Galleri Maria Veie proudly presents Animal Magnetism 3 Friday February 4th and Saturday 5th

I.
Henriette Pedersen is an interdisciplinary artist with a background from choreography and time-based art, and to define her trilogy it was necessary to come up with a new term. Theatre critics might call it a performance when it is presented on stage with the audience safely seated in the dark, but what happens when the work of a choreographer enters the gallery space? Is it contemporary art or ballet? From my perspective, as an iconologist, Animal Magnetism 3 is not a performance, but an interformance.
Pedersen chooses dancers that are splendid instruments of expression and movement. The dancers’ extreme strength and independent artistic qualities make it possible for them to interact in a condition beyond control – responding to the state of the audience. Hysteria is not just a diagnosis; it may also be expressions of our suppressed feelings.
Pedersen works site specific, using three dimensional space, flood lights, and organisms as materials. She is not performing herself, but implementing her artistic ideas through living materials like dancers and opera singers. The dancer Kristine Karåla Øren is crucial for Pedersen’s work, but this time she is not wrestling with another female, but in a hysterical spiral with the Swedish opera singer, Fredrik Strid. In addition, Pedersen is cooperating with Tilo Hahn. Hahn works with electronical controlled light as the two others work with their voice. Animal Magnetism 3 is thereby a highly interfering work being created as a response to the specific space, the audience and the moment itself. It consists of sound and movement as the dancer and the tenor use their voice and their ‘historically effected consciousness’ (wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein) as described by Hans-Georg Gadamer in Truth and Method (1960). As a scholar finds the ways that a text’s history articulates with their own background, they use their experience in creation.
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