måg | issue four

mag KAREN NIKGOL STEFAN SCHRÖDER PER KRISTIAN NYGAARD VICTOR Mutelekesha TOR MAGNUS LUNDEBY AJLA R STEINVAAG KJELL TORRISET

DYLAN MINER

issue four/ 2011 published by nabroad www.maagmag.com

THE ABSTR ACTION OF BARRY LYN DON ARE BLYTT

NABROAD.LONDON WWW.NABROAD.ORG

/editor/ the how and the what måg issue four: Welcome.

We have put together another fantastic issue as always delivered digitally and free to your desktop. In coming weeks and months look out for måg rolling out across mobile devices including ipad, iphone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 devices. måg continue to be forward thinking both creatively and technically so welcome again to this and many more issues and a massive thank you to the guys at Virtual Portfolio for supporting måg. You will also discover in this issue that our font has changed, acting upon your feedback we have selected a font that will be friendlier to the eye on screens and mobile devices to come. måg issue four’s cover is by Dylan Miner, an artist who explores and challenges capitalism through his work, investigating how society and capitalism shape understanding as well as the history of art and culture.

Miner says ‘as an artist, my struggles against capitalism are likewise embedded in my own aesthetic choices. What materials I use, the narratives I construct, the places I exhibit, with whom I collaborate. Each of these is intentional. Of course, living under the kraken-like tentacles of capitalism means that I can never escape it’.

Also in this issue we speak with artists such as Ajla R. Steinvåg, Stefan Shröder, Victor Mutelekesha, Tor-Magnus Lundeby, Karen Nikgol and Per-Kristian Nygård who comment on the cultural and socio-historical influences of how we humans think, act, consume and remember history, whether it’s through direct comments within their works or by use of materials or observations. Per Kristian Nygård makes observations of our social and cultural life through his work, often loaded with parody and sarcasm, which often express ideas and concepts that might not actually work in reality.

The artist Victor Mutelekesha makes direct comments on identity and wants to induce a reaction to what we already have been conditioned to believe and remember, Mutelekesha says ‘My desire to redefine identity is part of a wider ethical battle that includes displacement (physical and that of the mind). The inequalities I hope to correct are due to the identities we currently subscribe to and are in many ways promoted by the leading financial system, that much of the world currently subscribe to, and have been perfected through time by ‘capitalism’.

This issue’s text; ‘The ‘How’ or The Civic Responsibilities of an Artist’ is written by Anthony Schrag. The writer Marjorie Celona once said: ‘Anthony, you have alot of ideas. Not all of them are good.’ Never the less; this text dwells on How and What, looking at the idea of ‘community arts’ and what it is, how it is used and what it can be. Schrag says: ‘So how do we talk about the ‘how’?

As we’ve already accepted that there can be no absolutes in ‘art’, this can’t be a step-

by-step guide. And, it can’t be a manifesto because I’ve already admitted I have no clear direction of meandering.

I would even hesitate to call it a rough guide because of the imperative of context within this type of work dictates every project must be intrinsically unique’.

Finally, worth taking a close look at is the gallery section of måg, particularly the works by Margarida Paiva, Muzi Quawson and Ragnhild Johansen.

Paiva and Quawson work with the narrative and the empty space of our presence whilst Johansen explores painting through the medium of wood; our reading of it and our connection to it, a connection that changes as we enter her work.

On the final page of måg you will find our chosen features for the next issue where we have an exciting line-up, featuring works by Simona Barbera, Javier Barrios, Newsha Tavakolian, Toril Johannessen and many more.

See you in August, have a wonderful summer.

AUDHILD DAHLSTRØM is editor of måg and director of NABROAD www.nabroad.org

/Contents/

4 COVER PHOTO DYLAN MINER

MAGAZINE DESIGN

BY NABROAD © 2010 www.nabroad.org PUBLISHER: NABROAD NORWEGIAN ARTISTS ABROAD EDITOR: AUDHILD DAHLSTRØM CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: PAVLA ALCHIN MARIANNE MORILD RUTH BARKER SUB EDITORS: LILLIAN UTNE SKJŒVELAND TATEVIK SARGSYAN EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS: CHRISTOFFER EIDE JASMINA BOSNJAK PHOTOGRAPHY: HILDE KVIVIK KAVLI ADVERTISING: COD DIGITAL MEDIA LONDON

Copyright of all editorial content is held by måg.

Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden. måg © 2011 www.maagmag.com SUPPORTED BY VIRTUAL PORTFOLIO

GALLERY 136 Halvor Rønning 144 Ragnhild Johansen 150 Nina Hove 160 Margarida Paiva 168 Muzi Quawson 176 Sada Tangara 180 Signe Christine Urdal 184 Gro Thorsen 188 Judy Sirks Vevle 192 Thomas C. Chung

F

FEATURES 8 DYLAN MINER / Audhild Dahlstrøm 34 STEFAN SHRÖDER / Susanne Altmann 46 AJLA R. STEINVÅG / Tatevik Sargsyan 58 PER KRISTIAN NYGÅRD / måg

text

72 TOR- MAGNUS LUNDEBY / Marianne Morild

3 Editor / Audhild Dahlstrøm

90 VICTOR MUTELEKESHA v v / Mara Ambozic 102 KJELL TORRISET / måg

124 The ‘How’ Or The Civic Responsibilities of an Artist / Anthony Schrag

114 KAREN NIKGOL / måg

196 Letter / Pia Myrvold

NEDREGÅRD & HILLARY 2009-2011

ENTRANCES

NABROAD.LONDON.2011 www.nabroad.org

FEATURES

/FEATURES/interview/

DYLAN MINER

by Audhild Dahlstrøm

/ANE LAN/ /MINER/

“impersonate” or “be” another person or character; one can only, make one’s own true personality visible through the enactment of a character or a situation. It is only by trying to be another person that you can really be yourself – hence; the masquerade is the true nature of human interaction.

This can sometimes be a little bit tricky, of course. Those of my friends who first volunteer to participate in my projects are those who have a narcissistic drive to be in front of a camera or to stand on a stage. That is also often the main symbolic value of their personality. How do you explain this to him/her? “I want you in this part because I see you as a great narcissist, and this piece is about narcissism”. And how do you persuade those of your friends and family who most of all hate being the center of attention to perform either in front of a camera or on stage?

This is crucial if I want to speak of the true discomfort of being objectified before the media gaze.

In order to succeed I try to create a transparent but solid contract of fiction and drama between the collaborators and me, which often implies costumes, and acted out clichés. I aim for an equal participation, but I guess what I am really looking for is a psychological projection (underneath the theatrical gesticulations) which my collaborators, or myself, are unaware of - the sides of our personality brought out by the play, contributing to the work in a way originally not intended. However, this has always been what makes the display of human interactions intriguing to watch, either on film or on stage.

Where a camera is present, the participants are consequently also able to investigate

/MINER/

1) AD: You are currently completing a book on the concept of Aztlán within Chicano art, please tell us about this research.

DM: The book project, tentatively titled Creating Aztlán: Chicano Art, Radical Politics and Indigenous Utopias, interrogates how Mexican American or Chicano artists and activists have evoked Aztlán, the so-called mythical homeland of the Mexica or Aztecs. The book emerges out of my own involvement in Chicano art and activist circles over the past fifteen-plus years, as well as my own experiences in the Great Lakes and US Southwest.

I was born and raised along the US-Canada border and grew up alongside Mexican and Chicano farm workers.

The colonial presence of both the US-Canada and US-Mexico border are ones that I’ve felt for a long time. My father’s family are Aboriginal Canadians and worked for generations as fur traders traversing the colonial borders of North America. Following the treating of Ghent, which permanently fixed the US-Canada border, my family was forced to relocate alongside other Métis and Anishinaabe families. My high school sweetheart (who is still my partner) grew up in a family of Mexican American migrant farm workers. Their stories of the shifting US-Mexico border and its impact on Mexican and Chicano families paralleled the one that Indigenous people feel along ‘the medicine line.’

When I heard Chicano activists chant “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us,” it reminded me of my own

familial experiences of colonial borders and their painful slicing through communities.

These words produced within me a profound and painful connection with the struggles of the Chicana/o community (in which I was raised). After all, along la otra frontera many Native people share the experience of being written over by geopolitical boundaries circumscribing our abilities to visit family, travel without documentation, and harvest in traditional ways.

The book began with my own activist desires to look at Chicano art from an indigenous and anti-capitalist perspective.

By analysing and looking at ways that artists and activists evoke Aztlán, I hope to show how anti-colonial and utopian projects still have salience today. I begin the book by exploring the history of Aztlán, from its pre-Columbian manifestation, through the colonial and national periods, and into the modern and contemporary era. I am specifically interested in this topic because during the sixteenth century, Aztlán functioned in a way that legitimized the Mexican subjugation of other Nahuatlspeaking peoples in central Mexico. Following the foundation of an ‘Aztec empire,’ Aztlán remained an important ideological construct for elites, but lost its importance with the arrival of Spanish conquistadores in 1519. It is at this point, of course, when European colonial hegemony begins to take hold across Abya Yala (the Americas). Over the course of the next five centuries, Aztlán would re-surface in the US and Mexico in a variety of distinct manifestations.

The book pays particular attention to the ways that Chicano

activist-artists use the concept.

In the late-1960s, Chicana/o artists and activists recuperated the ancient indigenous construct as to sanction and decriminalize their presence in the United States. For these young activists, the US Southwest was (and continues to be) Aztlán. From this perspective, Mexican Americans are not immigrants, but rather they have aboriginal title to this land. While the book discusses the nuances of Aztlán, I am interested mainly in discussing the reclamation of land and culture during the 1960s and after.

The book ends with a discussion of artwork produced by six artists and one artists collective: Gilbert ‘Magú’ Luján, Malaquías Montoya, Santa Barraza, Carlos Cortéz Koyokuikatl, Nora Chapa Mendoza, Favianna Rodríguez, and Dignidad Rebelde. Throughout the book, I investigate how and why various Chicana/o artists and activists evoked the concept within their bodies of work, as well as the consequences, repercussions, and outcomes of ‘creating Aztlán.’

The book is under contract with The University of Arizona Press as part of the First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies Initiative. It is scheduled to be out in 2012. I am also working on a book about contemporary Indigenous Aesthetics, as well various articles on contemporary Indigenous perceptions throughout the Americas.

2) AD: Justseeds Artists Cooperative is a group of 26 artists who work internationally but have one thing in common; using printmaking as a form of activism through social justice causes.

/MINER/

You are one of these 26, how does the Cooperative work and how did you meet?

DM: Justseeds is the most amazing group of people I have ever worked with. As an artist, I feel that working collaboratively or collectively is simultaneously exciting and difficult. If you bring together twenty-six artists from across an entire continent, the complexities become even greater. Of course, the benefits also become magnified when working with so many folks. In 2009, Justseeds won the Grand Prix at the Twenty-eighth Biennial of Graphic Arts in Slovenia and will have a solo show at the next biennial this fall. These sorts of collective projects are only possible when you bring together groups of people who work non-hierarchically.

Initially, Justseeds was a website where artist/curator Josh MacPhee distributed radical graphics. As a collaborative, we joined forces in 2007, the same year I moved from the US-Mexico border back to the US-Canada border. Justseeds was about a dozen radical printmakers who knew each other from the work we were doing. Over the years, we’ve expanded our ranks to include even more amazing artists, some very active, some only marginally so. At this time, it seems that we’ve reached the capacity of being able to work collaboratively, yet still intimately know one another.

As a decentralised collective, we both seek to communicate with one another, but we also have twenty-six individual ways of working. Because we live in so many different locations, the bulk of our interaction occurs online through Crabgrass,

a networking site facilitated by riseup.net. We’ve tried conference calls, but found them not very effective. At least once per year, we get together for a group retreat and spend three long days working through our short- and long-term projects.

In addition, small contingents will get together to develop and work on smaller projects throughout the year. By working pre-figuratively, we see the collective as building the world we want to inhabit.

ting corpse of this animal, in the way that I reconstruct my own autobiography, began to stand-in for a certain economic system that was both the poacher and the poached.

The very nature of American capitalism turned me off at a young age.

As an artist, my struggles against capitalism are likewise embedded in my own aesthetic choices. What materials I use, the narratives I construct, the places I exhibit, with whom 3) I collaborate. Each of these AD: is intentional. Of course, living Your art refers strongly to anti under the kraken-like tentacles capitalism and in fact, typof capitalism means that I ing: ‘anti- capitalist artist’ into can never escape it. CapitalGoogle produces a top hit with ism haunts us all, as Marx alyour name. Tell us where your luded, but in my work I hope original inspiration for both your to show that it needn’t be the research and your practise only spectre. In my brief 34 derived from. years on planet earth, coming to grips with living under this DM: system, while still challenging That is hilarious that I am the it, has been one of the most top hit on Google. Maybe I difficult things I’ve dealt with. should organise a show based While I have never known any on Google hits for ‘anti-capital- other system, in the spirit of my ist artists.’ It would be interestancestors and of my descening to use the search engine to dants I believe that it is my create an exhibition of artresponsibility to imagine someists working against capitalist thing beyond. economies.

4) It is hard, to state exactly when AD: I began to make work that was Is it possible to be an anti-capiintentionally against capitalism. talist artist in today’s society?

Since adolescence, I remember thinking that, as a strucDM: ture, capitalism is completely I believe that it is. In fact, I untenable. I grew up in the think that it is the responsibilwoods and memorably recall ity of the engaged artist, as a climbing trees, swimming in public intellectual, to confront creeks, ice skating on beaver a system that has created such ponds, playing with the bones huge economic and social disof poached animals. Maybe parities within its short life. If by these are romantic recollecyour question you mean to ask tions, but in many ways I am if an artist can live outside the an idealist who romanticises confines of capitalist society, resistance. Once I remember then I would offer a very difcoming across the bones to a ferent response. However, to poached coyote and thinking be against something is both a how horrific this was. This rotrhetorical and a political

/ANE LAN/ /MINER/

/MINER/ manoeuvre. I am against many things, even if they happen to be the dominant modality or the hegemonic structure. So, yes, I can be anti-capitalist, while I am nonetheless limited by the very structures of capitalism.

I believe that to be an artist is to speak from a place of privilege. From this privileged position, it is my responsibility to use my visual practice in just and responsible ways. I’ve been working on projects with Aboriginal Australian friends of mine, primarily ecologists and activists. In our working collaborations, my friend John Hunter (Gamilaraay Murri) shared with me knowledge learned from his elders. In this process, he acknowledges that it becomes a responsibility of the knowledge-keeper to do good things with the wisdom of our elders. Unlike Western knowledge-keepers who commonly compartmentalise information to be stored away in books, for many indigenous knowledgekeepers the process of learning ideas becomes a responsibility in that they must now use these stories for the common good. I see my role as operating within this framework. I cannot hoard ideas. I must put them into circulation.

Returning to the question, or its possible subtext, I think it is almost impossible for an artist, or anyone for that matter, to live outside the parameters of capitalism. Following Immanuel Wallerstein, capitalism is our current World-System. Am I outside capitalism? Of course not, but my work can be used

as a way to question or challenge its centrality.

5) AD: How important is transcultural understanding?

DM: I am somewhat ambiguous about the notion of transculturation, as developed in the 1940s by Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz. For Ortiz, transculturation was supposed to demonstrate that cultural exchange went both ways and that both African and European practices lay at the heart of Cuban society. Conceptually, I agree with Ortiz and his desire to challenge the dominant ideas of his time. However, his book Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y azúcar (Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar), in which he develops this thesis, completely ignores indigenous issues. That, for me, is always an issue.

Currently, I teach a university course entitled ‘Transcultural Relations,’ a core class in my college’s curriculum. In the class, I want student’s to begin to recognise that culture is a complex network of exchange that is not limited to simple acculturation and deculturation, but rather transculturation may be a better model to explain cultural flows in an age of global capitalism. However, in my own research and lived experiences I am quite critical of transculturation and its (sometimes) cognate, hybridity. From this perspective, I feel that neither transculturation nor hybridity say anything about the realities of cultural exchange and/ or dialogue. In fact, scholars frequently use these concepts so that they do not have to deal with the particularities of

historical conflict. In this vein, I am presenting a lecture at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City entitled ‘Against Hybridity, Against Globalisation: An Indigenous Provocation on/as Contemporary Art.’ This intervention challenges dominant theories of transculturation and hybridity in relation to contemporary art by indigenous artists.

If we truly are transcultural, why do I write in English and not Michif or Anishinaabemowin?

Why is this interview in English and not one of the Sami languages? Deculturation and acculturation are all too real for indigenous and colonised communities. Transculturation is an interesting intellectual exercise, but one that denies violent and on-going colonial processes.

To return to the original question, I do believe that it is important to communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers. As someone who benefits from the world of capitalism, yet attempts to bring it to its knees, I believe that I have the unique obligation to cross illegitimate boundaries (geopolitical, economic, gendered, etc.) in both a communicative and creative way. Will this always be successful? Probably not, but I nonetheless will continue trying.

6) AD: ‘In the Spirit of the Living and the Dead’ was an exhibition you curated that explored images of popular resistance and by highlighting the stories of resistance and survival, it became an account of individual and collective struggle. This project is one of many projects you have curated; how do you see the role of a curator similar, or different to your own artistic

/MINER/

practise?

DM: It is quite possible that I have taken Marx’s critique of capitalism’s capacity to create specialists too literally. Or maybe it was my upbringing in DIY (do-it-yourself) punk culture, making zines and attending shows in peoples’ basements. Nevertheless, I get excited about working on multiple projects at once and, as an anti-capitalist jackof-all-trades, performing various roles at differing times. I am trained as a historian of art, having a PhD in Arts of the Americas from The University of New Mexico. My MA is in Latin American Studies, while I have a BA in both Fine Art and Spanish.

One could call me a dilettante because I work in multiple fields at once; I see no conflict in this at all. In fact, I see this as embodying my own radical politics.

The few shows I’ve curated deal with similar themes and questions that emerge in my own artistic practice. These are also manifest in my scholarly writing, my criticism, my teaching, my grassroots activism, and my family and daily life, to name only the most obvious places where these issues arise. So, my work as a curator is an extension of my work as a teacher, which is an extension of my work as an intellectual, which is an extension of my work as an artist, which is an extension of my work as a human. Everything is intertwined.

Shows like ‘In the Spirit of the Living and the Dead,’ as well as ‘In the Name of the Blood Shed,’ are about our struggles to confront the colonial and capitalist spectres, while simultaneously offering something in their wake. I hope to think that there is an obvious connection between my practice as an artist, the shows I have curated, my classroom pedagogy, and the scholarship I produce. Ultimately, that is for others to decide.

7) AD: Does art that takes place within the community and amongst people have a greater chance of making a social change than the art one would see in galleries and museums? –And should art make social changes?

DM: We must be careful before we make declarations about what art should or should not do. This was one of the many failures of the Soviet project. Inversely, however, most Latin American socialisms have been more open to artistic freedom than

/MINER/

/MINER/ have European socialisms. A few years after the success of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro is quoted as saying that our enemy is imperialism and capitalism, not abstract art. Regardless my thoughts on Castro, I’ve always found this quote moving and quite poignant. While the Cuban government has plenty of structural and human rights issues, it nonetheless developed a wonderful arts infrastructure outside market economics.

Until the 1989 collapse of state-based Socialism in Europe, Cuba had created a space for heterodox aesthetic to emerge outside capitalist markets. By creating a non-market space for art, different visual languages were able to emerge.

This is what I long for: spaces for art that are more autonomous than those we have in the US. Furthermore, my political roots are as a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Wobblies), the anarcho-syndicalist union mostly known for its work in the early twentieth-century.

One of the things that differentiate the Wobblies from other revolutionary organisations is their creation of a new culture that parallels the construction of a new society. My practice is one which combines gallery exhibitions with community workshops and other pedagogical interests.

I am adamant that my teaching, writing, and even my daily life are all respective elements of my work as an artist. I see everything I do as interconnected, speaking with and to various publics. If you look at the galleries in which I exhibit, I have intentionally targeted spaces where that community may not otherwise have access to contemporary art, especially art which is politically charged. I was raised in a rural area and have maintained a commitment to working with and for communities at the margins of the contemporary art world. In many cases, these communities are the Third and Fourth World inside the First. Today, we might think of these as the global South in the global North.

Working with and for community happens in the gallery, just as it happens in the union hall, on the street, and at the kitchen table. Some cultural institutions are more exclusive than others.

Personally, I am drawn to those local, regional, and autonomous spaces which transcend the corporate model of the biennial system and the New York artworld. Should art make changes?

/MINER/ /morstang/

/MINER/ It better do something transformative. We live in a globalised world where artists appear to be the only individuals capable of directly confronting capitalism. While I wish to do away with models of the artistic avant-garde or political vanguardism, the dominant ontology necessitates the existence of individuals who push things forward (while looking back). The Aymara, an Indigenous nation in the Andes, have an adage: Qhiparu nayraru uñtas sartañani. This translates as ‘Looking back, we will move forward.’ We must use our traditional knowledge to inform potential futures. In this way, I believe that if we are not challenging power then we are replicating it.

preoccupied with defining an artist’s body of work because of his or her nationality. Do you believe that artists have been misunderstood, due to this preoccupation with definition?

DM: In the 1980s and 1990s, I think we became fixated on identity. In the US, the ability for queer artists and artists-ofcolour to infiltrate dominant institutions was so intense that it created a backlash from arts institutions, like the National Endowment for the Arts. In some ways, identity discourses of the 1980s began to dissipate with the expansion of global art biennials during the 1990s.

Alongside the rise of this biennial system emerged a nondescript, transnational visuality in which it didn’t matter where an artist was exhibiting or even where she was from.

This globalised art world seems to love the way that cosmoThis semester I taught a semipolitanism is transitory and nar on ‘Art and Activism’ in without a home. Global capiwhich we discussed the relatalism forms the backbone of tionship between artists’ colthis expanding, yet insipid lectives and social movements. system. While identity could be In the course, we contacted used to augment an otherwise artists throughout the world via characterless visual practice, Skype. When dialoguing with it ceased to play a significant the collectives, the university role in most works being made students were interested in (or inversely it becomes the knowing whether or not these object of interrogation). In artists saw their work as either some ways, my work responds a mirror to reflect society or a to this trajectory by speaking hammer to smash it? Almost directly to the specificity to my exclusively, the artists said they own experience at the edge saw their practice as both. By of the US Empire. My practice operating within and outside has little to do with my nathe gallery system, I would say tional or personal identity, but the same about my own work. has everything to do with my biography as an anarchist, as 8) an Indigenous person (Métis), AD: as someone who works with One cannot define art simply unions, as a teacher, etc. These through definition of nationalimarkers are quintessential to ty, but often the national histo- my identity, but I merely use ry and cultural identity may of- these to inform my practice, as fer us clues. Despite this we are opposed to creating work that

is autobiographical in nature.

Labour historian George Lipsitz once wrote that art during the Chicano Movement was a move to convince Mexican Americans to draw their identity from their radical politics, rather than their politics from their ethnic identity. I think this still plays itself out today and could be argued that it applies to all artists.

9) AD: Your work consists of easily identified materials such as cardboard, wood and found objects. Whilst working with these, from a financial perspective; non-significant materials, you are increasing their value both financially and culturally by either painting on to them or making them part of an installation. What is your relationship to the value of materials and the work itself?

DM: I don’t make work for the market, so little of it actually sells.

As a member of Justseeds, I do have a few prints and pennants for sale on our website (www.justseeds.org). However, the bulk of my work is created outside the gallery system and circulates outside systems of monetary exchange. A visit into my studio/basement will only verify the fact that I intentionally make work outside markets of monetary circulation. These objects are frequently given away or retooled for future purposes. I can do this, of course, because I have the privileged position of teaching at a university and having a constant income.

Many of my friends and peers do not have this privilege and therefore either live off grants, selling artworks, or working non-art jobs. My daily grind is teaching at the university and

/MINER/ writing about art, radical politics, and indigenous issues in North America. I see these as part of my artistic practice that does not necessarily create objects of wealth (but does generate wealth for the university). I struggle to make sense of this dilemma.

As for transforming ‘worthless’ objects into those that have monetary worth, I’m not sure I actually do that. I generally lose money on installations and other projects. My partner, Estrella Torrez, can verify this.

While it doesn’t always make her or our daughters happy, I feel that this potential negative cash flow parallels the function of the work itself. Punk and DIY culture informs us that culture is something that we can all participate in and create. While I understand the way that my practice may produce financial or cultural capital, I hope that it nonetheless intervenes in a system I find faulty and horrific. In a time when everything is commoditised and transformed into monetary worth, can we work and not produce some form of value, either monetary or cultural? I believe that it is up to us to try.

10) AD: In a text for the publication, ‘Deliberately Considered’ Vince Carducci used the term ‘agitprop’ not to define your work but to place it into a context. This term is interesting and possibly from a contemporary arts perspective, highly off-putting. What is your relation to this term and do you feel there is any connection to your work?

DM: You are correct that in our contemporary context considering one’s work as agitprop seems to dismiss its function as art. However, I don’t think Carducci was using it this way and, quite possibly, his evocation of the term demonstrates a desire to reinsert agitational work into the framework of contemporary practice. This is especially true in post-industrial Michigan (the state where Detroit is located) where both Carducci and I live and work. Carducci’s labelling of my work agitprop provokes re-examine certain radical ideas that have too commonly been dismissed as out dated and outmoded.

Initially, the term propaganda did not hold the negative connotations that it currently does in English. Art historian David Craven argues that it presently does not denote one-dimensionality in most parts of Latin America. In the US and most places in Europe, the remnants of the Cold War still inflect the language we use and how we see art in opposition to propaganda.

My work, in all its manifestations, is highly confrontational and I have no qualms about that. During the late 1990s and early 2000s post-structural ambiguity seemed to be the dominant way of working in contemporary art. I believe that the backlash against the failure of the Left and what some consider the Modernist project has dire implications on how artists work and the political function of our practice. My labour highlights both the failures and potentials of what new futures may look like.

Whether or not this is agitprop, I am not entirely sure. Nonetheless, I have worked with unions whose main task is to organise

workers to improve their everyday situation. If my art can be used to aid in this process then I am honoured to work alongside my fellow-workers.

/MINER/

Two-colour relief print 7 inches x 11 inches

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

Installation view Reoccupied, University Art Gallery Central Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, USA 2011

Mikhail Bakunin 2007 Two-colour relief print 12 inches x 9 inches

Libertad from Homenaje series 2006 Relief print 12 inches x 9 inches

Power in the Union from Songs of Joe Hill series 2005 Two-colour relief print 12 inches x 9 inches

LINK: http://dylanminer.com

Wal-Muerto, Damos Gracias 2008 Relief print 9 inches x 12 inches Spirit of Carlos CortĂŠz Koyokuikatl from Homenaje series 2006 Relief print 12 inches x 9 inches No Estoy Muerto from Homenaje series 2006 Relief print 12 inches x 9 inches Tecumseh and Sockalexis from Indians vs. Immigrants series 2010 Incised Louisville Slugger baseball bats Varying sizes Popay from Firebrands: Portraits from the Americas (Microcosm Publishing) 2010 Mixed media on illustration board 10 inches x 7 inches 100 Years of the IWW from Wobblies!

(Verso Press) 2004 Two-colour relief print 6 inches x 9 inches Installation view Provisional, Urban Shaman Gallery Winnipeg, Canada 2011 Human Existence Cannot be Silent 2008 Three-colour relief print 12 inches x 12 inches Untitled 2002

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/FEATURES/TEXT/

Stefan

Schrรถder COMMON ALPHABET

by Susanne Altmann

/Schröder/ Stefan Schröder has been ‘writing’ drawings and paintings in a language which he has developed himself and calls ‘Common Alphabet’ -since the mid-90s. He designs multi-part compositions from shapes that appear strangely familiar to us and yet we cannot immediately ascribe an everyday experience to them. Schröder’s sign system is anything but common and the viewer can enjoy ornamental shapes or an organised chaos such as in, for example, ‘Runestone, Modern Language Type’ (2011). It is no coincidence that the title refers to an archaic alphabet which only experts can decipher today and nevertheless it accompanies the historic national identity of Nordic countries, including Norway. The runic language has died out, apart from its use in scattered esoteric circles, and draws its current artistic fascination from its graphical density and the aesthetics of half-weathered stones in the landscape. The messages of the scripts, whether they are now a magical formula, a religious or historical document or simply a mundane attestation of love, remain obscure without scholarly guidance.

We should look at the ‘Runestone’ from a similar perspective: it lays or stands on a stylised sandy base, arched over by darkness and its texture recalls traces of weathering on an irregular rock.

Instead of runes, it is covered with ‘letters’ from the ‘Common Alphabet’ and offers just such riddles as the decoders of cuneiforms, hieroglyphs and ultimately runes encounter. The ‘Runestone’ symbolises the projection screen for myths that grew out of the information runestones originally conveyed to their contemporaries. However, with the addition of ‘common’, the artist gives us a key: The solution must lie in our everyday life and must have a global aspect. And what connects our world more deeply than consumer culture, as industrially massproduced goods from Guangzhou to Portland, from Naples to Narvik? Stefan Schröder’s fund of forms is not an invention but a discovery.

It is standard cardboard packaging that we handle on a daily basis. We unwrap something, get annoyed about the waste of materials and delegate the remains to the waste bin to disappear. Not so with Stefan Schröder; he carefully unfolds and examines the boxes. His series, ‘Common Alphabet’, is a special kind of recycling service. There is packaging from wine glasses, bicycle locks,

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yoghurt pots, socks, pralines, duct tape and various kinds of fruit; a wealth of geometric shapes that belong to the world of production and usage. This relationship becomes especially clear when Stefan Schröder activates the boxes in his latest work, ‘Vestavinden’ (West Wind, 2011), an outdoor piece for a school in Lista/ Farsundkommun. The boxes, translated into aluminum, take on a three-dimensional life of their own in the playground sculpture. They get caught in the branches of an abstracted tree and tell the story of this place and many of its inhabitants who, in a time of economic distress, immigrated to the United States. Having achieved prosperity, they sent packages of coveted consumer goods back to their old homeland, Norway. Figuratively speaking, the west wind brought prosperity and left empty boxes behind as witnesses.

Of course, Stefan Schröder’s preference for these abstract shapes betrays a love of construction and constructivism.

This becomes particularly evident when he presents individual templates on panels and thus moves in the direction of geometric abstraction or concrete art. However, as the construction itself is not carried out by the artist, it is more a demonstration of an intellectual proximity than the appropriation of a strategy.

Another relationship – if not primarily visual – is much clearer.

In Stefan Schröder we meet a great-grandson of Marcel Duchamp at work. Stefan Schröder’s ‘Common Alphabet’ is nothing less than a thinly veiled interpretation of the strategy of ready-mades. It is widely known that Duchamp was the first to declare a trivial

everyday object as art and thus triggered a revolution in 20th century art, a revolution without which objective art and installation would be almost unthinkable. They are not necessarily Stefan Schröder’s media, yet the everyday object, here as a copy of its packaging, is in the spirit of Duchamp’s multiple image motif, particularly through the ‘Common Alphabet’. When asked how this title came about, Stefan Schröder explains that these neglected cardboard boxes are ultimately a worldwide system of signs.

While there is no spoken language for this alphabet, its information content - once one opens up to it – is global and universally understood.

‘Common Alphabet’ does have a code and the key for it exists, even if no one is particularly interested. With his work, ‘Möglichkeitsfeld’, (Field of Possibilities, 2010) Stefan Schröder once again plays with the cryptic potential of ‘his’ signs.

He made two screens of the ‘Common Alphabet’ in the staff restaurant of the largest German research centres (Helmholz-Zentrum DresdenRossendorf) that deals with high-frequency magnetic fields, particle accelerators and radiopharmaceuticals.

Here, his elements incorporate the visual models of scientific experimentation and thought structures between chaos and order, between rationality and intuition. Both fields evoke a possibility to creatively decode sign systems and the diverse forms of coding behind them.

Here, however, as in ‘Vestavinden’, Stefan Schröder, as well as a practitioner of site-specific and public art, proves to be a practitioner who understands how to think with the ‘art user’ and opens up new

horizons. He offers such a horizon, in the literal sense of the word, incidentally in his latest work, ‘Lørenskog Stars’ (2011), in the stairwell of a new cultural centre in Lørenskog, near Oslo. Although he does not refer back to the accepted sign language of ‘Common Alphabet’, he again chooses a moment of yet to decipher readability. The bird silhouettes that populate several levels of a steel mast topped by a light and remove the barrier between inner and outer spaces appear from a distance like black notes on a vertical score, with further information behind the visual layer. Stefan Schröder is actually thinking about an aleatoric musical piece as a tonal equivalent of graphics.

Susanne Altmann is an art historian, curator and art critic, based in Dresden Germany.

One of her main fields of expertise is public art. In 2010 she curated the Tegnebiennale at Momentumhall Moss, together with Stefan Schröder.

He also participated in her long term project ‘Above Ground’ (2007-2009) in a German mining area near the Polish border (www.ueber-tage.de).

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/torp/ /Schröder/ IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Neben Ganzen, Halben und Anderen 2007 model proposal for commission Courtesy the artist Tableau Nouvelle 2006 oil on hardboard 240 x 300cm Courtesy the artist Runestone, modern language type 2011 acrylic on wall 320 x 409cm Courtesy the artist Lørenskog Stars 2011 silicate paint on concrete wall 28,7 x 6,6 m Lørenskog Kommun Collection, Norway Möglichkeitsfeld (Field of Possibilities) 2010 foil on plexi glass detail Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf Collection, Germany © photo: Stefan Schröder LINK: www.schroederstefan.com

NORDISK KUNSTNARSENTER DALSÅSEN | ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE CENTER DALE I SUNNFJORD | NORWAY | www.nkdale.no | www.facebook.com/nkdale

Artist Cabins at Dalsåsen (detail) photo Laura Vuoma

/FEATUREs/INTERVIEW/

AJLA R. STEINVÅG

by Tatevik Sargsyan

/STEINVÅG/

1) TS: Ajla, your recent work deals with medical and technological representations of the human body, some pieces also resemble figurative medical sculptures. Could you tell us where you draw your fascination and inspiration from to make your work?

erlands, especially at the rare embryological collection of Museum Vrolik at Academisch Medisch Centrum in Amsterdam. The field which is inspiring me the most at the moment is regenerative medicine, especially the reconstruction of defect parts of the body by inserting implants grown from the patients own genetic cell material or bio-adaptive materials ARS: that are likely to be accepted One of my all time favourite by the body. In this sense the writers J.G. Ballard (Atrocity body is a site of invention, Exhibition, Crash, High-Rise, as technologies like medical Concrete Island) once said: ‘I engineering are tools for transthroughoutly enjoyed the two formations. As an artist I am asyears I spend as a medical similating their tools, materials student, the anatomy, dissectand processes, and simulations ing cadavers, you spend hours of these processes are resulta day minutely paring away ing in new forms. Sculpture as the skin, muscles, nerves, carry- a medium is for me a tool for ing out an extremely detailed research and experimentation examination of what was once in the extension of the technia human being with heart, with cal methodology, that I apply love affairs, triumphs, disapto make invisible processes vispointments. By the time you ible. My role is more that of an completed the dissections of experimental researcher, often the head in particular, you the process is just as important have explored a great amazon as the result. of human possibilities and human experience, a marvelous 2) education. Everybody should TS: study medicine, anatomy any- Your main focus is on the huway’. man body, how do you integrate psychological and emoAfter finishing art school I did tional issues into your work and several fieldresearches into do you think these are imporprosthetics and orthopedics, tant aspects in order for others anatomy and pathology, to understand your work? dental prosthetics and implantology. The medical field ARS: is a hard one to infiltrate, as it Cartesian reduction of the is protecting our most private body to a warmblooded maand intimate; the integrity of chine is troublesome. Such our bodies. I am intrigued by as the split between the conbodily transformations and sciousness and the body, the metamorphosis, whether they subject and object, the flesh are biological or technological which is “it” and “I” at the processes, the body’s ability to same time. Medicine students adapt to internal or external are told not to identify themfactors is impressive. The last selves with whatever they are few years I spent a lot of time working on; “You have a body, drawing and modeling in ana- but you are not the body”. tomical and pathological uniMy self-initiated research into versity collections in the Nethmedicine is fueled partly by

fascination, partly by fear for the practical, physiological and psychological processes that our bodies undergo in this field. In this learning process I have trespassed my own inhibitions more than once. This was evident the first time I was studying specimens on formaldehyde in plastic containers from the dissecting room or observing during suregry on an operation where plants were inserted into the body. To my own surprise my ratio was overrun by my instincts, and I experienced a visceral reaction. What at first might seem eerie later on it becomes familiar. The generosity of medical specialists and their patients have given me an insight into not only technical but also psychological aspects. Anatomy, pathology and surgery are not only sources for aesthetic imagery, but the processes, techniques that the body undergoes are just as important.

These experiences are certainly embodied in my work. I do think that imagery of anatomy and pathology have a psychological effect on others, essentially what we are made up of are bones and flesh - and feelings.

3) TS: Humans are vain creatures, striving for a ‘perfect’ body and appearance. However, in your work you deal with the fragmentation and estrangement when a body part is separated from its whole. What are you striving to achieve with the body parts in your work?

ARS: I am investigating the body as a construction, as a raw material that can be re-engineered, re-manipulated, and re-designed by the use of advanced technologies. Medical copies

/STEINVÅG/

/STEINVÅG/ or replica’s of body parts isolated as seen in prosthetics and implants are ambiguous and make you question if they are organic or inorganic, original or duplicated, human or non-human. Conceptually the body is a system which wears and tears with time, and new parts must be produced according to a calculated loss. The body is in a continuous process of degeneration and regeneration on cell level every hour, day, and week of our lives. Body parts, separated from its whole, are either dead or artificially sustained by an apparatus. Deformed and fragmented body parts are often used to create a horror-effect in science-fiction films triggering an instinctive shock-effect in the viewer. According to Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror is the ‘abject’ a physically revolting response to the threatened breakdown caused by the loss of distinction between subject and object, self and other, like the corpse or other separated body parts, or bodily liquids that reminds us of own materiality, hence mortality.

4) TS: Some of your work depicts the genetic defects and deformations of the human body, such as in Less than Human and Humanoid Formation, do you think it becomes easier and more acceptable to deal with those topics when it is displayed in an art installation?

ARS: Since the sculptures are mere representations and refer to real-life genetic errors, defects and deformations you are only confronted with it indirectly, with a certain distance. The formations are separated from their “host” giving them an autonomous appearance, also the titles refer to a species of sub-human organisms. Sadly enough, humans with a genetic defect or deformation are often treated as lesser than us, stigmatizing and isolating them further.

What is normal, is often defined by the norm or by some authority, therefore I think it is important to realise that normal-

/STEINVÅG/ ity is nothing more than just another concept. Speaking of deformations, a while ago I had a mouth cast made by a dentist for the series of sculptures Soma Techné. The dentist examined me on deformations of several bones in my upper and lower jaw, rarely seen here in the Netherlands. These types of jaw bones might be completely normal in Finnmark were I was born, also the X-rays of my skull seems slightly different than the ones that I usually see. Dysmorphia or abnormal forms often caused by genetic defects, chemical, physical or environmental factors are already cultural phenomena in science-fiction, special-effects, film, photography and art.

These transmutations or deviations from normality are certainly a source for new forms and might be an expression of the spirit of our times. Genetic engineering is changing our concepts of what is normal, since that biological material can now be manipulated as any other material or artificially grown. New technologies such as genetic engineering imply a transformation of the body and the material itself, changing our conceptions of normality, identity and bodily integrity.

I think we will have to deal with an increasing number of sidedefects in the near future.

5) TS: Can you tell us the concept behind your installation Syntheclinic?

ARS: Syntheclinic or Synthetic Clinic is a spacial collage inspired

from third world field-clinics constructed by found materials such as left over car parts.

This is not a high-end clinic with the latest technology but a low-tech, improvised one.

The DIY stainless steel interior of the clinic, the car frontlight operating-lamp on carbatteries and car-mechanics worklights over the worktable is contributing to this eerie feeling. This clinic can be installed on remote locations under a viaduct, next to the highway or in an abandoned building. On display are reconstructions of synthetic fractures of the skeletal system, inserted with bioceramic implants replacing the skeletal structure itself or parts of it.

6) TS: You are right now investigating industrial fabrication techniques in regenerative medicine – tell us more about this research and what it involves.

ARS: At the moment I am researching 3D modeling with medical scans such as MRI’s en CT’s by experimenting with opensource DIY medical and scientific visualisation software.

During the pilot CAD-CAM (Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing) residency at the European Ceramic Workcentre in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands last summer I combined analogue and digital techniques, 3D scanning, 3D modeling and 3D printing resulting in the series Renderings of a Second Skeleton. Digitalised, the human body is opened up for unlimited mutations beyond one’s imagination. Another part of this investigation is on the material level with organic and inorganic material processes used in prosthetics and im-

plants, simulating bodily “raw” material such as bones, muscles, ligaments, tissue, fat etc. for new synthetic structures.

The sculptures will be constructed trough a cycle of industrial processing trough which I can simulate biological principles as self-repair, self-growth, self-replication and self-destruction. Some sculptures or “simulants” will also be fabricated with the use of chemical components. These materials are chosen for their aesthetics, conceptual and technical properties in the extension of the reality that I am referring to in my work. Both processes, digital as well as analogue are influencing eacht other. The results of these experiments will be shown at the Stedelijk Museum‘s-Hertogenbosch in September this year.

/STEINVÅG/ /stiller/ IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Syntheclinic 2009 Installation (foam bone-china, steel, car batteries, car lights, car interior lining, car seatbelt) 6x6x3 m.

Installation view at MU Artspace Eindhoven the Netherlands Photography: Ajla R. Steinvåg In courtesy of the artist X-ray portrait 2000 X-ray 1/2 (Ajla R. Steinvåg) 28x30 cm.

Photography: Unknown, radiologist In courtesy of the artist Syntheclinic 2009 Installation (foam bone-china, steel, car batteries, car lights, car interior lining, car seatbelt) 6x6x3 m.

Installation view at MU Artspace Eindhoven the Netherlands Photography: Ajla R. Steinvåg In courtesy of the artist Syntheclinic 2009 Installation (foam bone-china, steel, car batteries, car lights, car interior lining, car seatbelt) 6x6x3 m.

Installation view at MU Artspace Eindhoven the Netherlands Photography: Ajla R. Steinvåg In courtesy of the artist Renderings of a Second Skeleton 2010 3D print 2/7 (plaster and calcium phosphate powder, sealed with epsom salt) 47x21x16 cm.

European Ceramic Workcentre pilot CAD-CAM residency ‘s-Hertogenbosch the Netherlands Photography: Peter Cox In courtesy of the artist

These works of art were made possible with generous support of the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Brabants Kenniscentrum Kunst en Cultuur, and the European Ceramic Workcentre.

LINK: www.classofoutcasts.com

www.screenfestival.no

/FEATUREs/INTERVIEW/

PER KRISTIAN NYGÅRD by måg

/NYGÅRD/ 1) måg: The work ‘A Social Sculpture for a Social Democracy’ (2007) is a fence similar to that one can find in an airport. It is a structure for organising people in a queue, restraining movement and controlling order. Equally, it can be perceived as a paradox to the opportunities that an airport provides. To what extent do you want to make social comments through your work?

PKN: The airport paradox is an interesting suggestion for a reading, but making social comments through my work is not what motivates me. The work came about more as a kind of personal response to living in Sweden, were the idea of equality is very strong. The way everything is organised sometimes seems to be a parody.

The queue number machines were for instance invented in Sweden as an answer to the problem that people working at the counters could not go to the toilet when there was a big line in front of their booth.

The sculpture was commissioned for Malmö sculpture park in 2007, were I eventually got the feeling that they were trying to push me out of the exhibition after having denied two of my proposals. The final piece was actually meant as a joke – a proposal that they could not accept – after all, they denied my second proposal that was a big sign because blind people could walk into it and injure themselves.

So of course this is a social

comment. In this situation it is also commenting on problems with public art. How to make a public art work that can also be interesting as art, and not just become public furniture or whatever.

2) måg: In 2008, you made a model of a proposed building, ‘Proposal for a Building’. This is a block consisting of 16 flats for the modern family. Tell us about the idea behind this and the reactions you wished to evoke.

PKN: It was a proposal for a building where the child’s bedroom would be located between the two (separated) parent’s apartments and could access both parents, while the parent’s apartments have their entrances on different sides of the building.

I was interested in the suggestion – as a form for an artwork. I felt that many neo or so-called conceptual artists become moralist, so they would be pointing their fingers at the bad things within society. I therefore wanted to use the form of the suggestion or proposal, trying to be constructive somehow.

I see this work very much in relation to the history of modern architecture, were the formal aspects were the most important – it never or rarely dealt with, not even today, the new family (split-up family) constellations that now have become the norm rather than the exception.

It was also considering another problem: 50 / 50 custody for children. I saw that a lot of my friends could not have a 50/50 custody for their children because the mother often obtains more than 50 % custody,

and a reduction for them (the mother) would also mean a cut in their child support, and furthermore the possibility to afford an extra bedroom for the child.

By using the form of a suggestion one also makes the viewer think through what you are suggesting and therefore it involves them in another way.

3) måg: Architecture is a reoccurring element to your work and one can read much of it as comments on how we structure people and society and how this often limits our imagination as human beings. Do you believe postmodern architecture restricts us as human beings?

PKN: I would say both yes and no, I mean, all big governmental projects will to a certain degree be a restriction – but not more than for instance modernist architecture was. The city planning of Paris for instance – very wide boulevards were constructed so in case of a revolution, the masses could be controlled, and not hide in a lot of small backstreet allies.

What make post-modern architecture different are mostly formal aspects I think. And also that private capital are entering and transforming public space more than before. I am more interested in how architecture is the last and final step in an ideology. And postmodern architecture can be seen as a picture of neo liberal capitalism where everything is allowed. Architecture is the medium where the ideology makes its strongest impression so to say.

4) måg: You are the editor in chief of

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Artscene Trondheim, which is a portal (onlinemagazine) for engaging both critically and informatively in what is happening on the Trondheim art scene. Do you feel it is important that artists take active part in running organisations and collaborations in their own arts communities?

PKN: Yes! Artists being absent in media is a problem. We need to make more voices heard through different media channels. In this way we can make a discussion on our premises.

When we started ArtSceneTrondheim in 2009 we bought the domain www.trondheimkunsthall.com as a response to the fact that the municipality have still not managed to start a Kunsthall – but spent over 6 million Kroners on planning the construction of a Kunsthall.

Most artists are bad at making themselves both heard and seen. I think it has to do with no, or very poor media training in the art academies and also that many artists seem to be afraid of being connected with other things than their art, or they insist on not being political, -whatever that means. And it seems that a lot of artist are also fearful of criticising the hand that’s feeding them – and that becomes very obvious in a small city as Trondheim where the city is spending a large amount of money on public art.

ArtSceneTrondheim (AST) is a small, independent artist-run online magazine and comparing us to magazines that seem to be too attached to the artist unions, I see that they are not fulfilling their potential when criticising and dealing with problems in the art world.

I definitely think there is need for a stronger political consciousness.

AST has positioned itself through critical reflection and the ability to look at local challenges as a part of an international discourse. During the last two years, we have published over 70 texts and documented and distributed over 200 exhibitions on our picture blog. In March 2011, we had over 30 000 visitors and that makes us one of the biggest online-magazines in Norway.

I never thought of myself as the right person for this job – being the editor in chief of an online magazine as I am dyslexic. Because of the rest of our editorial staff and the way we collaborate, my dyslexia has caused no

/NYGĂ…RD/ /larsen/

problems and it has been a great joy working alongside my colleague.

5) måg: What is happening in Trondheim that is worth paying attention to right now?

PKN: Firstly, I would say that the discussion about public art and instrumentalisation that my colleague and editor Marit K. Flåtter initiated at ArtSceneTrondheim, with the text series Artistic Compromises in Public Space is of high relevance. Through this project AST manage to highlight these challenges even nationally. It is a big issue when public art becomes an illusion of democracy and the text series is dealing with the challenges with instrumentalitation of public art and art in general.

Personally I think that the way the municipality of Trondheim have placed their main focus on public art the last ten years or so, has been a disaster for the city´s art scene in general.

Besides resulting in uninteresting, boring art of very low quality, another consequence of this is that it has cut the bond to the rest of the art world. It has also been one of the main reasons that so many young, recent graduates have left, and are still leaving, the city, since the municipality is favouring very traditional mediums such as stone and wood sculpture, which is excluding non-permanent means of expression and mediums like video and performance.

Trondheim also has two good artist-run galleries, Blunk Gallery and Babel Gallery that are exhibiting young artist. To mention some noteworthy artists; Markus Lantto whose surreal and poetic works I find very interesting, and the two Swedish artists, David Kumlin and Martin Stråhle - aka The borings, who are taking painting to a whole new level.

6) måg: You play with satirical elements within your work and the titles, how important is humour to your practise and life?

PKN: It is very much a big part of it, and often a starting point for me. Humour and jokes are interesting – it is a way of saying things that is hard to say in any other way. There are many

/NYGÅRD/ similarities between humour and the way I work with my art.

Like a joke witch often comes as a response to a certain situation art works can emerge in the same way – as a response to something. But of course, that’s just a starting point – then it is all the work with finishing or making it into a piece.

Humour is said to take the seriousness out of things, but I also think it can be an entrance. It can be hard to find a balance.

The surreal elements of humour are interesting and important to me. I see a lot of similarities between jokes and artworks in the techniques they employ.

Freud writes about the joke in his least read book – The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious. For instance, how a joke can be a detour in communicating something. Or that it contains only relevant information, otherwise it becomes a digression.

7) måg: The title of your recent solo exhibition at Trøndelag Centre for Contemporary Art were: ‘The Triumph of Glue Over the Integrity of Materials’ you showed sculptures, objects and graphic art referring to materials used in 1960’s design and architecture. Tell us more about the show, the works within it and the ideas behind it.

PKN: The title ‘The Triumph of Glue Over the Integrity of Materials’ is referring to the collage way of working that I usually

use. Not in a traditional way of cutting in magazine, but more towards putting different noncoherent elements together. In the exhibition I used modernist furniture as I see them as both icons and ideology, and in the exhibition they were destroyed and made into sculptures.

In this exhibition I tried a slightly more abstract touch in my work. Meaning not being so clear or direct and that the objects or sculptures doesn’t have an obvious function as they often had before. Playing with dysfunction enabled me to be freer in my expression.

I have always been fascinated by all the traces of history that lies within the materials itself.

The woodcuts are for instance printed cutting board from a kitchen in a house I used to live in, and the prints show traces of between 60 and 80 years of cutting bread. They are titled Back Square after Malevich’s painting with the same title that was his complete break with representation.

I was also trying to avoid that very well put together exhibition. Like black and grey today seems to be the new rococo frame, and by the title – ….the triumph of glue, I suggest that the most important for me is how things are put together – not in a material fetishism for instance. I like it if I manage to make a solo show that looks more like a group show, with elements that break it up somehow.

The piece, ‘White Light’ is a wall built out of spruce wood which is the cheapest wood panel one can get. I wanted to do something in the room, which is a late modernist building, a former bank, and actually a quite difficult room to work in. the wall is dividing the

room in two and it becomes some sort of a ritual rape of the architecture, also commenting the low status of modernist buildings in Norway in general.

One of my favourites in the show is the work Procrastinator; which is a ladder upside down.

I like the simple twist of it and how turning an object upside down makes us re-think the picture. And I guess the title says it all.

8) måg: Function, dysfunction and meaning are other elements playing part in you work, is this an area of exploration and research for you both in the process of making as well as the planning (research) period prior to starting the work?

PKN: Well, I think the dysfunctional is just an aspect of everything, and in all human beings. Of course, prior to a lot of my works are observations and research made everywhere in society, miserable trips to IKEA with (now x) girlfriends, to family dinners, kindergardens, bad living conditions or maybe most importantly – being extremely bored at times. Being bored is important – I often attend lectures and things that I know I will find boring because that is when most ideas come to me.

I find dysfunction very interesting and inspiring. On a personal level it can be very amusing, but also as a method in my work, by pointing at, or highlighting that aspect of something as an entrance, because it’s kind of a reversed way of communicating something. I guess it is quite easy to relate to the dysfunc tionality most of us encounter every day in life.

The artistic process to me is

/NYGĂ…RD/ quite often very dysfunctional.

It is very slow and with all the mistakes made through it, I am very much a studio based artist and if I do not know what to do I will force myself to work in the studio all day until something happens.

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE The Agreement (Detail), mirror box 2010 Mirror, steel, concrete 30x30x40 cm House 2010 Plywood 70x80x280 cm A Social Sculpture For a Social Democracy 2007 Steel 4x3x1 meter Block Watne: Type 64 2009 Woodcut 80x60 cm The Agreement / Unapologetic Architect 2010 Screen print & mirror box on a concrete / steel shelf Dimentions variable Untitled Arc (Fence) 2010 Steel 1x6,5 m LiNK: www.perkristiannygaard.com

/FEATURES/interview/

TOR-MAGNUS

LUNDEBY

by Marianne Morild

/LUNDEBY/

1) MM: You have been described as a ‘true cosmopolitan’, you are working and exhibiting all over the world, and you live in Finland. I’ve only briefly visited Finland, but I found it to be a strange mixture between East and West, where the influence of Russia and Sweden are apparent. Finland has defined itself to the rest of the world particularly through film and technology, exporting a dark sense of humour and a strong relationship to dilapidated suburbs as well as a slick 21st century approach to human interaction via technology and design. There is some of this sense of humour in your work, something helpless or dysfunctional but endearing. I’m reminded of the anti-heroes of the Kaurismaki-brothers’ films, but also of the effortlessly

designed space Finland is so famous for. Is this a reflection of how Finland plays a part in your work?

TML: Yes, I can’t escape my surroundings, neither my past, so in some sense it must have influenced my process. I guess I have taken up an old habit of mine while living here, collecting stuff. Combined with organising the materials collected, I see new structures taking form.

But my work does not directly reflect my visual surroundings here in Helsinki as I see it, it rather opposes my environment. I am quite lonely here except for my own little family, and I do not take part in local/ national theoretical discussions, neither pick up the codes of succeeding in Finnish art life.

This makes me an observer and I take in whatever might inter-

est me visually. Since structures and imagination play key roles in my work, I can often find meaning in useless things and get the energy out of weird obsessions.

2) MM: When you were at the Art Academy in Bergen in the 90’s, the Norwegian art debate contained some very polarised views on painting – there was the notorious debate about “Artists should be able to draw a hand” on one side, which had up until that time been a requirement for entry into certain art studies in Norway, and on the other side galleries like Otto Plonk in Bergen, run by Per Gunnar Tverrbakk, driving forth a more experimental and perhaps continental approach to art. Your painting was, and is, very different to the kind of

painting that flourished in Norway at the time. Did this environment influence your development in the 90’s?

TML: I really thought I could succeed in both camps. I wanted to take part in the non-commercial scene with an absolute uncool form of art at that time, painting. And then I thought the same painting style I had developed could communicate on this scene and at the same time succeed in the commercial gallery world because I really believed that it could talk to non-artists also, not only artists. I was really comfortable with how it went, because I was neither a typical 90’s artist nor was I a typical painter representing the glorious and historically loaded medium of painting and its possibilities. But I also did a lot of

other works, sculptures, installations, concepts etc. based on ideas that ere not so easy to develop in a painting.

3) MM: Tor- Magnus, your paintings are so tidy. Much has been said about the relationship between the organic and the machine-like in your paintings, it is as if the machines take on life, or cities refuse to be laid into grids, but they also have the air of being made according to a strict plan or scientific method. At the same time there are traces of some form of amnesia or obliteration in the way that the forms have been disjointed – as if some conjunctions were left out, connections that failed to be made. How do you plan and work out your paintings? Do you make a lot of preparatory

work, and to what extent do you improvise once the painting is under way?

TML: I am tidy in my artworks and try to play with it in order to make it more intuitive and messy. I never do sketches, the paintings and drawings take form during the making. But I do draw with pencil the next steps on forehand on the background colour. An idea for a new painting or drawing is often rather simple, a shape or contour of something I’ve seen which suddenly comes to my mind. It can also be an inner picture, a map of any kind and form or a landscape structure that catches my eye. Then I sometimes do a sketch on paper, but it seldom leads directly to a new work, instead it goes into my archives of bits and structures. What could lead to

/LUNDEBY/

/LUNDEBY/ an idea is also moods and colour combinations I see on people’s clothes, houses etc. But I never get political or socially/environmentally critical with my paintings. I leave these subjects and save them for use in installations. I see f.ex structures on the existing world map versus historical maps, how it can be interesting as art works visually and still politically strong.

4) MM: I was trying to think of who your early painting heroes might have been, and strangely enough Hundertwasser came to mind. Other influences that have been suggested are the psychedelic drawings of the Norwegian children’s book illustrator Tor Åge Bringsværd, and of course computer games-graphics and the Japanese cartoontradition. All of these very much create the sense of a closed circuit world, where you can come in, but you have to accept the terms and conditions of the life-forms there. I’m curious about your relationship to architecture. Hundertwasser’s own idea of architecture reflected a very idealistic view of the relationship between nature and human living, and in many ways negates a lot of the experiences we have as participants in a higly technologised society. Can you talk a little about your own relationship to architecture and how you use this in your work?

TML: I am a systematic person doing tidy artworks, well, that doesn’t sound very interesting until you see my works. I am not an expressive person and don’t like chaos around me. Still I do need these polar aspects around me and within my process to get my visual language stronger and more authentic. All my works have a strong visual language that has been developed over 15 years and whatever I do, it has to look very much like my style, even if I always widen the vocabulary.

I often move on with references and what occupies me but I stick to my language and style.

When I have a “new message” a new subject to reflect upon I use the same visual language range as always, otherwise the world won’t listen.

I believe in the importance of the visual aspect in art, and also in architectonic aspects of our landscape. Our nature with its forms and patterns is the true genius of art, and I hate to see people

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/LUNDEBY/ trying to squish hard forms like sharp corners and triangles into our landscape.

5) MM: You refer to your style as something that is necessary for you to come through with your message. Do you think that style is helpful in this way or can it be a hindrance to explore new avenues?

TML: My style is quite wide and still recognisable, but I see the boundaries and paths of repetition that they might take.

The only way for me to criticize my own style is to twist it until it almost brakes and then see what comes out afterwards.

This has happened many times already, and is a bit of a stressful and uncomfortable process.

A couple of years ago I left my straight lines made by masking tape and perfect circles stamped onto the canvas, for a freehand technique and that to me was a giant step forwards. And I have been seeking a way of making the background colour more dynamic and spacey.

6) MM: Why do you hate strict geometrical forms put into landscape? Could there be something fascinating in our drive to make these forms that do not resonate with organic forms?

TML: Maybe I only DISLIKE the triangle shape itself, but indeed, we repeatedly tend to go for simplifying existing models and

/LUNDEBY/ shapes to a better and more functional new version, and the triangle is one of the most simple forms of human relations we have, in many senses.

Squares are very functional on many levels, the pentagon very dramatic and so on, but I still believe we have a long way to go in designing our surroundings.

7) MM: As well as a humorous side, your work also has a subtle cultural critiscism, an askanse look at consumer culture, inner city living, environmental concerns – I’m thinking of for instance “Owntown” and “Veryowntown” where you built a model city of towers, essentially from colour-codes on waste packaging-material that had a strange formalistic beauty. You recently exhibited in Dubai, a country well known for its extreme environment, the futuristic city built in a desert, populated by the extremes on the spectrum of society. How did the city of Dubai resonate with the structures and organisms you make?

TML: I do not know. I suddenly found my self repeating history in a grocery store searching for local colour codes on consumer goods /packing materials. The gallery owner and I ended up with a trolley full of milk and juice boxes like on the picture of Andy Warhol’s Brillo box shopping trip. Odd. I saw the photo [ of Warhol ] in a magazine for the first time just hours later and regretted that I didn’t ask the gallery owner to take

a photo of me with the loads of juice and milk boxes. The only thing that caught my eyes for real in Dubai was the white sand and lack of vegetation, plus the Arabic letters and writing style. Once a structure spotter always one! So I ended up making four really small towers, true local variants. The sheikhs though compete in height and glossiness making their buildings and towers, so I made my four towers really short reflecting and commenting the emirate style of architecture. I actually spent money there to buy the boxes in order to get the colour codes, since little garbage could be found and own consumption was too low in a short period of time.

8) MM: Both you and even some of your paintings have alter egos, you are also DJ Loony and some of your paintings are also members of a band you perform with. This ties in with an overarching playfulness in your work, I get a sense of losing oneself in play like we do when we are children. Is imagination somewhere else, or perhaps at least, somewhere?

TML: Imagination is very important to me, but not only from a child’s point of view, which has been a misinterpreted tag on my work from the late nineties.

Imagination is to me something very subtle missing out in our adult life. It represents a unique way of communicating breaking roles and rules for perceptual and intellectual understanding. Imagination is here and there to be found and jointed like pieces of a map. When I loose myself in the process I find the most interesting and surprising way out of it. Utopia is most often

somewhere else, but imagination is a way of travelling forth and back, with the utopian destination right in front of you or behind an odd stone on the ground, or even being it the stone itself. I have during my whole life imagined structures representing some kind of meaning. But just in recent time I have seen the importance of breaking their codes and present them in a different light, then we see that no systems work smoothly and perfect, never ever. Then it becomes really interesting and challenging, visually too.

9) MM: I first noticed your painting when you were included in the anthology ‘Vitamin P’, published in 2002, which charts contemporary painting from all over the world, and I was very impressed, partly because you were the only Norwegian featured, but also because your painting represented something akin to what was happening in Norwegian music at the time – it suddenly decided that it was part of the world, that many of the nations’ urges not to be provincial which had previously manifested themselves in a lot of pompous nonsense, had suddenly become real and relevant. Did you always have one eye cast toward the horizon?

TML: I often tend to think modestly about these aspects regarding my own role, I see my works really part of the international scene, but as an artist I am no career type and quite down to earth. I don’t have to live in New York to make good art, but maybe to make good connections.

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10) MM: On your website there is a short and sweet little sentence which states: ‘..currently testing styles…’ – that was posted in the summer of 2010. What are you working on now, and what happened during the testing?

TML: Yes, the ‘currently testing styles’ could be seen as a reference to my work development and process as well, but it was posted as an excuse to allow me to interfere with the making and developing of my web page.

I have been forced to take over a start product from my web master and figure out myself how to write in PHP, CSS and so on in order to add stuff to this page and control it myself. Since I am not very good at it, the styles might appear differently on various systems such as PC/ MAC/LINUS, Safari, Mozilla etc, and on my very own Iphone. So styles is referring to font types and sizes and how they appear and look like to different people, which also would be a metaphor for my concern about perception of visual art in general.

At the moment I am still gathering and collecting loads of colour code pieces from daily consuming materials, and I am trying to sort them out according to their colour numbers and print sheet position. There will be walls of them in the end, surrounding my very own town. Just numbers up and down the wall.

Crazy. Then there is to come more black and white drawings soon. Colours on pause.

/LUNDEBY/ IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Downtown (level 2) 2007 Installation, Color code pieces from various consumer materials glued on tubes 1x1x1m Skyline 2008-2009 Alcyd and oil on canvas 155x55 cm Permanent in the building of KLP, Oslo since 2011 Bar Queen Maud Land w/Antarctica 2006 Installation 6x6x6m Present Future, Artissima 06, Turin FO (Flying Observatory) 2008 Color code pieces from cigaret boxes glued on trash can lid from ikea.

50x50x20cm Post-Demolition 2007 Alcyd and oil on canvas 150x190cm Queen’s Nest 2010 Ink on paper 81x102cm Creatown (level 5) w/Skyline 2010 Installation, Color code pieces from various consumer materials glued on tubes 10x10x3m Solo show Ikioma Lähiömme, Korjaamo, Helsinki Creatown (level 5) 2010 Installation, Color code pieces from various consumer materials glued on tubes 10x10x3m The Mind-bender Blocks 2007 Alcyd and oil on canvas 150x190cm LINK: www.tormagnuslundeby.net

/FEATURES/interview/

ViCTOR

MUTELEKESHA

by Mara Ambrozic v

v

/MUTELEKESHA/ Victor Mutelekesha works with the recurrent issue pertaining to the human condition which he confronts thought different perspectives and mediums. In particular, the artist’s focus is oriented towards the displacement of the human, which is generated by the ongoing repressive manipulation and by the increasingly visible social and environmental breakdown of a culture so permeated with war and death that saying it sounds almost too low. It is significant to remember that Mutelekesha’s work shades light on a series of symbols, emblems and prejudices that are calling, not only Europe but all societies around the world, to be urgently analysed in the perspective of a real, ongoing and yet irreversible process of cultural contamination. Thus, to be able to imagine our place as a locus where the hope for a renewed emancipation of the human is still possible, we may have to stop and reconsider ideas such as selfmanagement, self-regulation and self-perception as possible forms that have to be developed beyond the commercial, the capitalist soul in which we have been entrapped. What the works of Victor Mutelekesha visually points to is that some of those issues could be faced also via visual critical inquiry.

Few of the mentioned topics were considered in the present interview with the aim to provide a proper insight into the recent project by Victor Mutelekesha entitled ‘Back to Basics’. A deeper analysis of the repressive strategy and

its consequences in our time has been provided by an essay expressly commissioned to illustrate the development of the phenomenon of repression and control of the human-body starting from that Leviathan monster, narrated

by Thomas Hobbes form the 16th Century all the way round to the capitalist systemic and timeless control occurring in our fragile bodies from within.

1) MA: Let’s open up the interview with a problematic question per se: do you think it is possible to correct history and your own identity through the artistic practice?

VM: Possibilities of correcting art are next to zero, but it is possible that art can transcends its original meaning and become relevant to those experiencing it in a different time and space.

Even when art is being created, the process that would involve rubbing, painting over, cutting and pasting or any form of editing basically signifies the desire to be true to the original thought; thought which is so fluid and almost impossible to materialise. Assume Germany and Japan won the so called Second World War, we would be reading and viewing the war from a perspective you can just imagine; history is written by the one with an upper hand over the other. The colonisers wrote much of African history and many western anthropologists at the time had preconceived ideas of how the Dark Continent was and how it should be represented.

The many disparities that exist between some western historians that study and write on Africa and African historians and intellectuals, as for exam-

ple the philosopher Valentin Y. Mudimbe who has written extensively about the continent is a clear testimony that ‘history’ can be and must be corrected. Human identity develops along existing divides such as race, religion, language, nationality and so on, and when one faces and works with all this, then ‘correction’ becomes possible, but first of all one needs to acknowledge that there are many disparities that exist among the people of the world, and that those disparities depend on the mentioned problematic identities and ‘leading’ histories.

2) MA: It seems that in your work the attempt is to redefine identity in order to rediscover an ethical dimension to reflect upon the phenomenon of displacement. A displacement that seems to be tied to a past that implicitly continues to affect our present and future, and which seems impossible to overcome because it presents itself to all as a ‘genetic code’, an undeniable truth. In your opinion how can such problem be tackled?

VM: My desire to redefine identity is part of a wider ethical battle that includes displacement (physical and that of the mind). The inequalities, I hope to correct are due to the identities we currently subscribe to and are in many ways promoted by the leading financial system, that much of the world currently subscribe to, and have been perfected through time by ‘capitalism’, which promotes ‘an obscene level of wealth inequality, along with its corollary of intensified class hostility and hatred. It also redefines the terms of what we

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should be striving for in life’, to quote Dr. Cornel West. He calls this system ‘free-market fundamentalism’ and he goes on to say that this system trivialises the concerns of the public interest. It seems that the more money you have the more political influence you will yield and create the world in your own image, and this image will persist as long as there is not significant revolution of the mind. A staunch capitalist will say that there will always be classes in society or, more, that poverty will always be there.

But we must be aware that statistics institutes, or the so called ‘think tanks’, from where the faithful capitalist gets such information are financed by the financial systems he subscribes to (and this will be presented to us as undeniable truths as long as the arrangement remains profitable to him). Furthermore, we have to remember that we are commodities firstly part of the wider production and consumption machinery that ensure more and more profits that in turn sustains the system. So the only way we are going to have proven research that will educate us otherwise is by promoting a total emancipation of the human mind, and even of the body.

3) MA: In a way, we can say that you see identity as a changeable matter, a matter that in your case was fundamentally influenced by the colonial history of Zambia. To which degree or extent is this present in your work?

VM: Let’s put aside my identity as a human. Before everything else, I will be identified using racial profiling, maybe because that is easier but the implications

are greater. When you are colonised or ruled over you will be made to realise your place in the hierarchy and the one above you hopes you will remain in your defined place forever because that way the arrangement remains advantageous to him. Colonialism was sustained that way.

When the colonised thought they couldn’t rule themselves that testified to the power of indoctrination, to look at yourself to be nothing but predestined to be of servitude to the coloniser. That’s why people like Edward Wilmot Blyden, the one Senghor celebrates as the foremost precursor of Negritude and African personality, Steve Biko, Patrick Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and others were not in the good books of the colonisers because they challenged the standard arrangement. It was Steve Biko’s desire to make his people realise their rightful place at the table that lead to his death. That desire to rearrange the structure of identity continues because the disparities are even greater today.

When you enter the space of my latest exhibition I opened at the beginning of March 2011, you will walk under or between two installations (depending on your height) which are both semi-circular glass objects. Your presence make the LEDs in them to pulse the slowest ever heart beat or breath; your presence makes them come to life, you complete the circuit of life, so to say, but the implication reverberates beyond the interactiveness of the installations. The glass objects were inspired by the stem cells or neurons in their infancy and every human that passes there under, regardless of race creed, nationality and so on, the sculpture will light up con-

firming your universal identity.

4) MA: If we look closely, your drawings shade light on the contrast between death and life; and beauty and loss; these topics are strongly stressed also in Jan Fabre’s installation The Belly, to make a comparison. But it seems that exactly these elements often cohabit in your artistic code…

VM: I truly admire Jan Fabre’s works; his ability to visually express an idea is unmatched.

His pieces From the Feet to the Brain, The Belly and The Sex, to mention but a few, are truly expressive of the human condition and I guess his desire too is to heal the undesirable parts of it by making conscious decisions that reverberate through history and can easily find meaning in our here and now. The ‘undesirable’ parts of the Belgium colonial history, the history most Belgians have chosen to forget by means of selective amnesia, inform the piece The Belly. I might not be as visually expressive as Jan Fabre but my desire to confront our ‘history’ even the undesirable parts for the purpose of making good our today and future, is something that I find us in locked stapes, especially when you consider Fabre’s The Belly and the four portrait drawings of the RED ACT performance in which I tried to confront different histories and bring about the very uncomfortable but necessary dialogues for the sake of healing the human condition.

5) MA: The role of the material and repetitive action, seen as an everyday gesture, is very im

/MUTELEKESHA/ portant to your work. Actually, during your one-month perfor mance RED ACT you were using red pigment, a colour that obviously reminds us of human blood, but also, to make another comparison, to the blood of murdered people that Teresa Margolles used to clean the floor of her pavilion in Venice…

VM: In the RED ACT performance I used lots of red paint spread on the four portraits every other day. The repetitive act was meant to recall a ritualistic act that usually evokes the dead or the spirits who have ceased to exist in this body we can identify by colour, creed etc. The red signifies a colour that transcends the physical identities that exist between the characters in the drawings.

To indulge more on this one the red might also relate to the mark of blood (mark of purifying) on the doors of homes to Jews during ‘pass over’ when God passed their homes over when he slaughtered Egyptians first born children.

To speak about the murdered people, as one might know, quite often, when murder occurs, either at the hands of government or by its sympathisers, we usually say the blood of the victim is on the hands of the assumed powers behind the killing.

The individuals in my drawings represents two opposing side.

On one side are those that had no political powers, but only an undeniable moral authority, and died violent deaths defending causes that they be-

lieved would eventually lead to peace, love and prosperity for all. On the other side, there are those that had political power at their disposal. Note how I have made these characters face each other in a very awkward way; this was to suggest a confrontation of the mind, a painful but necessary dialogue. They are stripped of their personalities, outward identities and whatever state of the mind they might have and asked to look the other into the eye.

has muted itself among people of my kind too, you know in Zambia, when a person has a higher portfolio in government, security services or just rich, he is almost automatically referred to as ‘Bazungu’ (white men). I never used to understand this until I got to understand where it all came from. The indoctrination of the mind designed to maintain a racial high rack.

This cycle repeats itself in the Americas, in India such human divides are even sanctioned my religion.

6) MA: The couples represented in your portraits are, in synthesis: Atal Bihari Vajpayee + Phoolan Devi: Indians; B.J. Vorster + Steve Biko: South Africans; Doctor Eugen Fisher + unknown Namidian. German and Namibian; George Washinton + unknown Native American: Americans. Why did you choose to represent only these characters?

7) MA: In your piece Halo you are presenting the stem cells as means to redefine the human. But, what if I were to be sceptical and assume that they could also be used to consolidate the structure that privileged hierarchies and national models based on strength principles?

VM: I decided to work with these characters by design really, because they are very close to my past and somehow my present. Even in the fiercest battle between a Goliath and David characters and all hope is lost for the underdog I will never waiver in my support for the causes of the oppressed whose situations I easily relate to. Steve Biko was killed unarmed and defenseless in the police cell a year after my birth but learning of his course I admired the man and like in the words of my friend Anawana, paraphrased ‘I could feel his ghost around me’. Well you may ask what about those represented by the character of Prime Minister Vorster?

The very racial hierarchy that Steve Biko fought to abolish

VM: The basic building blocks that make up our bodies (stem cells) are 100% same in all humans, connected with just the right amount of space in between and composed in the right amount fluids solids etc. to make this body accommodate life. And genes and the environment in which we develop allows for that unique nature of each human being. I would like human identity never to be associated to race, gender, sexual orientation, creed or indeed nationality but with the commonness in us all for the simple reason that identifying ourselves with what makes us different entrenches hurt, skepticism and antagonism among humans and we rarely celebrate those differences anyway but rather use them to advantage one over the other.

There is a slight chance

/MUTELEKESHA/ thought that stem cell as I have applied them could be used to argue for a structure that privileges one over the other but that is only possible where the human mind opens up to undesired manipulation.

But when the mind gets emancipated it begins to identify what’s wrong with the human condition and work to heal that.

8) MA: During your stay in Venice you had the possibility to come in touch with part of the immigrant population of the Venice Municipality; does Norway react differently towards minorities compared to Italians? Do you think the migration phenomenon we are facing could be seen as the result of the never-solved dynamics from the past centuries?

VM: Christopher Isherwood says ‘A minority is only thought of as a minority when it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary.’ And no threat is ever quite imaginary. Anyone here disagrees with that? If you do just ask yourself ‘What would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority overnight? You see what I mean?

Well, if you don’t - think it over.’

I see similarities in the way Norway and Italy react towards immigrants. Authorities and some citizens do choose to suffer from selective amnesia, consider this; not so long ago nearly one third of some European citizens (Norway

and Italy among the highest numbers) migrated to the USA for opportunities that the new world provided and Australia is a country of mostly ungrateful British people who found people living there but decided to claim it to be their own and hunted down the indigenous like animals. Colonialism that followed built economic structures that will ensure the continued flow of resources from the colonies even after ‘independence’ was gained. With this background it’s impossible to think that the flow of immigrants to Europe will stop any time soon no matter how fortified Europe becomes because people will always migrate to places where they think they stand a better chance of putting food on the table and that means places where much of global capital is concentrated (remember rise to the ashes, my map piece?), where there is a greater concentration of global GDP that’s where migrants will always go to.

ironic, almost all of Europe love to do business with dictators of Africa at least when they are still in power and when they fall they move quickly to claim the high moral ground by saying ‘We are freezing his assets’.

Most European Governments are basically demagogues, they accept even the dirtiest and most questionable business deals provided there is a flow of capital into Europe to sustain the ever growing consumerism while refusing access to people from where these resources come from.

If I were to ask a wild question like How much money do western companies doing businesses across Africa e.g. Statoil of Norway reinvests in countries like Angola and Egypt? The answer will suggest reasons why people from poor regions of this world will continue coming to Europe. I could credit Norway for its efforts to alleviate poverty in countries it never even colonised.

Any resolution gained through violence, intimidation and seclusion is unsustainable and what’s happening in North Africa (and also with younger disadvantaged Europeans) will testify to that, people will one day have enough of it and demonstrate for their rights.

Ghettoizing immigrants - as well as isolating via imprisonment might be a temporary solution for the presumed majority or those favored by the system in a quest to find solutions to their social problems, but it is from such ‘contemporary ghettos and prisons’ that resentment flourishes and an uprising gains traction.

The fall of the Italian stock market the week after the uprising in Libya would explain in part how entrenched Italian interests in countries it colonised are, but Italy’s immigrant population is so scared of the authorities, those snared in Lampedusa live in cages ready to be shipped back to where they are fleeing from. How

9) MA: Do you think that violence can be regarded as means to possible resolution? Or do you think that the tendency to virtually and phisically close off immigrants or the disadvantaged in “certain geographical” ghettos can be seen as a means to maintain a utopian and isolate social problem by the majority?

Mara Ambrozic, born in 1981 in Slovenia. Writer, curator and artist.

Since 2008 she is teaching at the Faculty of Design and Arts, IUAV University of Venice and curating the International Residency Program ‘Art Enclosures’, a project by Fondazione di Venezia and Polymnia Venezia.

Currently she is working on the International Symposium ‘Art as a Thinking Process: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production’ to be held at IUAV in June 2011.

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Oh! How nice!

2010 Digital Manipulation 77cmx55cm Red Act. 2011 Painting performance 600cm by 120cm Red Act. Detail 2011 Painting performance.

Photo by Tjook 50cmx100cm Red Act. Detail 2011 Painting performance 50cmx100cm Red Act. Detail 2011 Painting performance 150cmx100cm LINK: http://mutelekesha.blogspot.com

/FEATUREs/INTERVIEW/

KJELL TORRISET by m책g

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1) måg: You are one of Norway’s most significant painters and in June this year you are opening a solo show at Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum (4.

June – 4. September), the largest solo show you have had in the last eleven years in Norway. Accompanying this exhibition will also be a book, featuring works from the last seven years of your practice.

Please tell us about your plans for this show.

KT: This exhibition will give me the chance to show a comprehensive body of work done in the last 7 years or so, and also, hopefully, highlight some of the subjects and themes that have appeared in the work during this period, the use of texts, the nudes, the fragments and material treatments of these new works.

Four writers will give their views on the works from their different positions and I hope that their thoughts might help to clear the confusion or alienation that is still around.

It will not be a chronological lay-out, but it would rather concentrate on finding the threads that bind the things together. For the first time I will also show a large group of my drawings. I am very pleased that Vestfold Kunstmuseum has been so enthusiastic about this side of my practice.

2) måg: You use text in much of your work, in multiple languages.

How do you work with the text conceptually as well as practically?

KT: My paintings are impure

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and text appears as another fragment in a catalogue of incidents and disruptions that occur during the painting process. As well as strong visual markers, text also carry meaning often specifically linked to the image, but most often unavailable to the audience, unless you master Armenian, Greek, Russian, Latin, Coptic, Hebrew, Syriac, Turkish, Georgian, Irish, Arabic or Catalonian. Some see this as a provocation. But ‘understanding’ a painting is a tricky thing and although the written word most often has a precise focal point which is very different to an image, the look of a written foreign language takes on the appearance of image and makes you navigate through the painting in a specific way.

The foreign words become the ‘white islands’ of meaning, avoided but impossible to overlook. Mostly I write the texts myself and then have to find translators, usually at universities in Tokyo, at Harvard, Austin Texas, Oslo or Moscow.

The choice of typography is also important to me, and the consideration of such matters is part of the process. My paintings, I feel, evolve slowly and gain meaning in that process... at least that is my hope.

and art without ideas seem to me a hazardous activity. It becomes gradually more difficult to practice painting though, and at the same time increasingly more interesting due to its rich and complex history. To keep this dialogue with history open is important to me and to be able to continue asking questions about my practice and people’s perceptions seems crucial.

3) måg: How important is the audience’s understanding and reading of your work, are there ideas and emotions you wish to evoke?

KT: I wanted to work with porcelain for some time as an extension of my drawings and as I was invited to take part in an exhibition about the ex-voto tradition, it gave me the opportunity to carry it out - more or less, as I had intended it.

The ex-voto, mostly practiced in Southern Europe, out-lawed in the north, is a gift, an offering left at the alter in a church in gratitude for prayers heard.

This was a show of both historic and contemporary ideas about the votive offerings and

KT: This is a difficult question to answer, but I have always seen my activity as private and I do not think of an audience while I am working.

But obviously, you will create emotion - even by putting two colours together with authority,

The only possible correct approach in art is that which deals with imitation in one aspect or another, an approach that continues to defy rules and continues to speculate about the way things are connected. I hope that people will look at my efforts and that they will find some common ground, thought, or emotion that relates to their own experiences.

I could not ask for more.

4) måg: The work ‘The Service’ (2009) consists of 30 porcelain plates, the plates have text and images painted on to them and are arranged over ten tables with three plates on each table, forming a rectangular shape.

Please tell us more about the concept of this work.

my project points to the communion meal, which of course unites all Christians in gratitude.

5) måg: In much of your images, we meet characters, Robert Clark (the Guardian 2008) wrote that […] series of paintings (that) look like glimpses of unresolved film sequences. There are dreamy cross-associations and fragments of text, claustrophobic introversions and vertiginous settings. Oil paint, shellac varnish and wood stain are intermixed to summon something akin to the psychiatrist’s auto-suggestive ink blots. These are figures and creatures and ambiguous reveries from some back-of-beyond. […]

What is your preoccupation with the human form, the characters you work with, their sexuality and their personal stories?

KT: I like to think that the people I work with are collaborators - that somehow they lend their personality to the work and influence the outcome of the painting. They are not just models that come and go from the studio.

I might start a work with an idea, but it is what happens straight after having started that is more fascinating to me how ideas grow and connect, and how incidents, conversations, reading, talking, sleeping, dreaming continue to develop and alter the painting in front of me. If I find models particularly interested in the process of making these works, I tend to work with them for many years.

It is of course a tradition that is particularly difficult, awkward and controversial even, which

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in itself is a challenge.

And if there is a hierarchy in subjects tackled in the history of art it is of course the most important, and what could be more important than how we look and how we act reflected in anything from the Song of Solomon to the Genome Project.

This subject mirrors our artistic and scientific understanding, which is too important to us, and nudity too precious and mysterious, to be left only to the industrial manipulators of the mainstream.

6) måg: For much of your life you have lived in Britain but still kept a strong link with the Norwegian art scene. How important is it for you to be connected- but away?

KT: My connections to Norway are important and it is important for me to stay connected. But I have praised my position away from the flock as well.

At the moment, as I prepare for several new shows, I work from a studio in Oslo and life here at the moment seems exotic somehow. But for many different reasons I have chosen to live abroad most of my life. Maybe I am a foreigner by temperament...

7) måg: ‘The Boxer’ (2009) is a painting that has become very popular; it pictures a woman boxer, naked, holding two pink boxing gloves and she is ready to fight. Tell us the story behind this iconic painting.

/TORRISET/ KT: The gym I go to there was a girl who also sometimes practiced boxing. She was athletic, strong and took her workout seriously. I was intrigued by her boxing and asked her to model for me, but she declined. Art was not her business. She was happy to lend me her gloves though, and I asked somebody else to do the modeling.

The fact that she is a naked boxer raises many questions and complicates the image, but I saw no good reason to divert from my usual practice of using the nude figure in this case. I do not usually provide translations for the texts, but the exception is for mĂĽg: The text is in Italian and borrowed.

At the top of the image is the title of one of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poems, The Tears of the Excavator, and the fragment at the bottom from Eugenio Montale, a suitable connection here, I thought, between art and boxing: The one who digs into the past will know that only a millionth of a second divides the past from the future.

erators at the emergency communications centre says on the recording from the murder night.

1) BR: 28th Feb 1986 is the date when the then Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was shot down on an open street in Stockholm.

Why have you chosen this theme for the exhibition?

MH: Well, first of all, the event made an indelible impression on me. I was 14 and slept over at a friends’ house, when his parents woke us up early in the morning to watch the news on TV. We just couldn’t believe that it was actually true.

In the exhibition, I use it as a starting point to explore the moment when authority or what you believe in, fails or collapses. The murder of Palme shook the conviction of the security and the perfection of the welfare state right down to the very foundation. It was, and still is today, 25 years later, totally incomprehensible that something like that really could happen here in our little sheltered corner of the world. The fact that the murder could not be cleared up continues to show doubt in an otherwise rather self-righteous view of the world.

2) BR: “But I mean, it is in Sweden we live after all”, as one of the op-

MH: Yes, that is precisely what interests me with the recording, the strong sense of unreality: It can’t be true – it can’t happen here. Gradually the shock shines through in the voices of the ordinarily so professional and dissociated emergency personnel.

3) BR: It reminds me of the feeling I had when I was sitting watching TV and saw the aeroplanes crash into the Twin Towers on 9/11 - I could not believe my own eyes. It was beyond the powers of my imagination at that moment, only later did it slowly sink in that it actually did happen.

The video in the next room, (Closed circuit) can be read as an extension of the same theme: The gaping hole in the middle of the quiet residential street and Palme’s blood stain in the snow on the pavement - they are both like cracks in the facade of the presumed infallible “Folkhemmet” (the Swedish welfare state).

MH: Closed circuit is inspired by a painting by Swedish artist Peter Tillberg from the early 70s, entitled “In the middle of Sweden” (Mitt i Sverige, 1972 -73).

The painting’s subject is a similar hole in the

middle of the street. I connected that image with the idea of a biological cycle - a giant body that repetitively swallows, digests and shits.

4) BR: Well, it is quite suggestive and gross (laughs).

It has often struck me that you are not afraid to make use of – let’s call it “the spectacular”, in your work.

MH: First and foremost “the spectacular” in my work is the result of a fascination - I mean that it is something that I desire to see, so I try (and make) to create it.

But apart from that, I think that it functions as a kind of seduction, to lure the spectator into my world. Maybe these “spectacular effects” can contribute to make the threshold lower in engaging with the work.

5) BR: The following work, the sculpture Cannibalistic Solitude, is for me even more cryptic and open to interpretation. It conveys an eerie feeling with the large root in the ceiling with crystals and little lamps like a bourgeois chandelier, but also with tests of human hair scattered over it.

For some reason I came to think of the scene at the end of von Trier’s Antichrist where a wounded Willem Dafoe crawls into a dirt hole to hide.

/TORRISET/ IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Anglepoise Ink on paper 50x37 cm The Sermon 2008 Oil on canvas 220x200 cm The Geographer Ink on paper 50x37 cm House for Walt Whitman Ink on paper 50x37 cm The Boxer 2009 Oil on canvas 220x200 cm LINK: www.kjelltorriset.com

RODNEY POINT ,

launch: JAN 2012 with: secret views

this is art in places | www.rodneypoint.com | rodney point, galLery

/FEATURES/interview/

KAREN NIKGOL by m책g

/NIKGOL/

1) måg: In your artist statement you ask ‘How much is really left of an experience once one has experienced it?’ Are memories of experiences something that you are fixated on?

vited and NoPlace became a place! That is how we started.

We decided early on not to be an initiative lasting only one night, but to conceptually be open, like an organism. A place where you can come and feel comfortable. Noplace. At that time I had been KN: living in Oslo for three months, Yes, in many ways memory is realising early that a place what stimulates and creates to work in, and to show other the physical self, which we people’s work was something project out of our selves, and I needed. Since the opening it into the material world. So I has worked really well, as we consider memory as an imare in contact with New Museportant factor in our lives. The um in N.Y., Aspen Art Museum mind is what the memory really in Colorado. It is nice to know is, so to study the mind is to that initiatives made by young study memory. In my statement artists are appreciated by I try to question the value of established institutions, as we experiences which are stored are sick and tired to be sucking in our minds. Consider a person up to The Old Art Man, the guy who changes the experiences who sucks the air out of you. he has had in his mind! It is as if experience itself is not enough, 3) so a fictitious change has to måg: take place within the mind. I Despite having one of the best think that it is important to recultural funding structures in member things as we ourselves the world, what do you feel remember them, because is the biggest challenge for what we have left of the expe- young artists in Norway today? riences is only an image in our minds.

KN: The cultural funding is ok, but 2) the working wages of a lot of måg: artists are horribly low. Young You have recently started artists break their back prothe gallery ‘NoPlace’ in Oslo, ducing immense amounts of please tell us more about this artwork, only to lose sometimes and how you see this gallery more than half of the profit. being different to other Oslo The mind has to stay strong, galleries and your thoughts because to be an artist is not behind the initiative? a vocation one applies to. It is the only profession in the world KN: where one has to produce I originally found the location something out of nothing, and with a friend of mine, eh, let’s try to either sell it or share the call him NoFace. After one energy with the audience. month of talks and planning This is a problem one can find with the landlord, we invited everywhere in the world where the artist Petter Buhagen. I there are artists. immediately called Kristian Skylstad, an artist whose tac4) tics in art impressed me, and måg: he made me react. Following In the video ‘Total recall 2’ this Stian Gabrielsen was in(2010) we see a man in a fish-

ing boat ready to shoot a ‘living thing’ pulled up from the water, although it is difficult to identify this ‘living thing’ as anything recognisable, one senses a feeling of disgust and displacement. In the soundtrack, we hear someone breathe, but we never see their face. Tell us about this video and the story behind it.

KN: ‘Total Recall 2’ began when I wanted to shoot a science fiction type of an art film in the Iranian desert. The desert there is immense, incredible, filled with ancient crematoriums of the fire worshipping Zoroastrians. As I started researching Iran, my home country, I came across the militant suicide brigade called “The Army of The Hidden Master”, who worked solely in the Iran-Iraq war, running on the minefields to become martyrs, in order to meet their Hidden Master.

Then I came across conspiracy theories concerning burned dolphins in the Persian Gulf, and from then on I was on a dark, post-modern and Middle Eastern voyage. I traveled to Iran in the midst of the election riots in 2009, then into the desert to film. I completely recalled my childhood, remembering being born when “The Army of The Hidden Master” worked in the war, smells of rockets and dead bodies.

This was a country that once had the first human rights and an empire of fire worshipping mystics! Now, it was rotting in religious mad technocracy. I felt sorry for the whole country, feeling that the nation itself needed to “totally recall” its past - hence the title of the film. But, as there already was a ‘Total Recall’, this had to be a ‘Total Recall 2’.

/NIKGOL/ Slowly, out of all these subjects I found a surreal narrative: A burned whale is pulled out of the water, a warning of some natural disasters; one of them being the complete loss of fire.

Bill Clinton hires the ‘Army of The Hidden Master’ to travel into the Blue Planet to find the source of fire, namely the Ultra Fire – a mission impossible. The 35min. film was made in Iran, Norway and Germany, locations varying from gyms to ancient crematoriums. Also I made all the costumes, sculptures, hired Magnus Børmark from Gåte to make the sound track and having the strongest man in Norway, Richard Skog to play one of the main characters. I am very interested in the theory of ‘Gesamtkunst’

by Richard Wagner, where art is considered as a collaborative activity between different mediums to create a totality.

This theory has also affected the conceptual theory behind my work, which consists of different kinds of expressions, from drawing and film to opera and event making.

So ‘Total Recall 2’ was the product of a quite anarchistguerrilla approach to making a film, where the different sources mix into one expression. It was also an attempt to make a complete lie, a fiction. The trailer of the film was shown in Bergen Cinema, luring some of the audience into thinking this was actually some artistic crazy sequel to ‘Total Recall’. At one point it was on a lot of gaming websites, just because the title of the film and the hits that it created on the internet.

5) måg: Your paintings and drawings reference historical-political elements as well as popular culture, do you make work from true events or from the memory of true events?

KN: I work from the memory of true events, even from the memory of imagery - plain thievery. I steal from reality, twisting it into my own kind of a fiction.

Childhood, boyhood memories mixed with the present day. It is a kind of story-telling. Sometimes, if one is alone, the mind is all one has, which is full of memories. One of my films is called ‘The Fountain of Memory’ it is about my Armenian uncle, who is dancing in women’s clothes, with a slow and soft touch. This was so beautiful that I immediately wanted to store it in my memory forever!

So I began filming it. I realised as I was editing the piece, which it was impossible to keep the feeling it had whilst I was filming it. So I slowed it down and created a new rhythm to it. It is pointless trying to recreate anything at all, so I have to make my own versions of the true events. See the film ‘Rashomon’ by Akira Kurosawa. It explains this whole problem thoroughly. I consider one of the main points of creating artwork is to show one’s own individual way to look at life.

6) måg: ‘The Metamorphosis of C.G.Jung’ (2009) is a painting depicting a man in a suit on a street corner at night, he holds his hand up and an incredible shadow is cast on to the wall. It refers to ‘The Metamorphosis’

by Kafka where a salesman wakes to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect.

What was the starting point for this painting?

KN: The shadow - is the dark, forgotten side of our selves. This is the Jung theory, and the starting point of this painting was about Jung himself, showing his dark and forgotten side in an alley, where nobody was looking. We see our idols as people without flaws, as great men and women that really made it. This was more an attempt to de-humanise my idols. Another painting from this series is James Joyce, lonely and almost blind. It is called ‘Portray of The Artist as an Old Man’ and refers to his book A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. Joyce, the greatest lyrical modernist died lonely and blind. I wanted to see my idols as gentle, human and lonely to realise their human-ness. It is a Tibetan tactic of taking down the imaginary veil of reality.

Think of the person you are sexually attracted to, and then envision the guts of this person, pumping and working. Then consider the spit, the faeces, the juices etc. Voila - unmasked. Another painting was the great philosopher Nietzsche kissing a horse, referring to the moment of his madness, where he kissed a horse.

But the esoteric side of the painting that you speak about above is also important. Where light (street lights) builds the shadow of Jung across the walls. I was trying to create a balance between the light and dark shadows. Esoteric philosophy embodies all of my work, as I want the viewer to intellectually engage with my art work. It is some kind of artistic archeology.

7) måg: You are a young artist; you graduated in 2010 from the Art Academy in Bergen, Norway. What made you move to Oslo after this and what will we see from you in the future?

KN: I wanted to move to Oslo for many reasons. One of them was that I had lived in Trondheim, then Bergen. Oslo has a buzzing art world. There are 3-6 shows every week that one can go to.

I will continue to work in Oslo, with Noplace and my own work.

We have a good vibe at the gallery and I like to work in this city. Next up is showing work at Sparebankstiftelsen DnB Nor at Oslo Kunstforening, and then a dark, Illuminati-like version of ‘The Magic Flute’ by W.A. Mozart and Black Box in Oslo. I did a short version of ‘The Magic Flute’ last year, and I loved choreographing opera. The whole “Gesamtkunst” of Wagner can be found in opera. It is complete. So I want to create my own Masonic ‘The Magic Flute’ at a grander scale.

9) måg: What do you think about what is going on in the Middle East and North Africa at the moment?

KN: It is difficult to say really. I hope that Libya won’t be plunged into religious madness controlled by rebels shooting everything they see. Religious madness had taken the whole Middle East and is being fought by crazy cowboys. I am not very positive when it comes to the Middle East. Look back at the last thirty years! War, religion. War, religion.

More war and more religion.

And then even more war and even more religion. Are we on the verge of a nuclear/religious/ militant holocaust controlled

/NIKGOL/

by mad mullahs and oil sucking horny cowboys? You see, revolutions can be dangerous too, when the smell of Che Guevara sits down what is left is dictatorship. America is the perfect example of that. Then we have the Soviet Union, Iran, China and Cuba. Countries are plunged into chaos at the moment of revolutions. We should learn from the past and be careful.

All these revolutions have plunged countries into chaos, and then dictators have seized the power and created “order”. I hope that this is not going on with the military in Egypt, and the unknown and chaotic rebels of Libya. Right now, Libya is an open wound.

That is dangerous.

8) måg: Your work can be seen as quite provocative in more than one sense, aesthetically it’s sometimes grotesque and violent, and it often depicts extreme takes on religious or political convictions or truths. Have you ever received negativity from the audience?

KN: No, never. Maybe someday I will. I am looking forwards to that day. Religious and political truths are something that I am very interested in, being born in a religious country at war!

Maybe the reason why I have not met negativity is because I am not trying to provoke anyone. All my aesthetics comes naturally, not from a process where I create situations to piss people off. My job is not to make people angry or to shout at me, but rather to move their minds into other spheres, places of phantasy and concepts.

10) måg: Does criticism affect you?

KN: Yes and no. Sometimes one word someone says can make you think for ages. Then one other sentence might be shrugged off as unimportant.

Criticism that plunges me into thinking of who I am makes me think. Criticism from people that try to pull you down should be shrugged off.

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Total Recall 2 prop: WHALE 2010 latex, foam 580cm x 310cm The Age of The Barbarians 2008 pencil on paper 220cm x 160cm When I was Young 2009 oil on canvas 190cm x 120cm Pythagoras Lodge 2010 oil on canvas 180cm x 120cm LINK: www.karennikgol.com

Maria Coin

by Yngvar Larsen

SHOP | http://www.nabroad.org/shop.html

TEXT

/FEATURES/text/

The ‘How’ Or The Civic Responsibili

by Anthony Schrag

ities of an Artist

/SCHRAG/

Please pardon the dry and boring opening of this article. I am not even sure you could call it ‘an article’. It’s more of a musing, a meandering on a topic. But, as every meander should have a map, let me take the first few paragraphs to sketch one: it might be boring, but it will be useful in case we get lost later on.

The ‘How’ Or The Civic Responsibilities of an Artist The Germans call it an earworm: a phrase or a song that gets stuck in your head. I have had one drilling into my meandering brain for years now – repeating and replicating ad nauseum. It’s not catchy or smart or even exciting – it just got caught in a loop because of its knotty edges: ‘Art can be a tool for positive social change’. It twists itself around and abounds with sharp edges. It is problematic. And like all good problems, it raises some interesting questions.

Perhaps that is why it is so stuck - because more questions are left unanswered.

PERSONALLY, I’M NOT COMFORTABLE WIH ABSOLUTES, ESPECIALLY WITHIN ‘ART’ Firstly, there lies a disjoint between the imperative and the suggestive: it can or it should be a tool for positive social change? Personally, I’m not comfortable with absolutes, especially within ‘art’ – a world essentially resistant to all forms of certainty, and so in defining my terms of this argument I would prefer to allow it to rest in ‘possibility’ rather than ‘certainty’.

Secondly, the phrase also has the sting of naff ‘community projects’ – mosaics done by children, painted light bulbs, watercolours with grand-

mothers and the like – and it is generally scoffed at by those in positions of ‘cultural power’ as something naive, ill conceived, and ‘bad art’: and here the phrase really begins to unravel the questions, asking almost childishly well, what is bad art? And, indeed, the questions come quickly after that: what is good art? Art in general? What does it look like?

Where does it live? What is it for?

AND INDEED, THE QUESTIONS COME QUICKLY AFTER THAT: WHAT IS GOOD ART? ART IN GENERAL? WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? WHERE DOES IT LIVE? WHAT IS IT FOR? And, if we are going to talk about the identity and purposes of art, we must unravel some more of this Gordian Knot and find who it is for. If it is for ‘social change’ surely it must incorporate ‘society at large’. Or, if it is for specific ‘social groups’, then the art must be specific to those groups. Is it only for folks who visit galleries? Must art live in a gallery/ museum? If people do not see it, is it culture? The phrase asks a very key question about accessibility, audience and context of the art/culture paradigm.

And what does social change look like? What is positive social change?

Is it possible that what is positive to some may be negative for others?

Can you measure ‘positive’ in empirical scales; quantify social change into formulae? This is the thickest part of the knot and I have neither the word count nor the energy to even begin on those sorts of topics.

/SCHRAG/

So where does that leave us? Does this phrase and approach undo any socially engaged art into a series of unanswerable questions and untieable knots? Are we left with a useless map and no hope?

No. Things are rarely that hopeless.

But how do we progress? If that earworm wriggles inside us, asking all its irritating questions, how then do we move forward? Being a practical sort of chap, I think if we look towards the biggest question this phrase asks, we might find a way through the map. To me, that question is: How? How can art be a tool for positive social change? What does it have to do? Fundamentally, I think this phrase asks about the function of the artist – of art – in contemporary society and it is in the how that we might unravel it.

I suppose this is all just highlighting the frame around which most socially engaged artists operate, or at least it is the frame around which my practice is based. I would never suggest that this is the only way forward, and that all art should be like this, only that it keeps my interest. And it’s true – I am interested in how art can be a tool for positive social change.

It may sound naive to think it even possible, but hey, honest cynicism was never my strong point.

SO HOW DO WE TALK ABOUT THE ‘HOW’?

So how do we talk about the ‘how’?

As we’ve already accepted that there can be no absolutes in ‘art’, this can’t be a step-by-step guide.

And, it can’t be a manifesto because I’ve already admitted I have no clear direction of meandering. I would even hesitate to call it a rough guide because of the imperative of context within this type of work

dictates every project must be intrinsically unique. My only suggestion is to look at how I’ve approached the ‘how’ on a personal level over the past few years of my “socially engaged” work, hoping that it will explore some of the questions raised.

Let’s begin: In 2007, I was chosen to work with the Gallery of Modern Art (Glasgow) on one of their successful ‘Contemporary Arts and Human Rights’ programmes, this one looking at issues of sectarianism in Glasgow. I was to work with youths from ‘socially difficult’ areas, and develop art projects with them that would then be displayed in the hallowed halls of the be-columned and marbled Gallery.

The hope was that the youth could explore the issues of sectarianism via art, learn not to repeat the mistakes of the past, and that the confidence of them having their work exhibited in the Gallery of Modern Art might inspire them towards loftier goals. It was a perfect example of an institution using art to encourage positive social change, but I was keenly aware of a certain cultural colonialism in play: I was being deposited, like a missionary, in a dark and scary country, to educate and raise-up the uncultured classes.

With this in mind, as well as working with the youth, I organised an event that looked at the city’s arts policies and power imbalances where, ‘with all the good intentions in the world, [the city council] is very removed from the real life situations of everyday people’. What this involved was ‘kidnapping’ the Council Workers, Curators, and Advisory Board. I invited them all to a meeting at the marble halls of the Museum and when they arrived, bundled them into the backs of waiting cars and took them to the very housing estate they sent me in order to discuss the flaws in the arts/culture programming and the possible pitfalls of underdeveloped Socially Engaged Projects. Most of

/SCHRAG/

them had never been to the estate nor spent time with the inhabitants, and I was keen to explore the idea that you should know who the society is, and what their concerns are, before attempting to ‘fix’ it.

Here, I was not comfortable in proposing solutions to complex social problems; I was more interested in how I could suggest alternatives, both to ‘assumptions of problems’ and to ‘policy development’: the ‘how’ to make art a tool for positive social change lay in opening up the possibilities.

‘CULTURAL COLONISATION’ WAS ALSO A CONCERN WHEN I WAS WORKING IN PAKISTAN IN 2008 ‘Cultural colonisation’ was also a concern when I was working in Pakistan in 2008. I was on a Public Art Residency with VASL and I felt uncomfortable making a work when I was clearly an outsider: white, Christian and a representative of its colonial history. It did not make sense to make something for a public that was not even remotely mine.

So, considering the difficult political climate and bleak outlook on the future, I proposed to develop a ‘Ship of Hope’ to be entirely constructed by the public (i.e. not me or other artists) on the condition that whatever form it was in, in 3 days we would launch it into the City’s central canal, and if it sunk, Hope was dead and, if it floated, Hope would survive. Built by passing families, bankers, students, housewives, maids, homeless children, etc and did not engage the skills of any professional builders, it began to act as a metaphor for social cohesion and the ability of a group to work to-

wards a better future. Whatever their idea of a ship was, we built it and on the third day, we took it to the canal, and it did indeed float. Hope had survived.

It seemed to me that the active engagement of the participants in developing their own social narrative and structures (physically) imbued them with a sense of ownership and confidence, not only over the artwork around them (reflections of their own society?) but over their future, as well.

Ironically, as I was very strict about not employing other artists on the construction of the project, I had to turn away many art students and other artists who had come to take part. They huddled at the edge of the project, muttering together, and at the end of the ‘boat trip’ they were still there, still keen to get involved. So I invited them to help take the Ship of Hope out of the water.

But, as they had not fabricated it, and as it did not look like art, they were very flippant about the floating object, and roughly yanked, heaved and wrenched it from the water, tearing it apart and destroying it in front of the eyes of the very people who had spent days building it. The strange, delicate and gentle Ship of Hope was crushed by a marauding mass of artists who did not feel it was worthy of their respect, because it was not made by artists. I think this is a brilliant metaphor for how we – as artists – sometimes approach art and culture (especially in terms of ‘social change’): we assume we know best, and we do not valorise or support a pre-existing, organically-developed culture, thereby alienating ‘the arts’ from those for whom it is intended.

That does not mean we need to pander to base concepts, or suddenly only make ‘popularist’ work, only that we should try to speak to the existing culture and their interests/needs. In 2005, I was invited to take part in a ‘performance art festival’ in the East Side of Glasgow.

/SCHRAG/

Knowing that it was a rough and violent area, I figured that folks living in the area probably had far more important things to do with their time than look at ‘performance art’ and so developed a ‘performance’ that I hoped spoke to their experiences, albeit in a funny and/or questioning way – and thus the ‘Human Piñata’ was born where folks were invited to beat-me up, and to be rewarded with sweets for hitting me hard enough.

And while I accept that violence is perhaps an easy route to take, I don’ think you need to be so visceral to make an impact. In 2010, I worked with Peacock Visual Arts to create a performance intervention to their pre-existing programme – an exhibition of seascapes by Scottish water-colourist and printer Francis Walker. Her beautiful sketches and prints explored the North East’s rugged coast as it was met by the wild North Sea. My ‘intervention’ simply invited visitors away from the gallery to the ocean side, to contemplate the actual ocean, so that they could stare out over a real and changing seascape, rather than the still and painted ones in a gallery. Those that were interested in such ‘cultural’ experiences as galleries need not be limited to them – and social change for them could simply be an alternative perspective, outside the norm.

And therein lies the rub and the solution to the social engagement question – this how to make art a tool for positive social change: for me, it is a suggestion of another way forward.

It is not an imperative, or a proposed solution, merely an alternative doorway, a different route on the map.

Working with the McColl Centre for Visual Arts in North Carolina last year I became interested in how much emphasis we place upon the art object – the thing that we can see – rather than the ephemeral concepts and narratives behind an artwork.

Considering this, I collaborated with a visually impaired group as ‘experts

on vision’ because they, more than anyone, are aware of the emphasis we place on visuals.

Through conversations developed in workshops, gallery visitations, and film screenings, we slowly built up a publication that explored the flaws of visual art in Braille, so that could only be accessed by those who were visually impaired – i.e., a critique of visual art only readable by those who cannot see it. On display, sighted people (especially artists) wanted to know what it said, and were chagrined that they could neither read nor respond to the critique.

THE ‘HOW’ CAME IN THE QUESTIONS THE WORK RAISED, AND I AM NOT SURE IT IS AN ARTIST’S JOB TO EVER PROPOSE ANSWERS TO SOLUTIONS, ONLY TO ASK THE RIGHT SORT OF QUESTIONS. Here, the intervention did not lie with those assumed to have a ‘problem’ (the visually impaired) but with those who in a position of ‘cultural power’ – with knowledge about the form, function and purpose of art. The ‘how’ came in the questions the work raised, and I am not sure it is an artist’s job to ever propose answers to solutions, only to ask the right sorts of questions.

Anthony Schrag was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in the Middle East, the UK and Canada, where obtained a degree in Creative Writing, as well as Photography/Sculpture. He completed his MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in 2005, and since then has exhibited/performed across the UK and Internationally, exploring the intersection between socially engaged practices and contemporary art. He is currently working with Deveron Arts in Aberdeenshire.

The artist Nathalie De Brie once referred to his practice as ‘Fearless’.

The writer Marjorie Celona once said: ‘Anthony, you have a lot of ideas.

Not all of them are good.’

LINK: www.anthonyschrag.com

project room

The Atelier Nord project room in Kunstnernes Hus is available to artists free of charge on a weekly basis.

The project room may be used for video and audio production, as well as screenings, presentations and exhibitions.

For more information and on-line application form, please visit

www.ateliernord.no

GALLERY

/gallery/

HALVOR RØNNING

/RØNNING/

A CONVERSATION

L:

Linnea Sjöberg

H:

M:

Halvor Rønning Martyn Reynolds

L: This staging you’ve been doing here in your living room looks very much like an everyday situation, and it doesn’t really relate to you as an artist. But that’s maybe what you want?

H: There’s no room for exaggeration in a ’realness’ performance, which is what we’re both working on. When something is exaggerated its credibility is questioned, so I think it’s interesting to look for the balance between a careful

composition and something relaxed and casual. I like that something can appear random, but actually is totally staged.

L: Why am I a key in this project?

H: I’m very fascinated by your project and how you’re doing a full time performance as a ’career woman’, the way in which you’re living it to make it real. You don’t seem to have a border between performance and life.

L: Yes, it’s like maintaining a role. I think in general one has to adapt to several different identities, but I use this role as a career woman to actually come closer to the understanding of the role of an artist. But with a distance, it’s important that I’m not becoming a career woman – I only try to maintain the surface. But I’m still in this gray zone between my daily life as an artist and this role I’m performing. I’m aware it can be a very general thing to say “I’m criticising the role of the artist by maintaining the role of a career woman”, because maybe this is something that regards everyone who works with art.

H: But not everyone is willing to articulate the relationship between the work of art and the artist’s persona. To me your performance is questioning where the meaning of the art work is located. And that’s something I always found very disturbing about the modern idea of the pure art piece – I was never content with the isolated interpretation of art as autonomous. I find art very transparent and reflexive, but this is too seldom taken into account or dealt with. So I’m more interested in the social

aspects around the art work – the relation to its immediate social surroundings.

M: Because of recent art history I don’t really want to describe this as a social aspect.

I’m more interested in thinking about your practices in the solipsistic relationship between artist and artwork, or the inevitable vanity of artists. Does either of you play games with your constructed environment to reflect yourselves?

L: I was reading the Boris Groys essays ’Obligation to SelfDesign’ the other day. And I thought that today as an artist you only need to show the kind of pile of books you have here on your table. I think it’s a very nice illustration of his ideas.

H: I guess it’s where he’s talking about Adolf Loos and modern design as something reduced down to its pure and basic function, and how later this reduction was perverted into superficiality. It turned into the most exclusive visual language of the ’modern man’.

After the massive secularization of our society in the last century, ’Self-Design’ turned into the new religion where the design of the body released the religious design of the soul.

ting things done” is a licensed method by an American guy called David Allen. He’s working on an empowerment method for the corporate world. Taking Eastern philosophy with mantras such as “mind like water” as a way of helping employees, and making the enterprise more efficient, just to make the workers more like machines.

H: “Mind like water”?

L: Yes, somebody who thinks “mind like water” is someone who can work, work, work.

That’s why I started working on tai-chi, I’m interested in how we can import and apply Eastern philosophy to develop these empowerment methods and to help us cope in our daily lives.

M: It’s also great how Groys’ implicates Joseph Beuys at the end, describing how the Utopian idea that everyone can be an artist has been fulfilled in this total aestheticization of our lives that we all engage in, the aspirations in the Nike commercial. It’s funny, when you mention the pile of books, it implicates Groys’ text itself in the very process of Self-Design.

H: Yes, it’s crazy how one can turn something very virtuous and spiritual into an instrument to achieve a higher level of efficiency. I mean, there are a hundred thousand philosophies and ways of thinking that you can apply to your life. And it’s so connected to the ’68 generation of artists and intellectuals who through the late sixties and the seventies were drawn to Eastern philosophy, and inspired a whole generation to think differently about how one could live and think.

A very secular culture, but still very religious. I think they left one religion for another, one they created themselves. But for me this ended up in a lot of talk, a lot of understanding, in the end – rhetoric. A way of shopping around for applicable philosophies and a kind of self-manipulation, or a way of constructing a mind- set.

L: Do you know about my project ’GTD 4s810’ – getting things done for Satan? “Get-

L: In your project New Realness you’re using transparent plastic and packaging tape.

Are you using these materials instrumentally in the same way you’re using the gray T-shirt you’re wearing today? I have a friend, you know, who is a stylist, and he’s always using some plastic and tape for his installations.

H: Yes, I know, the gray T-shirt is a classic garment for male artists. It’s perhaps ’neutral’ or let’s say ’practical’, but at the same time loaded with signals that depend on the social context. I approach the materials in my projects in the same way – for their own visual and tactile qualities, and as a reflection of the visual culture I’m part of.

M: Yeah, I love the gray Tshirt thing. Like today we both turned up wearing gray T-shirts.

I’ve thought before it’s a funny mixture of fake association with a working class uniform – ’look, I’m an artist, I actually make stuff with my hands’, and a classic celebrity exercise outfit – imagine paparazzi shots of celebrity X jogging in L.A. L: I’m interested in this, because you’re talking about ways in which this operates in countless, thoughtless ways for everyone all the time. But the distinction between ’acting’ it consciously or it being thoughtless, is a game I think many artists engage with. Which contemporary artist would do this kind of thing?

M: Elmgren and Dragseth – you can imagine them sitting outside the Venice Pavilion in their sunglasses, talking about it, sort of flirting with each other, and meanwhile there’s this camera pan over to the dead guy in the pool, with this nice “We’re in Venice” kind of music over the top.

/RØNNING/ Martyn Reynolds (1981) is a New Zealand artist based in Vienna. He graduated with a BFA from Elam School of Fine Arts in 2005. Recent projects were shown at MFAPS (Oslo), Former Bell Street (Vienna), Sue Crockford Gallery (Auckland) and The Physics Room (Christchurch). He is a founding member of Auckland artist-run space A Center for Art (ACFA).

LINK: http://martynreynolds.com Halvor Rønning (1984) is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo. He is graduating with a BFA from Oslo Academy of Fine Arts in 2011. Recent projects were shown at MFAPS (Oslo), Former Bell Street (Vienna), Cervantes Institute (Belgrade) and The Linneanum (Uppsala). He is also founder of Tanga Volante Designers Club (TVDC).

LINK: http://halvorronning.com Linnea Sjöberg (1983) is a Swedish artist based in Stockholm. She is graduating with a MFA from Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, Konstfack and Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien in 2011. Recent projects were shown at Nordin Gallery (Stockholm), Forgotten Bar (Berlin), Skånes Konstförening (Malmö). She is the founder of the organisation GTD4s810 - Getting Things Done for Satan.

LINK: http://linneasjoberg.com

IMAGES: Untitled (Table for Four and Eight) 2011 Wood and steel 73x 220x 64,5 cm (unfolded)

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RAGNHILD JOHANSEN

/JOHANSEN/

/JOHANSEN/ ‘Imagination is one of the forces of Nature’ – Wallace Stevens The material based works presented here are first of all to be looked upon as paintings, although they can be part of a sculpture or an installation.

By using the existing qualities in the material, I am able to make subtle yet powerful changes to it and unite the representation with what is represented. The works have a conceptual aspect and conceptual art is often referred to within titles and placement of objects, but I also emphasise the craft of painting.

At the first glance, some works will look like untreated plywood and wooden pallets, which demand to be discovered. They may go unnoticed by some, and surprise others.

Upon closer inspection meticulous manipulations of the wood become more visible, which challenge and stimulate the viewer’s cognitive capabilities.

The painted interventions add changes to the qualities of the material, or influence the conclusions we draw when we look at it, like the notion of layers and continuity. In daily life we have the urge and need to categorise passing impressions and events. Even though we try to avoid it, our automatic brain works faster than the clear thought. Sometimes it is made visible only by interrupted expectations.

Ragnhild Johansen was born in Melbu in Vesterålen, Norway. She currently lives and works in Mons, Belgium. She received her education from Bergen National Academy of the Arts (BA and MA) and Nordland College of Art and Film.

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Erasing Knot Paintings # 3 2009 Acrylics on plywood 30x30cm From the exhibition “In Real Time it Would Last a Thousand Years” 2.1: Leaning 3-ply # 1-2 2009 Acrylics on plywood 244x122cm 2.2: Class A EUR-pallet (leaning against the wall) 2009 EUR-pallet, acrylics on plywood 120x150x180cm 2.3 Class A EUR-pallet (lying) 2009 Acrylics on EUR-pallet Photo by: Peter Klasson Class A EUR-pallet (lying) 2009 Acrylics on EUR-pallet Photo by: Peter Klasson LINK: www.ragnhildjohansen.com

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NINA HOVE

/feature/TEXT/ /HOVE/ /larsmon/ /BECH/ THIRD PLACE

/HOVE/

Presents: Invisible clarity a study of Genius Loci

by Thale Fastvold and Bardo by Tanja Thorjussen

About LOCUS Tanja Thorjussen is educated at KHIB in Bergen and Parsons School of design in New York where she studied, lived and worked for 10 years, and moved back to Oslo in 2006.

Thale Fastvold is educated in photography, literature and art history from the

Istituto Europeo di Design, University of Oslo and John Cabot University, and lived in Rome and New York for several years before returning to Oslo in 2005.

The two met during curatorial studies at HIT. Feeling they had many things in common they started working together on curatorial projects addressing themes

such as migration, alchemy and liminality. They soon created LOCUS art and curator group and have since been working on curatorial projects, book projects and collaborative art projects.

IMAGE CREDITS: Bardo (2010) Tanja Thorjussen Genius Loci (2010) Thale Fastvold

/HOVE/

/HOVE/ Three Minutes in Somebody’s Life

by Nina Hove A film reel dated 1938 found in a camera bag at a flea market, constitutes the basis for the series Three Minutes in Somebody’s Life. They are memories captured in photographic fragments from places like Paris, Milan and Venice, and a family, who have now only left some traces behind.

I was curious to stop the time and find more details in singular frames which would be invisible if looked at as flickering images on a film screen.

Their stillness offers a hint of presence and an atmosphere that I feel is transferred stronger through photography. A poetic and enigmatic stillness is created where the images urge the viewer to find traces of something beyond that which is controlled by the photographer. Looking through hundreds of frames I was searching for moments in which the cameraman could not be noticed, what was left were the unconscious and timeless moments of the people and places. The order after breaking up the film roll is nonsequential, implying no specific reading or passage of time. A consequence of this is that the awareness of the photographs is to be taken into context which they were originally entered into and any subsequent presentations of photos in new contexts, with implications for our understanding of them this has become a necessary prerequisite to provide meaningful interpretations of the images.

The interpretation is no longer conditional on what the picture is, in itself, but what we do with it and which purpose we use it for. The final selection is also made into a book. By sequencing the selected images the reader has the opportunity to find new narratives within each page.

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Page #3 1938 / 2009 Digitized 8 mm film 15x20cm Page #11 1938 / 2009 Digitized 8 mm film 15x20cm Page # 1 1938 / 2009 Digitized 8 mm film 15x20cm Page # 8 1938 / 2009 Digitized 8 mm film 15x20cm LINK: www.ninahove.com

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MARGARIDA

PAIVA

/PAIVA/

/PAIVA/

/PAIVA/ /BECH/ EVERY STORY IS IMPERFECT

By Margarida Paiva The poet is a faker Who’s so good at his act He even fakes the pain Of pain he feels in fact.

Autopsicography is a short poem from Fernando Pessoa, Portuguese poet, written in 1930 (tr. Richard Zenith). I read it first many years ago and I found it quite intriguiging in the way that it speaks of a poetic faking. The poet fakes a feeling that he ‘really’ feels...

The poem does not translate what the poet feels, but what the poet imagines through the memory of what he once felt.

This real emotion, once felt by the poet, comes in form of a poem transfigured in the emotion worked through in practice. So the poem does not translate the real emotion anymore, but a new one which has been thought through. To Fernando Pessoa poetry was the intelectualization of emotion.

The work of this Portuguese poet has always been an inspiration. He and his poetry were fragmented. Pessoa was talented with a great psychological density and able to create various characters, completely different both in life experience and way of writing (the so-called heteronyms: unlike pseudonyms, they were literary alter egos with complex imaginary lives of their own).

Noone really knows the cause of his fragmented personality but there are many clues. An interior chaos combined with

the artistic currents of the time, cubism and futurism in particular. The poet himself wrote about these multiple characters: ‘Since childhood I have always had the tendency to create a fictitious world, to surround myself with unexistent friends and acquaintances...’

For my new project Every Story Is Imperfect (2010-2011) I’ve been collecting stories from the news: tv, radio and internet. Things that really happened. At the same time I’ve been filming improvised scenes and images. Associations arise between these disconnected stories and images using montage techniques. Through an intuitive construction a narrative starts to unfold. It is made with mistakes, inconsistencies, imperfections.

Time is fragmented. Space is fragmented. Fragmentation experienced when things fall apart. When things stop making sense turning into a broken cadence of thoughts. Narrative becomes a collage of short scenes where continuity is less important than the depiction of the characters’ state of mind. These unknown people remain emotionally distant and unavailable, wondering around in trains or empty rooms, absentminded.

Time passes fast before them, silence becomes a form of speech.

The film starts first like a common story, we hear news on the radio about a missing woman, but soon there are breaks, interruptions, unfinished actions, an unraveling of places and voices. The stories touch on themes such as loss, murder, abuse and rape. The film approaches the inability to communicate when confronted with random acts

of violence.

The story of the missing person was the first one I found. Gradually I found other unrelated stories. There was no connection between all these found news, but piece by piece connections are made. Editing was like unpuzzling a mystery. The final solution is there but it is not yet clear.

These collected fragments are then rearranged in a way that the final result becomes distanced from the original material. I deconstruct existing stories to collect the fragments and create new plots. These fragmented pieces are then presented as a kind of disrupted narrative. Small fragments cross, meet and disappear. In the end it becomes something else, but the original feeling is there, hidden between the images.

IMAGES: (Details) Every Story Is Imperfect 2011 Video still LINK: www.margaridapaiva.net

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MUZI QUAWSON

/QUAWSON/

/QUAWSON/

http://hotch-potch.org/

/LETTERS/ /QUAWSON/ Muzi Quawson (1978, London) is a visual artist who works with photography and the moving image. Quawson, graduated with a BA (Honours) First class in Photography from the University of the Creative Arts in 2001 and with an MA in Photography from The Royal College of Art, London, in 2006. In 2011 Quawson was invited for a two-artist residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Quawson’s work has been exhibited both nationally an internationally. Solo exhibitions include Annet Gelink Gallery (Amsterdam, 2009) and Yossi Milo Gallery (New York, 2008). Group exhibitions include Bloomberg New Contemporaries, (2005); Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2006); Wandering Star, GANA Art Centre (Seoul, 2006); Play Yourself, Gimpel Fils Gallery, London (2007); Bloomberg Space, London (2009). Her work has also appeared in several publications, including Art Review (2006), Aperture Magazine (2008), Portfolio (2008), ArtForum International (2008). Quawson’s work is held in private collections nationally and internationally. Gallery representation is with the Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam and Yossi Milo Gallery in New York City.

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Amanda

New York City, New York 2004 (from the Pull Back the Shade series 2002-2006) 35mm slide projection Asbury Park

Asbury Park, New Jersey, 2004 (from the Pull Back the Shade series 2002-2006) 35mm slide projection Inside the Bluehouse

Woodstock, New York, 2004 (from the Pull Back the Shade series 2002-2006) 35mm slide projection LINK: www.documentography.com

Salon art prize 2011 Call for entries

The Salon Art Prize is an annual competition for painting, sculpture & installation, and 2-D practices (drawing, collage, printmaking etc.).

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the prize we will offer a separate prize of £1000 for each category, supported by John Jones.

This year’s selection panel are: Patricia Bickers (Editor, Art Monthly) Pippa Hale (Director, Project Space Leeds) Robert Leckie (Exhibitions Curator, Gasworks) To apply please send three images of work to sap2011@mattroberts.org.uk and make a membership registration of £10 via www.salonartprize.com The deadline for applications is 17.00 (GMT) Saturday 13th August, 2011

Selector’s prize sponsors

Our passion at John Jones is to build life long relationships with our clients, to support the next generation of creative talent and encourage the aspirations of emerging galleries across London.

Media Supporter

Matt Roberts Arts, Unit 1, 25 Vyner Street, London, E2 9DG

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SADA TANGARA

/TANGARA/

Sada Tangara is a photographer, a poet and a film writer.

Sada was born in Bamako, Mali. His mother tongue is Bambara, which is spoken in Mali. He also speaks French, English and Wolof (Senegal).

IMAGES: All images from the photographic series ‘The Dream’ LINK: www.sadatangara.com

/GALLERY/

Signe Christine Urdal

e

/URDAL/ Signe Christine Urdal (1979) is an art and documentary photographer from Stavanger, Norway. Urdal graduated from Oslo Photo Art School. Sensitivity, aesthetics and humanism are subjects Urdal attempt to explore.

In autumn 2009, Urdal attended Stavanger Municipality’s artist residency in Berlin, here she worked on the two photo projects ‘Berlin Loves you Too’ and ‘Walls’. Both projects are currently in progress.

IMAGES All images are from the ongoing photographic series ‘Walls’ LINK: www.scurdal.com

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GRO THORSEN

/THORSEN/ GRO THORSEN

by William Jackson Gro Thorsen is from Bergen where she also completed her foundation course at the Art School. Her final degree training however, was at Wimbledon School of Art in London, where she graduated in 1999. Her first solo exhibition was at the Intimgalleriet (Bergen Kunsthall) in 2000. Her following exhibitions were at No.5 Bergen Kunsthall in 2003, at Galleri LNM in Oslo in 2007 and in 2008 at the Hordaland Art Centre.

At an international level, Thorsen’s career has expanded as a result of her association with the Jill George Gallery in London, which over the last seven years has exhibited her work not only in Soho with a number of solo shows, but at International Arts Fairs in the UK and throughout the world.

Thorsen’s enticing recent works have changed little in concept and perception during the last few years. But the new ‘fragment storyboard’ works on small aluminum panels have become more colorful, now with direct references to specific places, reflecting her recent travels to all parts of the globe. Hong Kong and New York spring to mind with contrasting brightly lit neon night-time backdrops and crowded avenues lined with towering buildings.

These impressive sets of panels, often installed in large numbers as in the manner of film stills, have very much retained their strong narrative content

and have become less objective. The designer bags, custom shoes and status accessories of the archetypal middle classes, captured in stark city piazzas of the earlier period have been substituted by real people observed in identifiable city centres, or in art galleries and on tennis courts. This development has not just been inspired by the artist’s extensive travels, but by a natural development and a significant number of public, corporate and private commissions carried out by her during this period.

able. Film is a particular passion and fascination for Gro Thorsen.

In her large oils on canvas, their sleek upwardly mobile and anonymous figures are set in sterile pale ‘stage set’ like spaces with no reference to scale or location, as though in a dreamlike automaton world. There have been more subtle and less obvious developments in these paintings with predominance of substantially smaller, and on occasions, single figures.

These serene and often sublime works suggest a deeper, more thoughtful direction from that of her photojournalistic persona.

But when 366 of the small panels are installed and viewed as one, as in the hugely dramatic ‘The Seasons’, there can be no critical comparison between these apparently diverse notion.

These are highly intelligent and captivating works which have a depth and consequence which needs to be discovered and savored. She makes continual references to the minimal and fundamental, such as in the stage sets of Gotz Friedrich’s opera productions or the awesome photo-images of Wim Wenders. There is also her inspiration from Cinema Verite, where the inconsequential is essential and, at a darker level, Film Noir, and the unpredict-

IMAGES IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Lonely Man 2010 Oil on linen 90x130cm Hong Kong 2010 Oil on aluminium Each 8x8cm total: 106x162 cm LINK: www.grothorsen.com

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JUDY SIRKS VEVLE

/VEVlE/ Judy Sirks Vevle (Born 1972), graduated from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design (CFAP), London in 1998.

Returned to her hometown Bergen in Norway where she worked in the local film industry alongside on her own video projects. After 6 years her interest for film led her to start painting stills from film and painting is now her main objective.

“Closer to the Mountain” (2009-2011) is a series of paintings made during a stay in Hardanger, exploring landscape as a genre closely connected to the notion of the sublime.

Another aspect is the relation between artistic vision and society´s experience of nature.

Judy lives and works in Bergen.

Recent exhibitions include “The End of History...and The Return of History Painting” curated by Paco Barragán, at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (MMKA), January- May 2011, supported by OCA and Bergen Municipality. This exhibition is traveling further to Salamanca in Spain to the Domus Artium (DA2), 20th June - 30th October 2011. Upcoming also is a group show at Hardanger and Voss Museum “Hardanger in 100”: 7th May – 21st August 2011.

IMAGES: Measured Mountain, (Detail) 2011 Acrylic on canvas 120x120cm Photo credit: okfoto Mountainous, 2011 Acrylic on canvas 240x240cm Photo credit: okfoto LINK: www.judysirksvevle.com

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THOMAS C.CHUNG

Thomas C. Chung (Born in Hong Kong in 1981) is an Australian artist based in Scandinavia. In 2004, Chung completed his BFA at the College Of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales. For the past 6 years, he has received various artist-in-residency opportunities, travelling to New London (USA), Gothenburg (Sweden), Kemij채rvi (Finland), and most recently in Drammen (Norway).

Since 2008, Chung has exhibited in 5 solo exhibitions and will be showing in 2011 at the Lands Museum (Norway), as well as at Kunsthuset Kabuso (Norway).

LINK: www.facebook.com/chung.c.thomas

LETTERS

/LETTERS/ The Complexities and Contradictions of Paris

PIA MYRVOLD www.pia-myrvold.com

I first came to Paris as an intellectual exile from Norway in 1991, with a 3 month studio grant at Cite International de Artist. After spending 6 weeks during the summer in the capital, I received a 1,5 million project commission in the freshly constructed Parc de la Villette, directly appointed by architect Bernard Tschumi, who himself was appointed directly

by President Mitterand in one of 5 Grande Projects, that transformed the architectural image of Paris in the Glory days of the socialist president and his culture minister Jacque Lang.

The difference between the intellectual elites in Norway and Paris at the time was astonishing, Paris had Derrida, Faocault, Baudrillard and Gueatta .

In Norway, the people in head of the institutions especially in the arts, where hardly aware of interdisciplinary thinking and practice, the deconstruction philosophy and the social reforms that these strategies called for and how they were to be implemented through design, interdisciplinary arts and urban planning and architecture.

As a virtually unknown artist from an insignificant country, I felt lucky that this elite embraced and rewarded the hybrid nature and innovative qualities of my work.

A few years into my stay in Paris, I met more conservative groups and some of the more reactionary environments where to be found in contemporary art. Power houses like Art Press, had become so removed from life and society, and they were cynical in approach to all motifs, noble or not, but most art was infected by a strong anti-art tendency, with highly

cerebral codes..

The educated public, with classical training and having been indulged their whole life with the best on offer in opera, ballet, public collections, museums, couture, design, architecture, philosophy and modern art, were people of diverse but specialised tastes, not revolutionaries, but content to be a part of a social educated elite.

I was to learn that this group was more reluctant to leave the classic ideals and comforts of their heritage, and less prone to individual thinking.

The capital of lights indulged in power, money and sex. A person who was married, including the President, would consider the life with their mistress their right to a private life. In all walks of society, there were evidence and suggestions of corruption, money gifts, a manipulated press and people abusing their privileges. At one point it became harder to be a Norwegian artist with idealism within the elite, such as the arrival and continued presence of Eva Jolie that created an invisible wall against strong willed Nordic women!

It became for me and my socially end ethically motivated art strategies a backlash culture, and for a while before the Millennium change I was spending time with the expats, loving to hate the French, a favorite pastime of millions, and lived there after 2 years in New York to again feel free.

In 2003, I came back to Paris with a child, and got to know civil Paris, a city with great services for anyone with a family. Daytime Paris with its parks, cultural institutions, schools and medical services are outstanding. The arts are integrated

everywhere, with housing and atelier programs, and I started to connect to intellectuals without the glamour factor; individuals of high moral and intellectual integrity and humility that I have learned to love and respect.

There are still produced ideas here of great seriousness and validity, there is a class of intellectuals that resist the Hollywood factor, that rejects the easy hype of the contemporary art world glamour, consisting of people who seek a different connection to society than the large headlines of worldly success. The museums still have the highest exhibition standards; there is now a new charge for collaborations between institutions. Paris is again a place to deal with in contemporary art, there are important and influential collectors and many new challenging galleries.

My Atelier MYworLD in Belleville district is a satellite, my own private Idahoe, part but not inside of the capital. Thus, I have come to constitute and appreciate the ideal the Parisians adore, their individual right to opposition, to live how they want, without imposing their views on anyone in the discreet code of civil and polite society.

In this interface, Paris opens as a city of wonders, the streets, the people, the architecture, the erotic charge, the food, wine, champagne, it is a great backdrop during long days and nights of solitary concentration, to enter the city in this anonymity is like sinking into a hot relaxing bath.

Kjell Torriset, (Detail) The Boxer, 2009, oil on canvas, 220 x 200 cm www.kjelltorriset.com

31.08.11 MÅG issue FIVE: SIMONA BARBERA LISA SLOMINSKI NEWSHA TAVAKOLIAN ROGHIEH ASGARI TORVUND TORIL JOHANNESSEN LISA STÅLSPETS JOANNA PAWLIK LENE BaaDSVIK øRMEN NISRINE BOUKHARI