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The Oslo Project upcoming events: Harald Østgaard Lund and Ane Hjort Guttu

Kunsthall Oslo

www.kunsthalloslo.no

Kunsthall Oslo has invited artists to investigate the city of Oslo and present their results to the public over a seven-month series of exhibitions, talks and events. With a central focus on the material reality of the city and on the present day, the artists' projects explore many sides of city life: aesthetics, ideology, architecture, economics, social relations, history, politics, conflict, everyday life and personal experience.

Upcoming events in the city project programme (further projects, talks and events are to be announced):

May 25th - June 10th: Harald Østgaard Lund
Veikrysset i Gamlebyen
Opening Friday May 25th, 19.00
A presentation of footage from Harald Østgaard Lund's lost film Veikrysset i Gamlebyen, a film essay about Oslo, using the Gamlebyen crossroads as a starting point to explore geographical, social and cultural intersections in the city.

June 15th - July 8th: Ane Hjort Guttu
Byens lys
Opening Friday June 15th, 19.00

Ane Hjort Guttu's exhibition raises the question of the ownership of light in the late-capitalist metropolis. The exhibition looks at the link between the sun and the privileged classes, and at how poverty, both symbolically and in real terms is associated with darkness.

Hjort Guttu has also curated a parallel exhibition presenting a selection of French graphic artist Gustave Dore's illustrations for the Harper's Magazine articles London - A Pilgrimage from 1872.

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After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer

May 20 — July 15, 2012

BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht (NL)

The FORMER WEST research exhibition After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer, which for the first time unveils to the public the unique visual collection of Russian-born French philosopher and diplomat Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). Curated by philosopher and art historian Boris Groys, the exhibition includes nearly 400 photographs that Kojève took in the 1950s and 1960s while traveling in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), China, India, Iran, Japan, Nepal, Russia, and throughout Western Europe, as well as over 1,700 postcards that he collected during his lifetime. This image collection captures the essence of both Kojève’s philosophical thinking and his political practice.

Kojève’s influential reinterpretation of philosopher Hegel’s writing inspired a generation of French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. Kojève thought history ended with the French Revolution, as it had achieved particular individual freedoms and the universal recognition of human desires. This notion of the “end of history” was later famously transformed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama to explain the loss of ideological antagonisms after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Believing that under the post-historical condition one should stop thinking about the world and instead change it, Kojève abandoned philosophy to work for the French Ministry of Economic Affairs. Remarkably, after this shift from deliberation to action Kojève started to develop his own obsessive photographic practice in order to register the post-historical world. The many generic postcards he collected show what inspired his artistic style.

The collection of both photographs and postcards portrays the world as Kojève articulated it through his philosophical thinking: an aesthetically harmonious and exotic East; a stiflingly complete and hollow West; and Russia, Kojève’s rapidly changing homeland, is shown mainly through old churches frozen in time. Through its premiere presentation, the exhibition questions the critical capacity for change in our contemporary reality and shows us a world stage waiting to be filled with activism and the desire for another tomorrow.

After History: Alexandre Kojève as a Photographer.

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Another retrospective initiated by Claude Lemand and curated by Nadine Begdache and Saleh Barakat will be presented at the Beirut Exhibition Center in May 2012.

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Surplus

May 24 -  July 5, 2012 at Bergen Kunsthall

Marianne Heier is this year’s Festival Artist. With a new site-specific project created especially for Bergen Kunsthall, she moves this year’s Festival Exhibition out of the white halls of the Kunsthall and instead turns the focus on the building itself and the urban space outside.

In the course of the early 2000s Marianne Heier has gained a quite special position on the Norwegian art scene. Through a series of actions and site-specific art projects she has established her own type of investigative artistic practice where social structures and mechanisms are illuminated.

In her projects Heier often explores specific institutions ‘from the inside’. She has for example made direct use of her own situation as a worker and ordinary employee at institutions like the National Museum or a blood bank in Oslo. At the National Museum she took the initiative to redecorate a break room for the museum’s custodians and technicians. The project was funded by Heier herself and the artwork was a gift to the institution in the form of a concrete improvement in the everyday working environment of the employees. This type of project situates itself within an institution-critical artistic praxis; but Heier’s critique from the inside is more often the result of personal engagement, motivated by personal, lived experience, than of a calculated, strategic institution- critical praxis.

The title of Heier’s Festival Exhibition makes use of the English concept of ‘surplus’. The complexity of the concept is exploited in the exhibition to shed light on different value systems set up in opposition to one another, and thereby also on the dialectic between scarcity and surplus. Heier investigates how financial capital and cultural capital are often overlapping value systems, but their various cycles and mechanisms are not always compatible. Something falls through the cracks, something cannot be translated from one to the other. Something is not for sale.

A central element in the exhibition is the story of Vima, a trawler built in 1977, first registered in Bergen, and later sold to Russian owners. When Vima was sent to the breaker’s yard in Trondheim in 2011, she had been seized and had incurred such large fines that it was no longer profitable to operate her. The story of Vima shows how an economic logic makes the trawler unseaworthy, while the ship itself should have been refitted for further use. The account doesn’t quite balance.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc countries, the balance of power that long held the world economy in check no longer functions. Today, after the financial crisis of 2008, we see the results of an unregulated, crude global capitalism that has been allowed to run amok in many places. However, Norway is in a quite special situation where the state is not only debt-free, but is also sitting on large savings that can in turn be invested in a global market. This means that the border between Norway and Russia in particular constitutes an area that throws the differences in the Europe of today into stark relief. No border in the world marks greater economic differences than the 196 km long frontier that separates the two countries.

The global economy also affects the way we look at the value of art. While the commercial market for contemporary art thrives (even after the financial crisis) we see public investment in art and culture crumbling away in large parts of Europe. In some countries an almost hostile rhetoric has grown up towards artists, art institutions and the values represented by free art. The issue of ‘who art is for’ has become touchier than it has been for a long time.

Marianne Heier’s artistry is grounded in an unshakable belief that art has another value than the kind that can simply be purveyed on a market. In this perspective, surplus can also refer to ‘surplus value’, a concept applied in Marxist theory to the ‘added value’ of excess production – but which, applied to art, may perhaps also connote an extra value that goes beyond the tangible and marketable. Art is an expression of human experience in the world, and it has a cognitive potential that can open one’s eyes to the world in new ways. Art too has solid value. It is central and relevant, and always survives.

Marianne Heier (b. 1969) lives and works in Oslo. Her recent solo exhibitions and projects in public space include “Jamais – Toujours”, Stenersen Museum, Oslo (2010); “Saga Night”, Maihaugen, Lillehammer (2008); “Pioneer”, Space for Art and Architecture, Oslo; and “Waldgänger”, KORO, Hammerfest (2008). She has participated in group exhibitions at a number of institutions such as Kunsthall Oslo (2011); Hiap, Helsinki (2010); Overgaden, Copenhagen (2009); the Henie Onstad Art Centre (2009).

Bergen Kunsthall