW 2010
UKS presents an off shoot of the very first exam show from the youngest of the art academies in Norway. The show at UKS consists of an eight day program of concerts, screenings, performances and happenings starting every day at 5pm with a free dinner served for the audience at 8pm. Instead of traditional individual presentations of works, the students have developed a collaborative format revolving around their ground braking experiences as participants in the challenging process of forming a new academy. Tromsø art Academy has profiled itself with a site oriented educational practice focusing on fields such as ecology, society, identity and politics.
http://www.kunstakademietitromso.no/
IMAGE RIDDEN
Marianne Hurum with special guest Inger Sitter (1929)
Image-ridden-ness and loneliness are looked upon and investigated as resources in this new work. My belief is that painting acts as both a problem-solver and a means to liberate imagination. The resulting works include lively and lyrical riffs about the act and history of painting. Recurring elements include ripped canvases, stacks and clusters.
Giant_Bowl_2010_Documentation.zip (7.6mb)
Giant_Bowl_2010_Press.zip (9.3mb)
Sverre Strandberg and Anna Daniell
Developed in collaboration with UKS
And supported by KORO
Time and place: Bislett Stadium 15.May, 6pm-10pm, Oslo - Norway
Big inflatable sculptures, an abstracted medal table, a lonely spectator and a dystrophic marching band: Giant Bowl is an art exhibition taking place at a sports stadium in Oslo, Norway 15. May 2010. Inspired by big sports events this is a one-night-only sculptural happening, the sports athletes will be replaced by 22 artworks. Amongst them 12 king-size inflatable sculptures!
BAD MOON RISING 5
Curated by Jan Van Woensel
A balance or unbalance between chaos and transgression, and solitude and melancholy. A cacophony of paintings, drawings, videos, installations, murals, and noise music transforms the main gallery space in a dungeon of audiovisual violencea
Vanessa Albury, Fia Cielen, Martha Colburn, Steinar Haga Kristensen, SARALUNDEN/The New Age, Prussian Blue, Lee Ranaldo, Max Razdow, Reynold Reynolds & Patrick Jolley, Sunna Schram, Joaquin Segura, Kristian Skylstad & Stian Gabrielsen, Taravat Talepasand, Tithonus, Philippe Vandenberg, Bart Van Dijck, Richard Kern
Recurring Individual Conversations
Do you need someone to talk to?
For one year Lars Cuzner offered fully confidential, one-to-one conversations, teetering four meters above the gallery floor, at UKS. Six participants signed up for conversations once a week for the full year. The conversations were not documented.
The room with the glass wall, which was placed three meters above the gallery floor, was a collaboration between Lars Cuzner and UKS director Linus Elmes.
The piece was quietly commenced during the Oslo Speculations seminar, April 16 – 17 at UKS and ended April 16 2011 without ceremony. The box still stands.
Participants in project:
Per Platou, Client, Artist and curator. Co-ordinator for PNEK
Victoria Stewart, Client, Psychologist
Serina Erfjord, Client, Artist
Suzana Martins, Client, Program co-ordinator for 0047
Magnus Oledal, Client, Artist
Anna Ring, Client, Artist
Linus Elmes, Editor
Oslo Speculations is a collaboration between Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, The Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo / Linus Elmes and Sverre Gullesen, UKS
Program:
Friday April 16:
14:30 Sverre Gullesen, Linus Elmes and Henrik Plenge Jakobsen
15:00 Jens Haaning
16:00 Marta Kuzma in conversation with Thomas Bayrle
17:00 Sante Poromaa
18:00 Leander Djønne, Ivan Galuzin, Anders Smebye and Ann-Catrin November Høibo
19:00 Loulou Cherinet
20:00 Danh Vo
21:00 Yngvars conservative kitchen and party
Saturday April 17:
13:00 Rodrigo Mallea Lira and Ylva Ogland
14:00 Michel Auder
15:00 Pause
16:00 Judith Hopf in conversation with Sladja Blazan
17:00 Jan Freuchen
PORTAL
Can the awareness of emptiness function as a catalyst for meaning?
UKS is glad to present Jørund Aase Falkenberg’s Portal. A Portal allows you to enter a space that is physically apart from where one was before entering. Or it can lead to a new mental space; new knowledge, changed outlook, altered awareness, a new ideological, political or ethical platform.
Book Launch: Emokonseptualisme
Kjetil Røed and Thomas Kvam
Exhibitors:
Lars Paalgard
Arne Borgan
Tor Børresen
Snorre Ytterstad
(Norwegian Text)
Begrepet ”emokonseptualisme” ble lansert 2007 i en artikkel i Morgenbladet. Det ble sendt ut som en sonde for å danne et arkiv over generasjonsdiagnosenes spredningsmønster. Innholdsmessig skulle begrepet reflektere konkrete fenomener i kunsten, samtidig skulle det kartlegge hvordan det ble brukt og hvem som brukte det. Bokproduksjonen har således vært outsourcet til norsk kunstoffentlighet. Resultatet foreligger nå i bokform og utgjør et empirisk grunnlag for en undersøkelse av kunstoffentligheten. Boken danner et bilde av et samtidig kunstfelt – språkbruk knyttet til kunst, retorikk og kunstkritikkens relasjon til faglige vurderinger og trender. Til forskjell fra annen forskning på kunstkritikk er dette prosjektet en intervensjon i selve kunstkritikken med det for øye å danne et kart og et konkret rom for debatt. Vi takker følgende kritikere og kunstskribenter for deres ufrivillige bidrag til boken: Charlotte Krog, Tommy Olsson, Bjørn Hatterud, Nina Marie Haugen Holmefjord, Anette Therese Pettersen, Tore Kierulf Næss, Ruth Hege Halstensen, Stina Högkvist, Karin Haugen, Hans Thorsen, Kari J. Brandtzæg, Mariann Enge, André Gali. De har alle bidratt til å utbygge begrepsdefinisjonen og dermed spredningen. De har utfylt prosjektets intensjon om outsourcing av bokens tekstproduksjon.
Straighten_up_2010_Production.zip (1,439.0mb)
Straighten_up_2010_Documentation.zip (44.9mb)
This is an exhibition that stretches outside the room and far into time. Everything displayed in it in some way treats, reflects and touches UKS. Vi have emptied our cupboards, searched the archives, and opened many a dusty drawer. This is not a chronological account and we make no claims to objectivity. Rather, our subjectivity has led the way and what we choose to display is primarily of personal relevance. The goal has been to clean up, put in order, and move on. So what really happened? And, perhaps most importantly, what will happen now?
Curated by Linus Elmes
Kristian Øverland Dahl, Mercedes Mühleisen and Siv Blankenberg Skottheim
Curated by Sverre Gullesen
"First follow NATURE, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchang'd and Universal Light,
Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart,
At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art
Art from that Fund each just Supply provides, Works without Show, and without Pomp presides: In some fair Body thus th' informing Soul
With Spirits feeds, with Vigour fills the whole, Each Motion guides, and ev'ry Nerve sustains;
It self unseen, but in th' Effects, remains. Some, to whom Heav'n in Wit has been profuse. Want as much more, to turn it to its use,
For Wit and Judgment often are at strife,
Tho' meant each other's Aid, like Man and Wife. 'Tis more to guide than spur the Muse's Steed; Restrain his Fury, than provoke his Speed; The winged Courser, like a gen'rous Horse,
Shows most true Mettle when you check his Course."
(Essay On Criticism, 1711, Alexander Pope)
radiowy was founded in 2007. As the first project of its kind in Sweden, its aim was to produce a platform for artforms between the fields of art, literature and drama, connected via the use of sound, focusing on the Swedish, and later Scandinavian, context.radiowy was founded in 2007. As the first project of its kind in Sweden, its aim was to produce a platform for artforms between the fields of art, literature and drama, connected via the use of sound, focusing on the Swedish, and later Scandinavian, context.
THE LONELINESS OF THE INDEX FINGER (PHANTOM VIEW)
Curated by Linus Elmes
Two spectators, visiting from the future will attend Steinar Haga Kristensens exhibition. They have announced that their arrival is to be based upon a retrospective interest in The Loneliness of the Index Finger (Phantom View):
“In the future this exhibition marks a breaking point in history, authorities have proclaimed this very moment to be of great interest to the understanding of the development of the depraved historism and its vicious roundelay. The opening of this exhibition has been identified as a critical point. It was the birth of the nocturnalistic era and the end of context relativism.”
Herremenn_2009_Press.zip (1.4mb)
Herremenn_2009_Production.zip (13.9mb)
Maria Sundby and Tone Leksbø
Ole Troldmyr (1888-1967) and Ulf Hallén (1927-2007) were two traders from Oslo. Troldmyr sold condoms, Hallén sold women’s wear. These two men are bound together here because both left protected listed buildings that have since been allowed to perish. The project is based upon Voksenkollveien 5 - Villa Troldmyr, and Thorvald Meyersgate 59 - Hallén-gården in Oslo. In a capital city local history often recieves less attention than the national. People feel less affiliation to the community than they would otherwise have in a smaller city. This project deals with local character’s histories and is an invitation to the city's population to become familiar and engage with a portion of Oslo’s own history in a slightly different manner.
CREATIVE HISTORY
As an extension to Unni Gjertsens project Creative History a new mural was painted on UKS's exterior wall with the text "Yoko Ono created fluxus"
"The work creates a possible but more or less false history of the public recognition and celebration of some well-known woman artists and intellectuals"
UKS presents the first three parallel exhibitions curated by our new director Linus Elmes. Three new film productions by three young Norwegian artists:
Elna Hagemann – Duet (2009) and Edward P. (2009)
Elna Hagemann's films, Duet (2009) and Edward P. (2009), takes contemporary art practice into un-explored territory by crossing the genre border to opera. Her collaboration with two opera singers will be followed by another opera intervention later this autumn in the upcoming exhibition by Steinar Haga Kristensen at UKS. In the inner room Elna Hagemann gets involved in a dark sexually twisted homage to Tim Burton.
Kaja Leijon – Resonances (2009)
In previous works Kaja Leijon has explored how film as medium influences the way we perceive the world and how it affects the constitution of our attitudes. In her new film,Resonances (2009), she extend this exploration of consciousness and perception and deals with the relation between senses.
Jorunn Myklebust Syversen's Violent Sorrow Seems a Modern Ecstasy No.2. (2009) present as another format but not present as such, this representation of cinematographic aesthetics extends the exhibition in time and space. This experiment with format of distribution is a collaborative project between UKS and Konst Bio. (Konst Bio is a project by the two Swedish curators Paola Zamora and Sofia Curman involving screening of video art and art film as opening short films prior to the screenings of main feature films at cinemas.)
INTERNAL DISPLACEMENT; FIN DE SIÉCLE
The exhibition Internal Displacement; fin de siécle deals with how people’s understanding of the world holds together with various constructed moral and political dilemmas. The works explore the individuals` ability to adapt to divergent power structures and the desire for revolt and radical change. Political power is something deeply grounded in the biological nature of humans. The body is a gravity point for power strategies: It is trained, CAT scanned, diagnosed, medicated, isolated and set in relation with other bodies through nations, gender, state of health, age group and so forth. It is giant social body where singular bodies cannot be discerned from one another, rather creating a mountainous grey mass.
STATE OF CHANGE
Trondheim Art Academy MA
Lina Berglund, Lars Haahr Klemmensen, Linn Halvorsrød, Åsa Larsson, Malin Lenneström-Örtwall, Marianne Omdahl, Lars Skjelbreia, Aylin Soyer Tangen, Linn Rebekka Åmo
Curator: Helga-Marie Nordby
The exhibition is dominated by by installations and large spatial works. Nine final-year students from Trondheim Art Academy reflect on subjects such as time and movement, loss and memory, identity and the orientation of the self, family and staging human experience.
Curators: Line Halvorsen & Helga-Marie Nordby
UKS is celebrating the Art Academy's 100 year anniversary with the exhibition Kunstakademiet 1909-2009 which contains a fragmented, yet rich selection of its history. Nude studies, television debates, 90s performance and forgotten stories are among the elements presented along with a purpose-made film consisting of interviews with current and former students and employees.
Svette_Netter_2009_Press.zip (0.2mb)
Svette_Netter_2009_Production.zip (7.5mb)
SVETTE NETTER
A Talk Show hosted by Jon Løvøen and Kåre Magnus Bergh
Using the audience as an alibi, the two talk show kings promise to gallantly guide us through a talk show filled with happening topics from the art and culture scene. A series of video clips concerning current affairs are followed by specially invited guests which takes us inside the world of artists' living conditions, disabled peoples' every day life and the phenomenon of diction surrounding the pronunciation of the letter "r" within the cultural sphere, just to mention a few topics. The guest list contains a NBK representative, a disabled person, a speech therapist and many surprises. In between all of this, Løvøen and Bergh will do their best to make up for the free entrance. Also, they will be accompanied by the totally awesome house band led by the well known Norwegian artist Kristian Øverland Dahl. A touch of very short skirts may also be a part of it all, on request from one of the talk show hosts.
Sex_Tags_2009_Documentation.zip (18.2mb)
Sex_Tags_2009_Production.zip (1.3mb)
SMORGASBORD
Peter and Stefan Mitterer
The project title is inspired by the hardcore band SMORGASBORD, active in the studio and concert space Fan Club in Moss. Fan Club was an important meeting point for a the small underground music scene in Moss from 2002 to 2004, when their building was run down. In 2008, Sex Tags held an exhibition at Gallery F15 in Moss and in connection they released the album Fan Club consisting of live recordings from the club. The cover design of that album is the starting point for Sex Tags wall piece at UKS. The artists have also produced a poster for the audience to bring home.
Trapped_In_Amber_2009_Press.zip (43.4mb)
Trapped_In_Amber_2009_Documentation.zip (304.6mb)
TRAPPED IN AMBER: ANGST FOR A REENACTED DECADE
Curated by: Bassam El Baroni and Helga-Marie Nordby
Trapped in Amber: Angst for a Reenacted Decade is an exhibition that draws on Oslo’s art history, specifically the city’s tradition of northern European ‘Angst’ demonstrated in the oeuvres of such pivotal figures as Edvard Munch. The exhibition aims to test the limits of cultural industry stereotypes by creating a contemporary comparative to the phenomenon of Fin de siècle angst-ridden artistic production. Through the works of the invited artists, Trapped in Amber considers angst’s possible post-continental existence today in contemporary artistic formats. Of particular interest is the way angst can live on and express itself in a different world and age, experiencing different problems and in the midst of new cultural, socio-economic, and information dynamics.
Anders_Smebye_2009_Documentation.zip (101.2mb)
Anders_Smebye_2009_Production.zip (2.3mb)
DEVOLUTION
Devolution is the title of Anders Smebye`s debut exhibition in Oslo. Devolution in biological terms is a backwards evolution towards a more primitive form, disintegration or total annihilation. The exhibition presents ten new works exploring different forms of deconstruction, destruction and collapse. Devolution investigates how these conditions could be the start of something new; Regression in the spirit of progression.
THE DIARY OF THE UNKNOWN CONSUMER
Mattias Härenstams work can ressemble a bereavment. An undefined loss or absence can always be found in his work. It generates a feeling of disquiet that places the viewer on the outside – A spectator trapped in a pattern of perpetual repetition. Härenstam has created his own narrative structure in his videoworks, based on a monotonous repetition and a meak, almost autistic movement through everyday surroundings, interupted by dreamlike or magical occurrences. The cameras perspective functions here as ones eyes and subtilely posítions the viewer in the role of ”the outsider”, one who has closed down or who has withdrawn from the collective.
Härenstam criticises in his work the consumer society and the disillusionary potential that exists in empty, uncritical usage. He points towards a type of conduct that creates isolation and leads to a break down of the collective and the social.
MY FIRST RECORD LABEL
Christian Blandhoel`s project My First Record Label is an expression of strong fascination for the guitar both as an object and as an instrument. All the works in the show have their starting point in the electric guitar. Blandhoel wants to challenge and expand our relation to the instrument through various experiments. As with John Cage`s prepared piano, the artist has altered all the guitars incorporating different objects in the instruments body and stringpath creating new sounds and ways of playing. The exhibition is also introducing Blandholes own record label and recording studio My First Record Label. Here the audience can record their own improvisations and take a recording home.
HELLO GLOSSALOLIA
Glossalolia means speaking in tongues.
Glossalolija: Poem o zvuke is a poem about sound. The poet Belyj is searching for the origin of language and the conection between sounds and senses. The text breaks up in the search for a universal language that can be understood regardless of cultural origin. In 1932 Kurt Schwitters composed the Ursonate, a piece for two vocals without instruments or words, built over rhythmical sequences of verbal sounds. Schwitters felt words had lost their meaning because of the massive propaganda machinery during World War I and reacted by using meaningless combinations of letters.
Wrånes' work consists of voice and sculpture. She does not perform glossalolia herself, but greets it as a viewer or curious admirer. How can we, as walking molecules, grasp our own meaning when evolution has equipped us with so much complexity and flexibility? Hello Glossalolia takes a closer look at the reverse reality of our life cycle.
TEN SKIES
Atopia Screening at UKS
Saturday 27 September (14:00 – 16:00) Sunday 28 September (19:00 – 21:00)
"Ten Skies ... looks at light: here, directly at its source - the sun. all ten skies were filmed from my backyard in Southern California: sies formed from weather systems, montain land currets, wildfires, pollution and the wind; skies as a function of landscape_ the sound giving clues about the land below. Each sky is a detail selecte from the whole; sometimes filled with drama, somtimes a metaphor for peace....
The whole thing is very dramatic, and it's just cloud movement. All the shots end up with a dynamic quality.
I never saw that before. I never had the courage. It took me fifty years to look at the sky like that! I call it 'found paintings'. I think of my landscape works now as anti-war artworks - they're about the antithesis of war, the kind of beauty we're destroyin. The Ten Skies works came about because I'm thinking about what the opposite of war is." (James Benning)
Per-Oskar_Leu_2008_Documentation.zip (251.6mb)
Per-Oskar_Leu_2008_Production.zip (51.8mb)
LIKE A DOG!
Like a Dog! is the last uttering of the protagonist Josef K, before his execution in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. Kafka’s ending is about as intangible as the rest of the novel. This however has not prevented the book from becoming a commonly-used and popularised reference and thereby escaping the authorative position often associated with literary classics. The book deals with K’s fight against an impenetrable bureaucracy, and has been the source of countless adaptations and interpretations. In the exhibition Like a Dog! Per-Oskar Leu adresses the proliferation and reuse of similar culturally ”decoded” phenomena, but with an equal interest in the Kafka-mythology itself.
RØYNDOM
This is an exhibition which concerns itself with individuality and diversity, and focuses on the importance of being conscious of the other and the distance between self and other. This distance can help visualize the individual, the experience can move in contexts which are positive, negative and neutral. This room, this exhibition and the accompanying catalogue open possibilities of combining experiences and wishes, to strive for unexpected processes, so that the work and the viewer, one by one by one by one, form a movement that can mix up, overlap and exceed our framework of understanding and create new rooms.
-Mads Gamdrup
Pernille Elida Fjoran
Ane Fornes
Anne Grefstad
Kristoffer Henriksson
Marianne Husnes
Elisabeth Kjellesvik
David Lamignan Larsen
Rina LIndgren
Love Evan Lundell
Robert K. Nilsen
Thomas Pedersen
Preben B. Solevåg
Ingvild Kjær Tofte
Kristin Tårnes
Anders Wighus
SKETCHES FOR A MECHANICAL SUNRISE
Dietrichson`s sculptures occupy UKS with a monumental strength and airy elegance. The objects, which have strong references to vehicles and architectonic structures, offer an immediate presence, which resonate and reflect their spatial environment. The apparently mechanical objects are created from an artist`s sensitivity and an engineer`s technical accuracy. They are fragile and forceful at the same time. By fusing formal elegance and simplicity with a rebellious and humorous touch, Dietrichson manages to create objects of outermoust complexity promising the impossible.
Curator: Helga-Marie Nordby
Øyvind Renberg and Miho Shimizu
Danger Museum has developed a large part of their work through collaboration with artists, musicians, curators and cultural institutions during their temporal inhabitance in various cities: London, Berlin, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Aberdeen and Cork, to name a few.
Their backbone interest is to investigate inscribed or hidden boundaries, tension, canon and traditions in the people or the community they encounter. Through their pursuit of research, the artists attempt to create a sphere that activates reflection and tenuous articulations. With their openness in modes of work, Danger Museum has taken on various positions and roles from producers of artwork to facilitators, interviewers and editors in their projects.
Curator: Kyongfa Che
All_Apologies_2008_Production.zip (3.5mb)
All_Apologies_2008_Press.zip (12.9mb)
Gorm Heen
Narve Hovdenakk
Sigbjørn Bratlie & Arne Langleite
Kristian Skylstad
Arne Vinnem
All Apologies is a group exhibition challenging the role of men, masculine stereotypes, self- image and ideals. The exhibition comments the current discussions on men as the new losers in light of the contemporary role of the sexes.
All apologies is at the same time a critical and humourous interjection into the medias special role in debates about the roles of the sexes in today ́s society. We have strong perceptions about what is male and female; what is understood as masculine and feminine will, in most cases, be traditionally rooted. The works in the exhibition adapts and plays with the media ́s and popular culture ́s own languages and tools. At the same time, it illuminates themes such as alienisation and marginalisation, sexuality and notions of shame, aggression and revenge, greed and violence and not in the least misunderstandings.
Curator: Helga Marie Nordby
Dear_Cockettes_2007_Production.zip (12.0mb)
Dear_Cockettes_2007_Documentation.zip (235.5mb)
Curated by Ida Ekblad and Anders Nordby
Dear Cockettes is a tribute to the legenday extragavant gender-bending art / performance groups The Cockettes, who were active in San Francisco and New York during the 1960`s and 70`s. For their rich visual material, boundary testing and mixing of genres like art, theatre, music, cabaret, performance and drag The Cockettes / Angels have become one of the most influential families of performers ever. They are credited as inspiration by everyone from designers John Gallioano & Marc Jacobs, musicians Anthony and The Johnsons, Sonic Youth, Alice Cooper & Devendra Banhart , artists Mike Kelley & Salvador Dali and film makers Alejandro Jodorowsky, Steven Arnold & John Waters. Allen Ginsberg (who performed with The Cockettes in Pickups Tricks), Truman Capote, Robert Raushenberg and Andy Warhol were some of their many fans.
Unique original material such as posters, vintage prints, magazine articles and parts of costumes will be shown in a museum installation. A film program with films concerning or with The Cockettes, as well as performances by Rumi Missabu, House of Egypt, Nils Bech and Stephan Dillemuth. The exhibition aims to present the Norwegian public with a broad and extensive survey of their work, and will consist of four parts, photography, archive / museum, performance and film program.
This fall, UKS and Black Box Theatre have joined forces to present a performance program over four oval weekends in October and November. In all 36 artists – 26 Norwegian and 10 foreign – will perform 30 performances in the gallery, the theatre hall and foyer. Somebody once said that performance is an art form that needs addressing every fifth year. There might be something to it. These days, artists involved in UKS and Black Box projects keep returning to performance, and in very different ways. With visual arts and the art of theatre on each side, performance is a natural collaboration between a gallery and a theatre. We hope that the respective audiences of these two institutions will come together and reflect upon the art of performance.
NEW WORKS
"And, as we went down this road towards a disbandment of the universal idea of good and bad form, this new attitude towards things infected the surroundings. As if I was inside a zone where all things could be the result of a higher formal awareness: The roads, the chewing gum on the side walk, the yellow light over the city on our way home from kinder garden. Or it could not be, it didn't matter any more. Everything became art, and in the same moment: nothing."
(Ane Hjort Guttu: How to Become a Non Artist, 2007)
Make a bargain at UKS Friday June 8th
Every item is NOK 1000,-
Cash only
The exhibition is open the following weekend
June 9th and 10th 12.00-16.00
The Art Academy's students and teachers have donated works.
Jørund Aase, Ayman Alazraq, Ben Allal, Kenneth Alme, Anne Marte Archer, Amir Amadeus Asgharnejad, Jack Bangerter, Simona Barbera, Javier Murillo Barrios, Tone Kristin Bjorndam, Sivert Bjørnerem, Lars Brekke, Petter Buhagen, Kristoffer Busch, Marie Buskov, Bjørn Breistøl Båsen, Mattias Cantzler, Sara Korshøj Christensen, Ellen Christensen, Tora Dalseng, Anna S Daniell, Jamila Drott, Aida Dukic, Ida Ekblad, Karl Edvin Endresen, Serina Erfjord, Sandøy, Silje Fredriksen, Stian W Gabrielsen, Nicklas Granström, Sverre Morell Gullesen, Hans Hansen, Tone Hansen, Iselin Linstad Hauge, Christian Hennie, Anders Marius Henriksen, Malin Hjorth, Emelie Hoffmeister, Hilde Honerud, Petter Johannisson, Tommy Johansson, Tone Wolff Kalstad, Lars Tore Kjempehol, Jon Eirik Kopperud, Tove Karine Larsen, Shi Li, Victoria Pihl Lind, Malo, Jumana Manna, Frode Markhus, Vidar Hesby Martins, Herman Mbamba, Peter Mohall, Eline Mugaas, Victor Mutelekesha, Lars Myrvoll, Kate Naluyele, Anders Nordby, Øystein Wyller Odden, Michael O ́Donnell, Ragnhild Ohma, Cecilia E Jiménez Ojeda, Margarida Paiva, Jet Pascua, Bodil Cecilie Paus, Erik Pirolt, Tom Daniel Reiersen, Gunter Reski, Olga Robayo, Sahak Sahakian, Andreas Schille, Abdullah Shirzad, Sindre Foss Skancke, Sigmund Skard, Jan Skomakerstuen, Kjersti Solbakken, Markus Li Stensrud, Marco Storm, Sverre Strandberg, Marius Sundåsen, Petr Svarovsky, Grim Svingen, Solveig Syversen, Anna Særnblom, Inga Søreide, André Tehrani, Hans E Thorsen, Roghie Asgari Torvund, Emma Tryti, Endre Tveitan, Anders Valde, True Solvang Vevatne, Ulrika Westergren, Tori Wrånes, Jorunn Hacke Øgstad
Liv Bugge, Marius Engh, Johannes Heldén, Daniel Jensen, Martin Skauen
The spiritual and metaphysical has clearly recurred as a major source of inspiration on the contemporary art scene.This approach could be a reaction to today's highly rationalized society and desire for parallel realities: for the fictional and the fantastic. The exhibition Future Primitive indicates a connection between future science and technology, and a retrospective mysticism and fascination for the supernatural. The works in the exhibition takes in different ways, their starting point in contemporary myths and the esoteric. Some of the works explore brotherhoods and sects – marginal groups that perform rituals connected to obscure beliefs, or as depictions of new and alternative world orders, coincidentally based on ancient symbols, and contemporary and scientific myths and facts.
Curators: Helga-Marie Nordby and Sylvia Cochanska
Hai Nguyen Dinh, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Christine Ödlund
The Journey of Niels Klim to the World Underground, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Gulliver's Travels are all well-known works of literature. These satirical and fantastical tales stimulated and challenged the imagination in new ways, while at the same time they provided an alternative critique of contemporary phenomena. In each book the main character is a human being from our world, who suddenly finds him or herself in unfamiliar surroundings, inhabited by weird creatures and governed by outlandish laws.
How Imitations Get Cornered By the Real transports the unwitting participant to a new world, just as Alice or Gulliver are plucked from their familiar setting and arrive in an unusual environment. The exhibition is diorama-like and consists of three projects that combine two- and three-dimensional elements and which are brought to life by video and light projections. Assisted by music and sound, the installations function as spatial sculptures, in which the participant can move around and enter into the notion that they are visitors in another world. These theatrical landscapes appear as cutouts of an exotic, if imperfect, far-off universe.
STREAM DAY
A reoccurring phenomena in Stian Ådlandsvik's work, is the reorganization and simulation of reality. In his project Stream Day, he links this to the oil wealth of Norway by contemplating the petroleum industry from a distance in an attempt to understand what kind of impact massive oil resources have on a nation's inhabitants. The result of this is translated into an interior like installation, where recognizable objects create a strangely unproportional landscape.
To simplify such an enormous and complicated network as the one the oil industry is an integral part of, it is necessary to be able to understand its character, Ådlandsvik argues. By using the interior as such, he presents a concrete way to deal with the problems connected to form and function at the same time as a new language, discussing Norway's economic base and the influence it has upon us, is suggested.
The word stream day is a description of one operational day and night at an oil rig.
Lars Nilsson (S), Sixten Therkildsen (DK), Kristin Tårnesvik (N)
Curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen (N)
Return Flight is a thematic exhibition dealing with conceptions, stories and tales from New York through the eyes of three Scandinavian artists. Three diverse video works have their starting point in a two week long work shop from the city made in June 2006. By three very different methods the artists have produced their works which in their own way showing the ambivalence, but also the fascination, we have for New York and the USA.
Before walking the streets of New York for the first time one is bound to have preconceptions of what one will meet there. These preconceptions might stem from facts as well as fiction, historical events, tv-series and films, as well as news. To say that these works get beyond these preconceptions would be a mistake, they rather offer the public the different understandings. The three artists have had their starting points in their special fields of interests, and thereafter used the city as a material with which to present their works.
FOG
”The trustful ways in which we deal with pathos, is one of the great mysteries to me” (Kristian Ø. Dahl)
Dahl has in a series of projects explored the rhetorical phenomena pathos, with emphasis on the artists role and myth, but also how contemporary society is legitimizing power and power structures through pathos. Like fog, pathos is still obscuring and covering the more healthy relations regarding ”truth” and ”the natural”, he argues. In FOG, the artist is transforming the exhibition space into a mythical landscape of sculptures in material like foam, cardboard, moss and hair. Here he confronts the biblical, political, and artistic pathos, and questions our apparently eternal benevolence facing the phenomena. Also the meaning we impose on an artwork, is a form of pathos, Dahl argues - a declaration of trust based on benevolence. Through the sculptures he wishes to analyze or objectify pathos, thus uncover and demystify the pathetic. According to Dahl, the artist should problematise his or her personal expression – it should be questionable, and he is sceptical towards the formal as a main artistic focus. In this way, he is criticizing the subject of the artist and the artists role, at the same time as religious and secular institutions intentions in communicating totality and performing transactions of trust, are challenged.
Kristian Ø. Dahl graduated from the Art Academy in Bergen and Oslo in 2005. His solo show NIGHT is currently running at Gallery TAFKAG (The Art space Formerly Known As Galuzin). He has also had a solo exhibition at Gallery Fimbul in Oslo, and has taken part in a number of group shows nationally as well as internationally.
Thomas_Kvam_2006_Production.zip (1.7mb)
Thomas_Kvam_2006_Press.zip (3.8mb)
Thomas Kvam's first solo exhibition in Norway, Eurobeing, moves in a dystopic landscape between politics, film and media critique, unfolded in a stylized animation universe. In the 20 minutes long film, the news coverage's sensationalism and our own prejudices are being parodied, either as pointed towards the American, Arabic to the European. The film presents a collage of chaotic news reportages, which fight for the spectators attention, which play the role as "Eurobeing" or the cynical audience. Here, black humor and critique of society are entwined, and where the media's simplification of a complex world is the real "bad guy".
The film landscape is a visually consistent and dense room, which balances between post apocalyptic tableaus, political satire and media clichés and myths . The film problematizes cultural taboos and shows a will to play in a politically unredeemed space. However, the political foundation in the fiction never disappears: the film's use of the term "Eurabia" points to a long European utopian tradition, where Thomas Moore and Jonathan Swift are natural references. With the extension of the word to "the desecularized zone of the U.S. of Eurabia" a future, where so-called "Western" values and political Islam, relygious believes and neo-liberalism converge, is implied, and where the real conflict takes place between a secular and a religious perception of the world.
Public_Diplomacy_2006_Documentation.zip (213.4mb)
Public_Diplomacy_2006_Production.zip (4.5mb)
Pierre Lionel Matte
Birgitte Sigmundstad
Curator: Eivind Slettemeås
UKS in association with the Pillar Foundation
"Public diplomacy, in its attempt to affect the attitudes and opinions of foreign publics, involves the entire communications spectrum, modern communications technology as well as such other methods of intercultural communication as well as cultural and educational exchanges, libraries, publications and people."
- Hans Tuch, "Communicating with the world: U.S. Public Diplomacy Overseas"
An equivalent concept to Public Diplomacy is lacking in the Norwegian language, and the content varies depending on countries' international orientation. The concept can both point to the self-projected image of a nation, and the influence of a nation upon other countries. In the 20TH Century, Norwegian art and culture were used as main means to position Norway in the world. The pathos of nationalism, expressed through characterizations of indigenousness and national heritage, does not communicate non-problematic today.
The wish to act as `global players` on the global stage of financial markets and media, makes it more desirable to nations to be impersonated with a "promising national character". Among the most famous examples we find `Cool Britannia` and `The Irish Tiger`. This is why Omdømmerådets sluttrapport (2005) to the Foreign Department, proposes a Norwegian version of Public Diplomacy, to be carried out by a prospected national forum of repute. The task of the forum should be the promotion of a national image based on peace engagement, aid policy and adjacency to nature.
Ideas about art as bridge-maker and change-maker, whether this occurs in real or imaginary stages of international politics, is a recurring theme in this exhibition. Birgitte Sigmundstad and Pierre Lionel Matte are both referring to the problems of political idealism, represented as unstable transitions between the officially representative and the visually seductive. The second part of Public Diplomacy will be a collaboration between UKS and the Pillar Foundation, taking its` departure from the art institution as an arena for international relations and democratic development, and the projected image of Norway as a beneficiary country.
The Geometry of the Zodiac
"Wherever we have spoken openly we have said nothing. But where we have written something in code and in pictures we have concealed the truth"
(Rosarium pholosophorum, Weinhein edition 1990)
Andreas Nilsson and Fredrik Söderberg have collaborated on several projects, and are recognized nationally and internationally for their distinctive and mystical universes. Together they create a unique visual language based on contemporary imagery mixed with symbols from past times, which questions our common iconography.
In the Geometry of the Zodiac, the artists explore the inner regions of thought and mind. Their wish is to recreate the force which can be found it what appears hidden and forgotten – like some kind of ruin of an exhibition which owned the room a long time ago, in a time when everything was more grey, simpler and less open…
Curated by Helga-Marie Nordby
Behind Front Lines - the Art Academy's MA Exhibition
Tone Bjordam, Margarida Paiva, Ida Ekblad, Simona Barbera, Olga Roboya, Kristine Afacan, Sverre Strandberg, Viktor Mutelekesha, Anders Langstrand, Anders Nordby, Therese Fische, Bjørn Breistøl Båsen, Solveig Syversen, Bjørn Erik Haugen, Petter Johannison, Marius von der Fehr
This year, the Art Academy have been a part of public debate due to the board of KHIO's decision to close down the Art Academy. Its students have been engaged in the debate through protest and action in a situation not far from trench warfare. It is now time to show people what is going on behind the front lines!
The exhibition "Behind Front Lines - the Art Academy's MA Exhibition", 16 students present strong, individual works that can be described as rougher, more intuitive - less conceptual - than what you have seen in recent MA exhibitions. There is still an critical distance to the art work and an understanding of the individual as part of a bigger, public society.
Provins_2006_Production.zip (2.1mb)
Provins_2006_Press.zip (11.0mb)
PROVINCE
Ulf Aminde and Bruno Nagel
Curated by Anders Smebye
The provincial narrow-mindedness is here changed to the introvert. The audience is presented to staged tableaus, which simultaneously describe different stages and mental states of the human psyche. With its rough scenography and stage construction, alongside the simple and direct acting style, this work can be seen in connection to theatre traditions like the Norwegian 'fjelebodsteatret' and 'comedia dell Àrte', which were based on improvisation around given characters. In Province the audience is confronted with familiar and stereotypical situations, objects and characters. The actors are improvising around given actions where the stagelike installation makes up some kind of professional playground, where small actions and displacements constitute the narration.
Several_Ways_Out_2006_Documentation.zip (142.0mb)
Several_Ways_Out_2006_Press.zip (44.8mb)
Artists: Ibon Aranberri (Bilbao), Julie Becker (Los Angeles), Marius Engh (Oslo), Terence Gower (New York), Gareth James (New York), Adriana Kuiper (Halifax) og Sean Snyder (Berlin)
Curator: Craig Buckley (New York)
Whether incorporated as a kind of Potemkin architecture, pictorialized as a backdrop for images, or as a quote pointing to the generalized boogeyman of modernism, one of the working hypothesis of this exhibition is that architectural tropes in contemporary artistic practice are over-freighted, to the point of exhaustion and cliché on the one hand, while being simultaneously under-scrutinized on the other.
This exhibition brings together the work of several artist whose procedures address the field through deliberately indirect means. Taking on the materials, procedures, or documents related to architectural culture, their work transforms such points of departure often to the point of effacement. The process of effacement is less about masking than about drawing attention to the cognitive work implied by translation.
The exhibition will leave the relative opacity of these work standing, as a question particular to these artists' processes and their own wagers. Within these layers of effacement, the exhibition looks to produce a space in order to put in question the cognitive affinities and dissonances relating these fields of work.
HAPPY DAYS
Periphery, exploring localness through sound
Most people in this world, and also most artists, live and work in the periphery, in the cold shadows of New York, Paris and Berlin's proud concert halls, clubs and art scenes. In a time where art and contemporary music have focused on the site specific, social politics, the democratizing art production with home computers and mobile studios - there is a new sense of the local, for provincial distinctiveness and history, and the unique and particular have gained strength over the standardization of multinationalism. Many of the most interesting composers and sound artists today take their starting point in their precise geographical location and their private experiences and let their work grow out of the immediate reality.
Happy Days Sound Festival will explore an extensive experimentation around the concept of 'concert' and will seek to stretch this term. All works will be made site specifically with consciousness as a central theme.
MONSTROUS LITTLE WOMEN
- what do you spin? records or linen?
Anne Bang Steinsvik go Kjersti Sundland
"Monstrous little Women" is a live video performance, in which female stereotypes in horror films are being explored. A common thread connecting the different films, is how evil is being present in the women as something unstable and hysterical. It is though the unstable feminine nature "evil forces" can harness and exist.
The evil feminine subject in horror films, is being explored through samples taken from a selection of horror movies from the 1950`s until today. The VJ panel is programmed in studio max, making a live three channel video projection. Audio and video samples are being scratched and re-sampled to soundtracks from the album "Syklubb fra hælvete". This album was the first release made by Fe-mail, a noise duo consisting of Maja Ratkje and Hild Sofie Tafjord.
As part of the series Celluloid2006, Atopia presents in collaboration with UKS, the first ever Norwegian screening of Line Describing a Cone, the legendary 'solid flight' film by Anthony McCall.
"Line Describing a Cone is what I term a solid light film. It is dealing with the project light beam itself, rather than treating the light beam as a mere carrier of coded information, which is decoded when it strikes a flat surface (the screen). The film exists only in the present: the moment of projection. It refers to nothing beyond this real time. The form of attention required on the part of the viewer is unprecedented. No longer is one viewing position as good as any other. For this film every viewing position presents a different aspect. The viewer therefore has a participatory role in apprehending the event: he or she can - indeed needs to - move around, relative to the emerging light-form."
(Anthony McCall, 1973)
Jana Winderen and Maia Urstad arranged the project Motlyd at USF Bergen in 2001 in collaboration with Jørgen Træen. The UKS seminar will focus on the changes in the field of sound art for the last 5 years, the main focus being today's situation. There is now an enormous activity in soft ware development and experimenting, large exhibitions and publications are being made on sound art and several young artists are exchanging experiences within this field. This includes a positioning of sound art within the galleries, and therein which strategics the institutions need to take to follow this development. Participants in this debate will speak of their experiences as practicing professionals concerning sound art's possibilities and ambitions.
Deabte contributors: Jana Winderen, Maia Urstad, Mike Harding, Jørgen Larsson, Lars Petter Hagen, Brandon LaBelle, Steinar Sekkingstad, Erlend Hammer, Bjarne Kvinnsland, Trond Lossius
JOHN SKIS OR SALLY SWIMS
Norwegian and San Francisco based video artists will present their work over four days at UKS. The aim is to focus on the productivity that different artworks generate when installed together. The videos in the program vary both in technique and theme, showing different ways of using the media. These kinds of meetings and disjointed connections can create new ideas and interpretations.
Disjunction (latin dis = apart, iunctio = connection) A disjunction is an "or statement". For example John skis or Sally swims, is a disjunction.
Anders Eiebakke, Ane Lan, Anne Britt Rage, Anneke von der Fehr, Astrid Johannessen, Aurora Sandlilje, Birgitte Sigmundstad, Camilla Figenschou, Caroline Silva, Catherine Czachi, Christian Hennie, David Larsen, Dodda Maggy, Endre Aalrust, Espen Tversland, Eva Drangsholt, Frederick Browne, Janne Talstad, Jan Steinum, Jasmina Bosjnak, Jorunn Myklebust Syversen, Kaja Haugen Pedersen, Lindsay Seers, Liv Bugge, Mads Lynnerup, Maggie Foster, Magnus Martinsen, Mariken Kramer, Mark Boswell, Mark Morris, Marthe Torshaug, Mette Hansen, Mika Rottenberg, Narve Hovdenakk, Ole Christian Ellestad, Petter Ballo, Ricky Rivas, Seth Myers, Sharon Glazberg-Erez, Stine Gonsholt, Sverre Strandberg, Thomas Østbye, Tilda Lovell, Tim Sullivan, Tone Kristin Bjordam, Tor Jørgen van Eijk, Tormod Bergum, Trine Lise Nedreaas, Zachary Reno
The Comic Book Backfire Project ™
Bastard Child, 2006
Stalagmite Tentacles in the Middle of the Night
This is part three of Borgan's The Comic Book Backfire Project which consists of a constellation of fascinations and work processes where sculpture, drawing and painting form large room installations. Part one was the artist's MA exhibition at the Stenersen Museum in 2002, part two was presented at the Tegnebiennalen in 2004. The installation at UKS will work as a scene where the artist will improvise soundscapes live.
Bastard Child is an ill-mannered play with mixing genres and styles. Together with Stalagmite Tentacles in the Middle of the Night the project pokes fun at often over the top pompous lyrics used in metal music – a sort of popular mysticism where symbols are pulled away from their original meaning.
Marianne_Heier_2005_Documentation.zip (204.6mb)
Marianne_Heier_2005_Production.zip (1.0mb)
Marianne Heier's solo exhibition at UKS presents a series of works booted by Cracking Concrete in 2000, and which now culminates in her new project CREW. The main focus in the exhibition is an exploration of concepts of values and conventions.
Background for the project CREW was that the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design Autumn 2004, advertised 60 positions for museum hosts. No specific qualifications were required from the candidates. The hosts were part of the National Museum's new image, and replaced earlier forms of surveillance. The Museum received over 600 applications. The vast number of applicants made it possible for the National Museum to hire people with especially high culturural and academic competence, which now in most cases are occupied by people with high ambitions and long educations within culture and academia. Most of them consider the job a temporary solution on their way to another job or position in their working life. Heier was herself employed at the Museum as a host from October 2004 to May 2005.
CREW is a group video portrait of Heier's colleagues at the Museum. The work focuses on the very special environment that occurred among the newly appointed hosts. It is a paradox for the National Museum that they who are considered low in the institutional hierarchy , often have better insight when it comes to the institution's own field of subject than their superiors. CREW discusses the situation from another angle and uses the Museum as a point of departure for criticizing constructed hierarchies. In this way, Heier emphasizes the relation (and distance) between cultural and economical capital.
These problematics are further explored in the video installation Construction Site, which documents the redecoration process of the museum host's lunch room at the National Gallery. The refurbishment as an initiative from Heier who has hired and paid the artisans and two of Norway's best architects to draw the room and the furnishings. Through this investment Heier tries to activate an equation between the Museum's visible and invisible reality.
Capital_2005_Production.zip (17.0mb)
Capital_2005_Documentation.zip (77.9mb)
Michael Blum, Andrea Creutz, Copenhagen Free Universty, Maria Eichhorn, Stephen Geene, Olafur Gislason, Ashley Hunt. Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Katya Sander, Fia Stina Sandlund, Jason Simon, Elin Wikström, Knut Åsdam
Capital (It Fails Us Now) is a group show exploring the notion of capital, taking point of departure in the one hand location, and on the other subjectivity: how capitalism affects our daily lives, our very structure of feeling and perceptions. Capital is here understood as an economic tool, as a measure of exchange and surplus, and as something at once regulated and regulating (regarding both state and market), as well as a producer of subjectivity (through the commodification of everything). The exhibition in Oslo is the first half of a two-fold project, with the second, expanded version taking place at Kunstihoone in Tallinn, Estonia Jan 7-Feb 14, 2006.
A book including artistic contributions and essays from Will Bradley, Katja Diefenbach, Stephan Geene, Brian Holmes, Trude Iversen, Oleg Kireev, Isabell Lorey, Gerald Rauning and Natascha Sadr Haghighian will be published.
Unn_Fahlstrom_2005_Documentation.zip (132.7mb)
Unn_Fahlstrom_2005_Production.zip (1.2mb)
"- I REREAD THE ODYSSEY LAST NIGHT"
This fall's opening exhibition at UKS is a collaboration between artist Unn Fahlstrom and composer Øyvind Torvund. The installation takes place over three rooms where sound and video establish a composition which deals with the general notion of re-interpreting existing works of art, more specifically Jean-Luc Godard's film Contempt (Le Mémpris) far 1963.
Using canonized movies as raw material is characteristic of Fahlstrøm's work. In this installation lies a more basic process though, the collaboration with Torvund has resulted in an installation concerned with an exploration of the video media's components where narration, characters and plot is dimmed down.
Curated by Trude Iversen
100 works by 60 artists
Videoarchive initiated by Sören Grammel, Maria Lind, Katharina Schlieben and Ana Paula Cohen, produced by Kunstverein München.
Organized by Anders Smebye and Kjersti Solberg Monsen (UKS)
Video screening by Marianne Zamecznik
Est its schwer das Reale zu berühren (It is hard to touch the real) is an archive which includes more than 100 video works by 60 artists for whom the notion of the "documentary" provides an important subject of investigation. Documentarism is one of the most prevalent approaches to video making in contemporary art. It is based on the notion of directly confronting the viewer with a reality or an event which appears to exist independently of the documentary's ability to mediate information. The artist involved in It is hard to touch the real both embrace documentarist and question it in various ways.
Opacity_2005_Documentation.zip (313.1mb)
Opacity_2005_Press.zip (0.4mb)
Current Considerations on Art Institutions and the Economy of Desire
This exhibition will explore in what way art institutions are used and challenged today within artistic processes.The startingpoint is the observation that institutions have changed after ‘institutional critique’ in the 70s as well as in the 90s. What could be the future impact of current critical tendencies? Today a critique is no more put against the institution in order to deconstruct it. Instead, a certain opacity, which has been criticized in the work of powerful institutions, can on the other hand be useful for smaller institutions in order to try out new forms of collaboration between different positions in the art field (artists, curators, academics or activists), and by this to create an alternative agenda for institutional work. The project is developed in a close collaboration between the curators and the artists. Therefore several workshops have been scheduled. The terms autonomy, freedom, internal process, uncertainty were discussed in relation to opacity. As well as the history of critical and affirmative work respectively within institutions: What happened in the 80s and 90s to institutional models in relation to notions of democracy? Only now the new forms of institutions of the 90s are at a point, where you can evaluate them, which was not possible five years ago.
The exhibition is not seen as the culmination point of these discussions, rather an integral part of an ongoing process. Considering the internal perspective of the artist as an involved teammate in cultural production, the question arises, how an art institution can be used from within - as an arena or a tool for repoliticization. Where lie the possibilities, and what do the presumable failures tell us about the societal role and reaching area of the diverse art institutions?
The exhibition will propose and discuss a collaborative and productive model, which researches current conditions of institutional work and develops alternative strategies – be they activist, appropriated, mocking, actual or purely utopian.
Participating artists: Kajsa Dahlberg, Stephan Dillemuth, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Markus Degerman, Sofie Thorsen, Danger Museum
Graphical concept: Halvor Bodin
April 15 – June 15, 2005 at UKS, Unge Kunsternes Samfund, Oslo.
Curators Nina Möntmann (NIFCA) and Trude Iversen (UKS).
UKS has the pleasure of hosting the opening of Lina Viste Grønli’s first solo exhibition. The exhibition title shares its name with the sculpture Ferdig/Finished (2005). As of this writing, it is a contradiction in terms to write Ferdig ("Finished") in italic with a year behind it, denoting a work of art. The work is not yet such a thing. Neither finished, nor a "work." The letters spelling out the word "finished," are chest high. The finished Finished will be the result of the artist "putting the last touch on the piece." In the same gesture, this theme is actualised and communicates with ongoing discussions on the supposed de-objectification process of art.
Hindrance as theme, as well as specific institution-critical aspects are present already at the entranceway to UKS. A double staircase makes visitors feel the "threshold" of stepping into the gallery. The same thing repeats itself when one leaves the exhibition. In the reception area, a two meters tall sculpture of letters made from leca, shaped like the word IKKE ("DON’T") can be found. The normal, accustomed passageway is now occupied by a defiant negation. The main room of the gallery is characterised by the work Cut it Out (2005). Despite the introduction of language- philosophical dimensions that need to be dealt with, Grønlis work demonstrates a straightforwardness that makes intellectualisation difficult, and possibly even unnecessary.
Curated by Trude Iversen
Alex_Villar_2005_Documentation.zip (107.2mb)
Alex_Villar_2005_Press.zip (0.3mb)
DE-TOUR
Alex Villar's long-term investigation of potential spaces of dissent in the city focuses on the productive conjunction of the body and the architectural environment. His are micro political interventions in the social experiences that constitute our subjectivity. Villar makes use of performative displacements of regular daily activities to engage resistance in the rearticulation of the normative processes at work in everyday life. In this exhibition, three of Villar's video pieces Other Ways, Upward Mobility and Dribbling the Field are presented in constructed settings conceived as tangible contextualizations of the situations depicted in his work.
"Gardar Eide Einarsson's work seems to pose a continual problem for criticism. To begin with, there simply seems to be too little to see and experience in his work – unless by som perverse sensual logic you happen to count meagre replicas of benches, or of skating "ramps" or flimsy photocopied images among your top ten objects of fascination. And what is on offer, visually, seems all at once too lightweight and too bluntly upfront to command the kind of awe you expect from "good exhibitions". Of course the small gesture also has its place within the contemporary art context. But Gardar Eide Einarsson's work is far from the romanticism of the ephemeral and the fragmentary as it is from the stringent textual strategies of classic conceptual art – to mention two tendencies that might favour an art of slim visual offerings."
[Excerpt from Ina Blom: "A Problem of Style: Art vs. Subculture. On the work of Gardar Eide Einarsson."]
SKA_TV_Art_Awards_Production.zip (2.9mb)
SKA_TV_Art_Awards_Press.zip (1.0mb)
SKA TV ART AWARDS show will be held for the very first time at UKS. The show addresses the Norwegian "alternative" art scene – artist run galleries, temporary and mobile art projects, art fanzines and web magazines. By establishing this award show, this part of Norwegian art scene will finally have their own glamorous event. The award show's intention is to promote the active and dedicated under ground scene and at the same time honor former participants in the alternative art scene. SKA TV ART AWARDS also consists of a following exhibition with video archives and an edited part of the opening show. The show itself will commence in a TV studio designed and built for this purpose and will offer awards, speeches, video clips, performances, dancing and music.
SKA TV ART AWARDS is produced by Art Academy students Ivan Galuzin, Christian Bould and Leander Djønne
Contributions: Lasse Ramstad, Camilla Tellefsen, Ildflue Produksjon/Bårdar, Fredrik Östman, Steinar H Kristensen, Marco Juha Mikael Storm, Sindre Foss Skancke, Terje Øveraas, Hai Nguyen Dinh, Ingeborg S Olerud, Rent a Bar, Jon Løvøen and Charlotte Thiis Evensen.
Curators: Eivind Slettemeås and Cathrine Evelid
[excerpt, translated]
UKS_Biennal_IIII_2004_Production.zip (21.7mb)
UKS_Biennal_IIII_2004_Documentation.zip (11.4mb)
THE UKS-BIENNIAL INHABITES OSLO!
The fourth UKS-biennial opens September 3 this year, and is one of the most important exhibitions for young contemporary art in Norway. The Biennial will for the first time take place in Unge Kunstneres Samfund’s own premises (Young Artists’ Association). After its relocation in 2003 UKS has created an improved and ambitious space for contemporary art in Oslo, and will for the first time have enough room to house its own Biennial. The exhibition is curated by Ida Kierulf and Helga-Marie Nordby.
The UKS-biennale 2004 will investigate the strong presence of the city and urban reality in contemporary Norwegian art production. In the last years, an increasing consciousness of urbanism - the city as subject and phenomena - has come into being, and this is clearly reflected in contemporary Norwegian art. The exhibition has a particular emphasis on Oslo and the political and social, physical and fictional, relationship between the individual and the city. The curators put to attention some of the main questions of the exhibition: “In what way do the urban surroundings affect us; how do they form our relation and interaction with other citizens; what kind of habits of movement and consummation do they create, what identity(ies) do they build? While urban planning and political strategies have decisive influence on how we live and move in the city, art can present for us other patterns and motivations, a possibility to see the city from within and from without”.
The selected artists for the UKS-biennial 2004 are:
Jesper Alvær, Liv Bugge, Bodil Furu, Ane Hjort Guttu, Lars Petter Hagen,
Knut Henrik Henriksen, Katja Høst, Eline Mugaas, Ketil Nergaard, Arve Rød, Christian Hoel Skjønhaug and Anders B. Wittusen.
Noise_Space_2004_Documentation.zip (7.1mb)
Noise_Space_2004_Press.zip (28.1mb)
Camille Norment (US)
Brian Conley (US)
Petra Lindholm (SE)
Unn Fahlstrøm (NO)
Alexander Rishaug (NO)
Marit Paasche (NO) text
"Noise/Space deals with the use of video, space and sound in opposition to the mass media's use of technology. The works demand the viewers engagement on time and space. They create a situation of conflict rather than a harmonic relation between noise/space and space/noise. They also point to conflicts outside the white cube. The exhibition looks at artistic strategies which employ tools of distribution that are similar to mass media culture, but the result is quite different. Music might be the art form most exposed to commodity fetishism and commercial adjustment the last years. The enormous mass culture has still made space for subversive strategies. Is there now easier for artists to make use of these distributing means than before? And if so, how can the gallery space facilitate this production and be a part of this network? If the relation to technology is normalized, one has to consider it as a tool. What artistic strategies are more resistant to the fetishizing of art as commodity? Can noise art be considered as a sort of last defense because it is so unavailable and at times uncomfortable?
The exhibition presents concrete space- and sound experiences, personal narratives where sound and image are intertwined, and an analytical and complicated use of video editing and soundscape push the boundaries of both medium and perception. The works are physical sound situations and works that manifest illusions of space. The contributors have in common a great degree of control of the instruments involved, a workmanship that is recognizable in the representation and production process."
Tone Hansen
[excerpt, translated]
Transactions_2004_Documentation.zip (1.3mb)
Transactions_2004_Production.zip (0.4mb)
TransAction will focus on the art space's possibilities as a place for production in the form of discussion, reflection and intervention. The program stretches over five weeks of debates. A reader's lounge for art magazines will be launched. The concept of art is not only exposed to continuous renewal and expansion – a turn from the art object as a starting point of evaluation to the art production that occurs outside the traditional venues of art is making a relevant impact. This situation entails changes for this type of production's various participants.
Art's diminutive status in the public sphere is the first topic in this series of debates and lectures. How to strengthen art's role in public? Which strategies have been launched and which ones remains to be tested? Participants are the art critic Marit Paasche, kunstkritikk.no editor Jon-Ove Steihaug, Billedkunst editor Ingvill Henmo and Klassekampen editor Bjørgulv Braanen.
In the reader's lounge Jesper Fabricius, artist and editor of Danish art magazine Pist Protta, have made a selection of 140 art magazines and books. Fabricius also runs the publishing company Space Poetry, which releases journals and art books. TransAction's visual profile has been made by visual artist Tone Hansen and architect Kjetil Sæterdahl. Hansen has, among other things, made the exhibition hall into a boxing ring, in which the debates will take place. The NRK program Aktuell debatt from 1965 is shown, in which Kjartan Slettemark's Vietnam painting is the object for a hard discussion about "propaganda art". Sæterdahl has drawn the blueprints for the reader's lounge.
[excerpt, translated]
UKS have the pleasure of presenting Mats Andersson's first solo exhibition in Norway. Andersson will show four works where the opposition between individual and surroundings is a common problematic.
The four meter tall installation Meeting with Félicité (1999) is made of mdf, wood and glass. The installation forms a diorama with a staircase that seems big enough to climb. The staircase curves upwards and the steps become smaller and smaller.
Teatro del Dongo (2003) is an architectural model. On its backside hangs the story of Fabricio del Dongo – the main character in Stendahl's The Charterhouse of Parma.
Untitled (2002) is an architectural model in glass and wood. Here, the artist touches on architectural themes and their function in relation to monumentality. The work also poses questions surrounding openness and exclusiveness, front- and back side.
In the 28 minute long video installation Norfolk Island Pine (2001) the artist sits himself in front of the camera. His back is turned to the viewer, sitting still and letting people pass by him. The video is recorded in Copenhagen's botanical garden and raises humorous questions as to what is being filmed – the artist to the left or the pine trees to the right? The passersby can't seem to make sense of it.
[excerpt, translated]
TIME ECSTACY
Time Ecstasy is Siri Hermansens first solo exhibition which contains two photo series, a photo manage, two videos, a sound piece and other smaller, but not lesser installations. Thematically and formally these works dwell around the experience of the scientific versus the personal idea of time and existence. "The sound of a star turning around its own axis" is a sound recording of just that. The photo series "From here to eternity; snow photography" is a cool representation of a well-known image: the blizzard on a TV screen without reception. In contrast to these works, Hermansen presents an endearing nature experience in the photo montage "Time-Out". A tent installation is a further comment on nature's mythology and an individual experience of lack of oxygen is the starting point for the video loop "Breathless". Easily recognizable porn scenes is an element of the exhibition's last photo series. Characteristical for Hermansen's works are the use of readymades as startling point for dividing and destruction of meaning, re-worked and put into a new context. Well-known objects different aspects both formal and connotative are exposed to analyzations and segmentations that has a means to bring the objects complex elements a cognitive value.
[excerpt, translated]
Farhad Kalantry shows his video installation, On a Bed of Blue, where a faceless naked person is presented on a bed of blue. The person is filmed in a bird's perspective and the video is projected on the floor. This installation view creates an ethical dilemma forcing the viewer to relate to the subject projected. The video Tea House differs from the cold blue video installation and emerges as a melancholy work evolving around the idea of memory. Black and white photographical close-ups shows the tea house on the screen – no continuity, alternating and brief, the language of film allows one to be the site for complex memories without offering any form of safety.
Antiværelse (Anti space) is the title of Anne Sophie Normann's series of photographies and paintings. Familiar motives are zoomed in in the paintings and the starting point for the photographies. This double sided approach to homely scenes from immigrant life in France creates the basis for a sober interpretation of western and oriental interior, taste, likenesses and differences. A photo of Hilary and Bill Clinton sitting at their lunch table from a home reportage from the sixties creates a starting point for all the series.
[excerpt, translated]
A MEANS TO AN END / DEMOLITION 4
Debutant of the year? UKS gallery presents Daniel Jensen's first, and most certainly not last solo exhibition A Means To an End/Demolition 4. The exhibition is an extension of The Octagon which was shown at the graduation exhibition at Stenersen Museum in 2001. The UKS exhibition consists of a single work with stretches through the gallery rooms, altering the architecture dramatically. The audience meets an environment reflecting a paranoid and manic mood. We find ourselves in a space where somebody has tried to shut themselves in, away from the outside world, and created their own utopia. A Means To an End/Demolition 4 represents a world which exists parallel to the public space, where some other, private order reigns.
Dag Nordbrenden's new book Be Yourself Tonight is launched simultaneously, with a foreword of Matias Faldbakken.
Karen Landmark
[excerpt, translated]
Carlo Benvenuto, Alessandro Dal Pont, Letizia Cariello, Gianni Caravaggio, Lara Favaretto, Marcello Maloberti, Alessandro Pessoli
"Does it make sense to make an exhibition representing the Italian contemporary art in today's globalized reality? This is the question which serves as a starting point for Caroline Corbetta's exhibition Italanamente where she has picked seven young Italian artists working with very different themes and materials. Italianamente means 'the Italian way', although Corbetta wishes to focus on the Italian (artist) identity in a global perspective, rather than representing the works as demonstrational objects."
Trude Iversen
[excerpt, translated]
Sellout_2002_Press.zip (22.5mb)
Sellout_2002_Documentation.zip (2.8mb)
"The Sellout exhibition at UKS was a huge success with a 40 meter long line of people an hour before the doors opened due to several announcements in the media. 144 artists generously contributed works with one thing in common - they were all worth so much more than 1000NOK. During the opening night alone we sold 88 works and nearly every piece was sold the following week. This resulted in securing the financial situation for UKS Forum and also made clear how important this magazine is for Norwegian artists. As a sales exhibition the show displayed enormous variety. Contributions from artists in various age groups and different artistic traditions mirrored the complex nature of UKS's members. Many visitors bought their very first art piece, and hopefully left inspired to start collecting.
Many thanks are due: Erling Fossen for being a splendid 'godfather' to the event, the magician Glorillo for entertaining the waiting crowd in minus ten degrees celsius, Hot Rod's Jan Walaker for photographing, Hummel for donating T-shirts to the workers, Mozell and Ultra for providing soft drinks, ginger bread and mulled wine, Kim Hiorthøy for DJ'ing and especially Halvor Bodin for profiling the event. But first and foremost we wish to thank all the artists whose generosity exceeds the financial success. This event have already been copied a few times and debates over art's possibilities for revenue and financial alternatives have been revived. In addition, this exhibition's availability and democratic openness have presented contemporary art to a whole new audience."
- Marianne Heier, curator for the event and board member of UKS
[excerpt, translated]
Dove Allouche & Evariste Richer
Roman Ondak
Bojan Sarcevic
Marika Bührmann
Jeremie Gindre
Jun Yang
Dominique Petitgrand
Laurent Montaron
Solene Guillier and Nathalie Boutin is the duo behind the gallery and art mediation project GB AGENCY which resides in the 13th Arrondissement in Paris. Together they have curated exhibitions with Douglas Gordon, Vibeke Tandberg, Koo Jeong-a, David Shrigley, Jonathan Monk and Pierre Bismuth, among other artist. Using GB AGENCY as arena, Guillier and Boutin work with showing art in new arenas as well as traditional art spaces.
[excerpt, translated]
Åsil Bøthun
Siri Hermansen
Gardar Eide Enairsson
Ole Martin Lund-Bø
Ane Hjorth Guttu
Morgan Schagerberg
Jenny Magnusson
Trine Lise Nedreaas
Anna Maria Gudmundsdottir
"The artists uses everyday life as a staring point to focus on the symbols that surround us and what these means to the artist as individual. A structural reworking of life's conditions, the state of affairs. The result is clear and concise, without ironic distancing and metaphysical denominators. The works speak to the spectator with immediate appeal and no one is to be embarrassed by the art. I would even go out on a limb and say that the art in this show is popular. By that I mean immediate and likable. This might be a future prospect which contemporary art may be wise to follow."
Terje Nicolaisen, curator
[excerpt, translated]
Force Majeure présent their new production Enslig Gran (Lonely Fir Tree) which consists of different technical installations feeding the audience graphic texts. Sound/image/action is generated by actor/viewer/technology in interaction. Four situations present different connections between text, viewer and actor – the actors consistently subject to the graphic text. The viewers' perspective differentiates between the situation – from passive observation to a sort of guided participation. Force Majeure have since june 1997 produced shows and performed on different scenes in different settings in Norway and abroad. Text have been the pivot point from the onset and now technology have become an integral part. The work is process oriented and is presented in various versions. Focus rests on demonstrations of perspective rather than performing brilliance. The material is developed "in common".
Actors: Saila Hytinnen, Håkon Lindbäck, Martin Lundberg, Daniel Norbäck, Cia Runesson, Anders Wennerström.
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
"Alexander Gutke (SE) presents two video loops and a model of a pavilion built in plexi glass. The video "Transition (A 1978 Pontiac Firebird driving through a Forest of Pine Trees)" shows the landscape along a Swedish country road reflected in the car's paint. "Untitled, to be continued" consists of a deserted country road where a car disappears in the horizon, reminiscent of Hollywood movies where the hero and his girl always gets away in the end. The pavilion model, "Proposal for a Turning Point", challenges the idea of immortality connected to building public monuments.
Tine Aamodt presents a wall painting, its motif consisting of silhouettes of different furniture. The arrangement does not conform to the room's corners with creates a confusion and decomposition of the boundaries of space. The painting's materiality is further compromised by the furniture's appearance as being both represented and mere shadows. Together with a slideshow of a young calf's last moments before slaughter, Aamodt's installation tells of transience and historicity."
Trude Iversen
[excerpt, translated]
Zolt Kovac
Miodrag Krkobabic
Milena Maksimovic
Vladimir Nikolic
The art and design group SKART
Project leaders: Per Platou and Sinisa Spasojevic
"If you try to find the term "Little Red Elephants" in a dictionary or encyclopedia, I have to disappoint you and tell you that you won't succeed. These small creatures have not yet taken their place in such documents. "Little Red Elephants" were born a few years ago as an accidental hybrid, and since that time have not evolved beyond their initial infantile state of innocence. Isolated in their own reservation park, the little red elephants knew only of the existence of each other and their masters who provided them with their daily needs, and made sure that they didn't escape from the reservation. However, some elephants managed to leave their habitat, never to return. Secluded in the reservation and isolated from the rest of the world, the remaining elephants had no means of finding out what happened to them. They had simply disappeared."
- Vesna Madzoski
The title of the exhibition refers to the artists' own self image. Exotic red elephants are perceived as 'other' and the title problematizes this mechanism as the 'other' is understood as 'the suppressed artist' under Milosevic's regime. The artists showing their works at UKS do have an identity that reaches beyond being representations of the opposition in Belgrade even though this is an important parameter. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between UKS and the Belgrade Center for Contemporary Arts. It is also the first part of an exchange between young Norwegian artists and Serbian artists. In febuary 2003 a handful Norwegian artists visit Belgrade and the areas around the city. Head of Belgrade Center for Contemporary Arts, the art historian Branislav Dimitrijevic gives a guest lecture on the Yugoslavic art scene and the project "Serbain Art During War Time".
[excerpt, translated]
Sverre Koren Bjertnæs, (artist group) 1561, (graffiti artist) Goal, Astri Wexelsen Goksøyr and Bjønnulv Evenrud, amongst others…
Curated by Anders Eiebakke
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
SCHLAFEN GEGEN RECHTS - SOV MOT HØYRESIDEN
"Schlafen gegen rechts" - "Sleep towards the right" - is the title of Snorre Ytterstad's exhibition as well as the main piece in the show - a fully functional slot machine produced by the artist himself. For every one kroner the visitor inserts, five kroners will be donated to the Anti Fascist Action, thus making a bet on the slot machine a political gesture, supporting this communist and anarchist movement. Two new works are also presented; "In the middle of the fucking room" consists of a one kroner placed i middle of the (fucking) room with eight wires, and the piece "Play/Rewind" is a little (very little) LCD-monitor placed on the skirting board on the floor. Besides the incitement to incorporate a resistance to the right in your sleep, the exhibition's title may be regarded as a means of reflection of all the three works on show at UKS.
Curated by Anders Eiebakke
[excerpt, translated]
"Berit Henning presents the video "Pål". Pål is a disabled person traveling on a cruise ship with two assistants from his communal house. His parents tells the story of his life and how his disability has changed their family structure parallel to Pål's journey.
Andre Lange exhibits a sound and video installation where Maroccan born Samir Tasaft (14) and Karim Bounbaa (13) sing the song "Frere Jaques" among photographs from their home town, Saint Gaudens in the south of France.
Ståle Sørensen presents the installation "Mobile Gallery", actually his touring gallery consisting of a 70s caravan. The caravan has been the scene for the project "Getmyselfconnected" showing five different foreign artists this year."
Trude Iversen
[excerpt, translated]
"Rune Elias Helgesen presents his new work "20 short movies in black and white" along with "Simple songs about living and relaxing", "Transport 01" and the CD "Transport". "20 short movies.." consists of 10 seconds long videos focusing on apparent day to day circumstances looped with 10 seconds long pauses in-between, stimulating impatience in the beholder.
Josephine Lindstrøm shows her 16mm film "Fossen" (The Waterfall). The image appears as something between fixation and endless movement: the aspect of time is reversed and gravity have ceased to exist.
Birgitte Sigmundstad presents her photo series "Match of the day", eight portraits of female athletes inspired by the media's representations of sports, here focusing on the losers. The fallen women reflects on athletic rivals like Nadia Commaneci and Olga Kobut or Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan."
Trude Iversen
[excerpt, translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
Ólöf Björnsdottir shows her project "Designer Dress Project" consisting of a series of specially designed dresses mounted on posters for call girls. The dresses are produced by Wollenmaiden who also presents a new portrait in the exhibition.
Charlotte Eliasson presents her project "The Ladies Club". Eliasson's focus lies on the individual's life situation, deconstructing and mapping three main aspects: the social heteronormative construction, gender and power through photographs and videos.
Cathrine Evelid displays her project called "The Mind Shop" (TMS), whose primary goal is to give easy answers to hard questions. TMS treats questions regarding culture, gender, politics and history through marketing items like "Club wear for female terrorists", "Ideology Bikinis" and "Back to Basics Boob Tubes".
Kristin Wexelsen Goksøyr shows her installation "Under Jorden" ("Under Ground") in UKS' basement. Concerned with creating a room that gives visitors a sense of visiting a parallel universe under ground, the visitors are supposed to encounter beauty in vegetation, water, contrasting living and dead, light and darkness.
[excerpt, translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
INTERVIEWS
Helen Torp Andersen, Anne Berntsen, Steven Cuzner, Kathrine Dille, Geir Gjerde, Björn Hegardt, Synne Holst-Pedersen, Mariken Kramer, Jens Laland, Mats Linder, Jens Nilsson, Ellen Røed, Pia Sandström, Lars Teigum, Hilde Tørdal, Theo Ågren.
The title "Interviews" reflects upon young aspiring artists speculating, questioning and perhaps even answering. Also the aspect of presenting views and comments on relation to their surroundings.
Co-ordinator: Lars Bang Larsen
[excerpt, translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
"Degraw's paintings, drawings and illustrations have strong references to music, mainly punk, but also themes like religion, drugs, "white trash" icons and "Bible belt" culture. his last installations have included altars honoring characters like Ian Curtis (Joy Division), Morrisey (The Smiths), as well as Dalai Lama and Satan. Degraw explains his art as religious confusion, wether it's christianity, rock music or whatever constitutes as 'belief'."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
"Annika Simonsson presents her work "Splash", a series of paintings in enamel paint on mdf boards. Their shape is an essential element from the 60s and 70s interior design, inspired by commercial and cartoon aesthetics.
Camilla Dahl shows two installations/sculptures. The first one being a champagne bar with a reclined hostess on top, pouring champagne into a container. The audience is invited to enjoy the champagne and converse with the hostess. There is also a vomit-machine in painted mdf and aluminum.
Eline McGeorge shows a series of animated works presented on LCD screens. Line drawings presents a way to reach the essence of what takes place on the screens, the possibilities of different meanings and outcomes."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"Hyun-A. Ji presents an installation consisting of models made of wood, trowel and acrylics. The models are based on shapes that can be described as homely – furnitures, but also stylized figures and a dismantled wooden bicycle. The works are based on the shapes' and material's subjective and objective purpose and (dys)functionality. The keywords here are fetishism, personal stories and the material's own expression detached from its original context and function.
Han Christian Gilje exhibits two works; One room contains film stills from Gilje's Mountain series printed on 150x120cm photo screen among smaller images with different themes. In the inner room we find "node III", the third version of a metal well with represents a sort of collective memory and also a meeting place in time and space."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"Una Ree Hunderi presents a series of photographs with motives from Tonga in the Pacific Ocean. After photographing Norwegian mountains, fjords and deep forests, Hunderi left for the South Pacific to study the exotic landscape there. Her former projects deals with the Norwegian landscape and our perception of this; a way to see nature closely bound to romantic nationalism, tourism and commercial representations of Norwegian nature. The apparent meaninglessness and harmlessness of the landscape photography is her point of interest. The choice fell on Polynesia and the Pacific paradise because many of us have a certain notion of what it looks like despite the fact that most of us have never been there.
Irene Nordli shows her work "the Boxing Kangaroos", two porcelain robots measuring 175 cm programmed to throw punches every 10th minute. Nordli also exhibits a series of porcelain figures on plinths. The figures accentuate the sensuality of their material, being casts of well-known female figures, souvenirs, models, dolls and such. The figures are compiled in new ways which represents Nordli's personal artistic expression."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"Cecilie Nissen shows her painting installation "Flux, Seductive Red" in UKS' large space. The work covers an entire wall with red aluminum plates painted with thick coats of different orange/magenta nuances and also shaded, highlighting a three diminutional effect. Nissen is concerned with the relationship between the work and the beholder and employs seductive hyper-aesthetic remedies in this exchange between figurative and non-figurative landscapes.
Yngvild Færøy presents a series of thirty framed pencil drawings on paper which together forms an organic whole. The motives are half recognizable as ornamental and cryptic symbols, half as representations of physical objects. Færøy also shows a photography of a dress with floral pattern against a grey sky, through the fog a cityscape is nearly visible. Her works depicts an inclination towards the ornamental world we live in, as in rose painting, hairstyles and dress patterns together with questions concerning the incomprehensible, indefinable and illogical in this world."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"UKS Gallery is opening the fall season with two simultaneous separate exhibitions.
Knut Henrik Henriksen work with different media, his focus being on drawing and sculpture. The sculpture is built with pinewood panels, stretching from floor to ceiling, placed in the big hall. As a sculptor, Henriksen works with non-functional, irrational walls where he gets his visual expression in the private, homely sphere and what you might call an intimate architecture. He is concerned with the materials' cultural and psychological character and value.
Tommy Olsson refers to this e-mail correspondence concerning the exhibition at UKS:
"Eh, pictures? Works on paper? Watercolors, drawings and collage… figurative? (Classical that is, like the Nerdrum students). Does it have to be more specific? I looked through the material last night; looks like it's going to be a quite ample exhibition. It revolves around Christine Keeler, choirs, pigs, cocaine and bisexual dwarfs… Don't ask me to be more detailed, that will make it downright filthy." "
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
Shin Myeong-eun & Taro Chiezo
"UKS gallery have the honor of presenting Shin Myeong-eun and Taro Chiezo. UKS continues to present international artists, this time we have chosen to focus on Japan.
Shin Myeong-eun, originally from Seoul, Korea, living in Tokyo, shows a series of photographies of stuffed animals, dogs, who float around under different skies and also the sculpture "Poodles", stylized poodles in plastic. Her works deals with the dogs' place in culture both as pets and icons. She addresses the special relationship people have to dogs in Japan and employs the dog as form and symbol for abstract feelings.
Taro Chiezo's video "An Experiment: Robots Fall in Love / or not" shows colorful plastic robots, half animal, half geometrical sculptures in suggestive, but clumsy attempts of hopeless relationships. The video consists of a scientific experiment involving five robots in an artificial garden. The robots were programmed to desire one another, but the experiment shows that robots resemble, but are quite different from people in function. Their intelligence work on another level."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
Mette Gamst, Beathe C. Rønning & Heidi Sundby
"The exhibition is curated by Tiril Schrøder, deputy of the board of UKS and one of the curators of next year's UKS Biennal.
Mette Gamst works with narrative structures, all having their point of departure in every day life and the subject's dealings with these events and situations which Gamst registrate and express through text or photos. The different projects are gathered in a binders system with the title "Standard Quality", presented in a reading room with table and chairs.
Beathe C. Rønning shows a database consisting of drawings, texts, newspaper clippings and photos. Each one are local moments of significance, high or low. Together they build a universe layered with stories made manageable by the installation where they are composed in different correlations every time.
Heidi Sundby presents "Delighted and Disturbed", a magical tale about the conditions of nutrition physiology and unconditional devotion. Three variations of the same photography reveals the opportunity to create the image one wants and not that which was. A text on the wall, porcelain and tablecloth points to items such as cotton candy as metaphors for desire and consumption, a material Sundby has worked with several times."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"The expelled artist Matt Burt is denied residence permit from the Foreign Affairs Office with, amongst others, this reason: "…the projects he possibly participates in concerns CD recordings and a text/sound/video project, not visual arts which is the applicant's field of speciality in arts". An amazing reason which demands many answers. Matt Burt will speak his cause by performing a piece named "Freeport". The work is a 30 minutes long collection of softly spoken word-images accompanied by a pump organ, inspired by Choygam Trungpa, John Cage and Allen Ginsberg.
These days, the art world of Norway discuss the need for organizing an apparatus capable of distributing art abroad and receiving artists from abroad. This makes fighting the bureaucracy that does not see Matt Burt's value, his extensive network and obvious contributions to Norwegian art and culture, a quite morbid situation."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
10 FRA DET KONGELIGE DANSKE KUNSTAKADEMI
Kaspar Bonnén, Andrea Creutz, Lise Harlev, Elsebeth Jørgensen, Lone Bank Nielsen, Olof Olsson, Daniel Salomon, Åsa Sanjasdotter, Lisa Strömbeck, Marie Rømer Westh
"UKS have invited Jeanette Christensen to curate an exhibition in the gallery due to her engagement as a guest professor at The Royal Danish Art Academy as head of the brick and wall course 1998-2000, her position as director of UKS and initiator of the UKS Biennal, and also working as a professional artist with exhibitions over large parts of the world the recent years.
Christensen have organized an exhibition consisting of young artists from Copenhagen. Her starting point has been artists who easily move between different media, not as independent activities but as an integrated exploration. The works in the exhibition exist in the tension between the sculptural, the extended painting, conceptual work and video work."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
Julia Gorman
David Jolly
Ricky Swallow
"The Exhibition BrandNewMasterCopy is a result of UKS' participation in Melbourne International Biennal 1999. UKS cooperated with the gallery 200GertrudeStree and met an artistic milieu that appealed directly to UKS' ideas of art and art mediation, and further cooperation was a natural consequence. BrandNewMasterCopy presents three of Melbourne's most exiting and innovative contemporary artists, all of them working across techniques as painting, sculpture, and installation. The exhibition shows a range of works which in different ways processes and plays with the relationship between technology and craftmanship, while at the same time having clear references to pop, hip hop and rave. The title of the exhibition reflects upon the artists' exploration of the concept of "cover versions", maticulously re-enacting and adapting original objects and phenomenons to a new object or phenomenon: a BrandNewMasterCopy."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"Jannicke Låker presents two videos and a book. The video "9 1/2 Minutes" is brand new and not shown before. It is a monologue in the form of a video letter inspired by a love letter from a nordic woman to an aid worker in a developing country. The occurrence of a jealousy tantrum drives the video into absurdity. The book consists of the video's manuscript. The second video work named "Spiderwoman" is a performance video from 1998 where the artist has placed the camera to her stomach, crawling around harassing furniture with her crotch.
Liv Strand shows three sculptures consisting of day-to-day ordinary materials put in motion through mechanics and electrical engines. Each one of the sculptures is both a description and a concentrated part of human behavior. Strand searches for conditions and situations marked by ambivalence, where understanding and interpretaion needs to be complex."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
Contributors:
HC Gilje
Victor Lind
Motherboard
Salong
Crispin Gurholt
Norsk Anarkistisk Fraksjon
Lappophora Wiljamsis
Jonas Ekeberg
Øystein Barsnes
Jan Nordvik
Helge Ryggvik and Internasjonale Sosialister
Y2K DADA
"Tilt" is a collaboration between UKS and Samtidskunstforum curated by Anders Eiebakke. There are no apparent theme connecting the works in the exhibition, reflected in its title – which also comments the complex cultural and political situation in Norway at the end of this century. This heterogeous project points to the climate where there is a general skepticism expressed toward the dominating market capitalism but where no alternative political options are presented. In the art world, the situation is less clear than ever: The exploration of the private sphere seems to come to its end and the heavy focus on philosophy of language and conceptual art have little effect on the coming generation of artists. Simultaneously there is no apparent formation of new tendencies, although concepts such as "social", "formal", and "post-conceptual" are prominent in today's activities.
"Jes Brinch is a Danish visual artist specially invited by UKS due to his artistry's relevance to the Norwegian public and art world when it comes to mediation and thematics. Brinck shows an installation titled "Only Apparently Real" which mainly consists of a chamber challenging our conception of reality. Using the room, objects and mirrors he offers an opportunity to contemplate reality.
Lisa Lohne and Adja Arnebäck presents the video installation "Trespasser" ("Trängde vi oss på dig eller du dig på oss?"). The recording is made in Berlin 1997 and 1999 and tries to portray the political and mental shifts in boundaries that has occurred since the fall of the Berlin wall. With this work the artists wish to describe the consumer society's rules and values as it appears in the capitalist system's "victory" over the Eastern Bloc."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
IN THE FAT ANGELS BLOOD
UKS presents Micke Persson's sound work "In the Fat Angels Blood". The piece will fill the whole of the gallery's ground floor. Persson graduated from The Art Academy in Oslo 1996, focusing on sound as his main channel for artistic expiression.
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
"Per Teljer should be known to Norwegian audiences with a resume of exhibitions in Oslo, Bergan and Trondheim although this is his first solo show in Oslo. Teljer shows video works projected on the gallery walls. The video titled 'Deaf Throes' is from 1998. 'The Vigilante' (1999) has its premiere at UKS. Both works revolve around a theme of narrativity which the artist have processed over several years – a sort of tragicomic realism offering the viewer an insight to somewhat peculiar interpersonal bevhaiour.
Mette Hellenes is known for her drawings and cartoons called 'Kebbevennene'. This project has evolved into a mix of cult figures and classic observations of the Norwegian art scene. Hellenes have been working on an animated version of this instant classic which also premieres at UKS.
Hege Vadstein and Trine Haaland present a video based scheme/web-installation in collaboration with Paul Brady titled 'Added Values' which could be described as a poetic staging of Franc de Mark's experiences from EU's 5th Framework Program. Vadstein and Haaland also shows their computer based work 'Conto Finto' presenting 21 artists from Loveland."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"Aage Langhelle presents an installation mainly consisting of manually intertwined photographies referring to raster graphics, woven structures and digital imagery. The works appears as manifestations of visual decomposition and restructuring.
Ogar Grafe shows photographies, embroideries and objects inspired by old mythology and new popular culture.
Johan Suneson debuted with this exhibition, displaying a glass object representing his family- mom, dad and brothers. Allegories and abstractions refer to his childhood environment, drawings on the wall presents motives from artistic, bohemian, Free Church societies undergoing metamorphosis."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
"For the first time, graduate students from the Valand Academy of Photography and Film show their work in Norway. Their artistry is a part of "the new visual language" consisting of dialogues and messages where photography serves as a starting point. The exhibition shows the younger generation's relation to photography and thereby the changes occurring in this field. These last years' explosion of new visual techniques creates a possibility of changing the visual language - perhaps the extended field also needs a change. It is not the technical innovation which constitutes the crucial factor, but the effect this has on our consciousness.
Supervising this exhibition: professor Tuja Lindström, artist Helga Bu and art critic Erik van der Heeg."
Jørn Mortensen
[translated]
The archive has very little information about this event!
If you have any material that you would like to contribute please get in touch.
info@uks.no
"Elisabeth Mathisen's artistry is mainly connected with performance, video and installation works. At UKS Gallery she presents drawings. There is a large variation over the theme, some based on ideas - formal and minimalistic with descriptive titles. Others complex and emotional representations of conditions, situations and uncomfortable traces of bodily memory. There are also recognizable shapes and figures subjected to alterations creating new associations.
Christel Sverre is known for her space-specific situationist installations. In this exhibition, she shows works made of mass produced textiles, metal, stoneware and different sources of light. The installations appear as an orchestration of time, space and conditions where the body and atmosphere is absorbed in a cinematic visual language. Sverre uses elements from the everyday, memories and dreams offering new experiences and interpretations."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
"UKS presents the international artist group Henry VIII's Wives, established in 1997 consisting of seven artists from Scandinavia, Britain and Germany based in Glasgow. After tending studies of Environmental Art at the Glasgow School of Art, they produced several group exhibitions commencing on a process which now have led to UKS gallery. The group work actively with their surroundings, making each show a result of the space they are in which often leads to humorous expressions with serious underpinnings.
Bente Bøyesen presents her exhibition "Hjertelig hilsen" ("Warm greetings") concerning ideas and illusions of portrait painting. Her works show female figures, a combination of known and unknown, clichés and types. The faces - persons - exist in the reality of the painting."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
JOYSTUCK III
"Gisle Frøysland have worked within different disciplines for several years. His starting point as musician in the 1980s lead to working with performance art and installations where music and sound were central to the experience. Frøysland later developed larger sculptural installations with sound and video. The themes are linked to post industrial society with strong references to the Futuristics' ideas and expressions
(…)
Joystuck III revolves around a problematization of the technological development versus human needs, ambitions and influence. To what degree is technological advancement under human control? Do these innovations benefit human kind and contribute to a better world or are they only byproducts of war lords' aggressive expansion? The exhibition invites the audience to participate. It is possible to experience a treadmill in a new context, video projections and a real railway model."
Jørn Mortensen
[excerpt, translated]
Dear reader,
I write to ask for your kind participation in No Gods, No Parents, an encyclopaedia of facsimile documents reflecting the unconscious cognitive system of the field called contemporary art.
My hopeful wish is that you could share with me particular documents of extraordinary interest, revealing the fundamentals of your practice and/or the mechanisms constituting the context you operate within.
The past is not singular and the encyclopaedia No Gods, No Parents is not a chronological survey with claims of documenting history or historical events, but rather a way of writing history in the present.
It is not an archive and received documents are not being structured the way information may be contained between the covers of a book, the content is will rather be involved in a contradictory co-existence and interaction, trapped in an elusively and ephemeral editorial topography.
The order of appearance of the content is intended to withdraw from any attempt of appellation or recognition with an extraction of meaning from the original material that requires a refusal of mental chronological arrangements and activation of alternative effective agents beyond formal terminology.
To file contributions to the encyclopaedia please contact: nono@uks.no
No Gods, No Parents is an Encyclopaedia of para-textual material, surrounding a particular field within contemporary art recognised under many names -- the alternative, artist-run and the self-organised scene maybe among the most common. These characterise diverse initiatives managed and operated in various formats to constitute a broad spectrum from conventional display to geeky experiments: non-for- profit, nomadic, imaginary spaces, non-venues, activist groups and deliberative collaborations.
No Gods, No Parents focus on para-textual facsimile material such as manifests, legal and financial statements, memoirs, proposals, formal requests and letters of intent kindly shared directly by the culprits. By collecting these documents No Gods, No Parents constitutes an editorial tool, a machine as an object of investigation unto itself that rewrites history in the present.
The term, para-text was coined by the literary theorist Gérard Genette to define such things in a published work that accompany the content. In the same way as a title, preface or ISBN-number stand in relation to a text in a book, so too does correspondence, invoices, applications, press releases and proposals revolving as satellites in an orbit around the artist initiated practice. As such, these documents are part of the unconscious cognitive system of the art world.
The incentive to collect and archive this residue is an attempt to outline an iconographic geography. A constellation of informal reference points on the fringe of the work and experiences of those who are, or have been involved in – and thereby contributed to, the development, thinking, re-thinking and realization of previous and existing initiatives in mentioned categories.
Temporality is one of the primary factors for all these initiatives. They are cyclical. Marcel Broodthaers’ Musée d’Art Moderne, Dèpartment des Aigles, or my own Ersta Konsthall, for that matter, could only exist in a certain moment of history. These projects needed special conditions to be validated within their intended contexts. They occurred as events to fill a gap or as critique, developed in a meaningful moment only to be subject to their eventual dissolution. By collecting the para-textual material, the bureaucratic leftover, printed matter, personal notes and other relevant (and irrelevant) documents, No Gods, No Parents takes into consideration this special aspect of the temporal as important as any aspect of the spatial.
The para-textual material constitutes more than a boundary or a sealed border according to Genette, who argues that it is rather a threshold as “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that [...] is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it”.
The intention is not to present a general definition of an economy or production of systems within the realm of these initiatives. Rather, No Gods, No Parents embraces the fact that this diverse field is a Hydra, an organism where every single head seems to have a different agenda and different motivation for ones practice. Every head – even the decapitated one – is also inextricably connected to the fabric of the art world at large. The collected material constitutes documented proof of those memorable moments in times when important things happened.
No Gods, No Parents indirectly reads up on diverse strategies and means of production by direct reproduction. No Gods, No Parents also reflects the traditional gallery space as something more than a set of agreements descendant from Brian O ́Doherty’s legendary Artforum essays. This, in suggesting that there are more than the complex and sophisticated relationships between politics, economics, social context and aesthetics that in 1976 constituted the conditions of everything that took place Inside the White Cube. No Gods, No Parents is a backdoor, a way to slip in without knocking upon the same door as Marcel Duchamp once did.
UKS is glad to announce the availability of a studio at Olaf Ryes plass 2 (ORP 2) in Grünerløkka, Oslo.
Only UKS members may apply.
- The studio is available for 6 months (1. April - 30. September) and is fully subsidised by UKS.
- The studio can be solely used for artistic production and not as accommodation or storage.
- After 6 months applicants will be asked to produce a presentation of their activities at UKS.
Spesifications:
- 3rd floor
- 20m2
- large sink
- wifi
- heating
- two north-facing windows
- Shared toilet facilities
Further information for applicants is available on UKS' ‘Applications’ page.
ORP 2 is supported by Oslo kommune Kulturetaten.
Every Wednesday at 7pm, Moloch film club offers free popcorn and shows deliberative democratically selected films in our cinema.
You can reserve a seat in advance and follow their program here
UKS and INCA announced a new residency program
in Detroit, open for Norwegian artists, poets, scholars and curators, or such based on Norway.
- Residents are offered a stay of up to 2 months.
- Return flights to Detroit (inc. transfers)
- Housing and studio in the INCA building
- Car rental and car insurance during the whole stay
- Monthly stipend of $ 950
- It is possible to get limited project support upon application
Possible projects could include publications,
community work or volunteering, exhibitions,
performances, and research.
In the proposal we are looking for an intended working approach and not neccesarily a detailed project description. We will evaluate the relevance of the proposal and help to provide the best working conditions and network in Detroit.
It is recommended that the resident has a valid drivers license.
Further information for applicants is available on UKSs ‘Applications’ page. INCA is a non-profit organization founded by Bergman/Salinas: www.incainstitute.org
INCA’s board members:
Alejandra Salinas
Aeron Bergman
Rebecca Mazzei: MOCA Detroit
Linus Elmes: UKS Oslo
Residents in chronological order:
1: Sille Storhile, 21st Sept - 21st Nov 2011
2: Marte Eknæs, 28th Feb - 24th April 2012
The project is supported by Arts Council Norway.
UKS cinema is a dedicated space for moving images. With only 15 seats it is an intimate setting but with optimal conditions for screenings. We currently use an Epson EH-TW 3800 projector and a 5.1 channel sound system.
For screening programs and other events taking place in our cinema, please check under PROGRAM. If you’re planning a screening, a preview, a lecture or other activities that you think might be appropriate, please contact us.
We found an old 1970´s Boffi kitchen in Stockholm and Kaspar Druml, our associated architect transported it to us in Oslo. It was then installed during the reconstruction of the premises in 2010, facing the library and the lobby. Here in the centre of our activities we cook for ourselves and our visitors, occasionally a guest chef appears, and at every opening we try to fullfill our aim to serve home cooked meals to each and every visitor.
On may 27th 2010 the Swedish artist Andreas Gavell-Mohlin made a permanent addition to the kitchen; the wall drawing Rusie Na Suea / Magic drawing for protection and good luck.
SOFT-BOILED EGGS
Ingredients:
1 or 2 eggs per person
water, so much so that it completely covers the eggs
Method:
Bring the water to the boil, once boiling reduce the heat, or take the saucepan away from the hob, carefully place the eggs in the water with a spoon or egg basket if available. Take a precise mental note of the time, return the saucepan to the hob and turn up the heat to its highest setting, once the water returns to the boil, reduce the heat slightly, but make sure that the water continues to boil. Do not cover the saucepan with a lid.
Calculate cooking times accordingly: 3 1/2 minutes for medium eggs (eggs of about 60 grams, 17 eggs per kilogram), that are at approximately room temperature. For very small eggs deduct 1/4 of a minute, for very large ones increase the time by 1/4 of a minute. If the eggs have just been removed from a cold refrigerator, increase the time by a further 1/2 minute. If the eggs are only a few days old, reduce the time by 1/2 a minute.
Once the calculated time has elapsed, immediately remove the eggs from the water and serve.
Soft-boiled eggs are characterised by a thoroughly fluid yolk, and whites which are more or less solidified leaving only a thin layer closest to the yolk that is still fluid. Now, if you want eggs softer or harder than described here, the time should be reduced or increased accordingly by a suggested 1/2 a minute.
Notes:
Let us begin with the dish that is usually considered to be one of the simplest: soft-boiled eggs. It is however not at all that easy, especially when considering all the almost rock hard so-called soft-boiled eggs that have been eaten in this day and age. Those who often travel, and who would want a soft-boiled egg for the morning meal at a hotel, are often led to believe that soft-boiled eggs are difficult to cook, that even hotels with the most
famous of kitchens fail to accomplish this task. Many a housewife has certainly found that soft-boiled eggs turn out to be quite different to what was expected.
The most common and easiest method is to let the eggs sit in boiling water for a certain number of minutes, depending on how well cooked you would like them. But there are also other ways. The most perfect and safest is to allow the eggs to sit for 10 minutes in water kept at a constant temperature of 80 degrees, however such suitable cooking appliances are yet to be found. Such is for the future of cooking styles.
One, and often discussed method is to begin cooking the eggs in cold water, once the water begins to boil either remove the eggs immediately from the water or after 1 minute has elapsed. This however gives far too uncertain results, which should be quite obvious. It surely must take much longer to boil lots of water with many eggs over a low heat, than a little water with fewer eggs over a high heat. The result in both cases must then be completely different.
Another method is to place the eggs in a certain amount of boiling water - 1/4 of a liter for the pot plus 1/4 of a liter for each egg - the saucepan is then removed from the hob, after waiting 10 minutes the eggs can then be removed from the water. This is theoretically correctly calculated, but is not always precise, especially if there are many eggs. The water cools at the bottom of the saucepan where the eggs are, and remains hot at the top. One must then place something underneath the eggs in order that they stay close to the surface of the water, this can surely only mean trouble.
It remains, therefore, with our current resources; the best way to boil eggs is within a given number of minutes. But we must carefully keep track of the minutes and seconds. Boiled eggs are so often either far too soft or far too hard, probably because in most cases, one simply does not pay close enough attention to the time.
However, there are some conditions that must always be taken into account. It is not without significance, whether the egg that is to be cooked is either very cold or very hot, when it is placed in the boiling water. An egg that is taken directly from the refrigerator should
be heated to 60 degrees in order to become soft-boiled, however one that has been in a warm kitchen or pantry should be heated to only 40 degrees, it is therefore quite natural that the former must take longer than the latter. Furthermore, it is natural that it takes longer to boil a larger egg than a smaller one.
Quite fresh eggs - those that are 1, 2 or 3 days old, solidify significantly faster than eggs that are older. Fresh eggs should be cooked for less time than older ones (and not longer as some cookbooks will have it). If an egg is not very fresh it takes 4 1/2 minutes for the whites to solidify, while maintaining a fluid yolk. It requires a truly fresh egg only 3 1/2 minutes to achieve this same texture, and for one that is cooked as soon as it was laid, it only takes 2 minutes.
One is often recommended to rapidly cool the eggs in cold water before they are served, on the grounds that the shells are easier to remove. Since one does not usually peel soft-boiled eggs, I find this measure to be unnecessary, in addition soft-boiled eggs are due to their nature, barely warm, so any cooling should be avoided.
Sometimes one finds that yolks, that are usually in the middle of the egg, are close to one edge, with the result that the yolk becomes partially solidified with the whites more fluid than desired, all of which makes the egg less pleasant to eat. In these cases, the egg is almost certainly so old, that the whites of the raw egg have become very loose, and the yolk has lost its two anchors and floated towards the side of the egg that has faced upwards.
Every now and then it may unpleasantly occur that some eggs crack when placed in the boiling water, despite having placed them with extreme caution. Usually, this is again a symptom of older eggs, which have formed a large air bladder that, when heated, explodes the egg.
We have always had books; an old reference library, texts in the office and publications left over from exhibitions. In 2010 we collected everything together and made a public library. New books are constantly bought and added in order to compliment our current activities and we are always open for suggestions and donations. The library is cataloged according to the Dewey system, and organised and presented in the lobby. Our library is available to everyone, drop in, take a coffee, and have a browse, the library exists in order to be used!