Underskog

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

MAGALI

Marie Svindt

25.05.12 – 10.06.12

Opening: Friday 25.05.12, 19.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays



While studying Marie Svindt’s pictures I wonder if these eyes want another world. One where fragility and tenderness are the subjects of desire. Desire is quite central in these compositions. Identity is hidden, heads are cut off, faces obscured, no sign of human beings but traces. I can’t help but think that pictures like these demand a little patience, and holding on to the priniciple of pleasureable mundaneness is like holding onto a broken piece of porcelain that should not be damaged further. Like Virginia Wolf’s gasp for air when faced with immense beauty damaged by the noise of experience. The end result though, is about shutting those distractions out. And what’s left is images you have the urge to enter. To touch that skin, put your toes down into that stream in order to sense the temperature rising through your legs, your womb, to your head and through your hair into the invisible nerves ending there. Closing your eyes with a vaguer overexposed image, a reflection, resting and conquering that concrete image which is now just a doubtful or dreamlike imprint, an illusion gone when eyes reopened. To abstract something so familiar. An image with no clear reference is an image where everything can refer to anything. The only way to make everything clear. . Yes, this style has been used and still has references to fashion and illustration. Mood-shots do because they want us to embrace them with emotions. A romantic gesture. But Svindt only briefly visits that reference, and by balancing on the edge of that manipulative language she manages to create an inner revolt in the viewer while still letting the image rest in their head, like the taste of a piece of candy in your mouth, even minutes after it’s swallowed. Her work is individual without being individualistic. Her images are quite lucid and mild without ever embracing banality. As if all the ideas for her images are created in an instant, a flash, and the reason for making them into photographs is because getting that mental image inside her head, a gift from her mind, forces her to materialize that picture. So she can share it with others. Doing so she is not only touching the essence of photography, but, for most mortal human beings, the essence of art itself. Fascination through energy. And the transformation of that gesture into an object or a picture. Seeing the girl laying naked in bed, overwhelmed by the intense illumination from the window, makes me want to touch her pale skin. And it doesn’t even make me feel sleazy. It’s like watching a picture with my body. An immense sadness evolves, and I’m disappointed. Not by the picture in front of me but my lack of patience in observing. The consequence of letting the method of observation take control over my ability to be fascinated by the unsure. Is the light striking your face in the morning your friend or your enemy? Or something in between.. I guess you need time to consider that light. Her work is slow and its shyness demands patience. The images I saw of her almost seven years ago are still imprinted in my memory. Pale skin barely touching fabric. Worn down buildings overwhelmed by summer light. If these images evoke nausea it’s only because you can not deal with the refined bloom of elegance evoked in the void between your eyes and your mind.

NoPlace proudly presents:

FALLEN TREE #2

Marianne Bredesen

Saturday 19.05.2012, 14.00 – 18.00





Fallen Tree part I consists of a tree-root encased in a wooden crate fashioned from the very stem it used to nourish. Quite literally this is the thing in itself, but only on the level of the sculptural syntax of the work: the thing displayed in a box made from the very thing itself. The actual thing in itself remains as inaccessible as ever. What Marianne Bredesen performs is a reconfiguration of the material properties of the object of her investigation, in this case a fallen pine-tree, to pry from it a demonstration of its foundational properties, its existence in time and space. So her literal, spoof-philosophical evocation of the in-itself is only aimed at elucidating the spatio-temporal structure inherent in the tree, to make it an abstract representation of itself. This movement from specificity to abstraction applies to symbolization at large. So any material that is put to work as an image, will have to waive its particularity and see itself reduced to a set of generic properties.


Fallen Tree part II is comprised of a sound recording of a tree that falls. The tongue-in-cheek cooption of philosophical conondrums is still an aside. The two instances of the work – part I and II – will be hosted in separate locations. What Bredesens methodology seems to ultimately push for is a attemptive delineation of the art-object as a set of generic properties, specific to the art-object, by mapping its basic functionalities and have the materiality of the work serve to exemplify these.


Like the tree she has has used for material, the work itself is also uprooted, unhinged from any one location. This spatial ambivalence, or undecidedness, embodied by the two-partite structure of the work, is one such symptomatic property of the spatial configuration of the art-work; so is also the absence of substance, the sound is held separate from the physical representation of the work, as the two parts occupy different locations. Yet another general property of the work that Bredesen addresses, is its dissemination accross media – being embodied as both sound and sculpture. The outcome is not a once and for all exposé of what constitutes the art object, but a continuous mapping of its underlying structure.



NoPlace
Adress: Oslogate 2B, 0192 Oslo, Norway
Tram and bus: Munkegata (Tram 18 & 19, Bus 70), Oslogate (Bus 37)
Contact: utopia@noplace.no

www.noplace.no

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

ANGELS BEFORE THE BATTLE, MOTHER

Jason Havneraas

10.05.12 – 20.05.12

Opening: Thursday 10.05.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





“We’re tired of being taken for granted, we’re tired of being used. We don’t like the kind of people we’ve become.”

JG Ballard, Millennium People, 2003


There is an interesting chapter in Errol Morris’ book Believing Is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography about a photograph from the American Civil War of a dead Unionist soldier’s family, found in his hand with no identification. A doctor took it upon himself to find the family and a long and interesting story unfolds. The photo could not be reproduced in newspapers at that time for lack of technology and so verbal descriptions of the picture were printed around the country, and postcard prints sent and handed out.

There are no photographs in Jason Havneraas’ exhibition Angels Before The Battle, Mother at Noplace. This might seem a bit of a strange thing to say given the importance in his work of the images before us. There are verifiably seventeen photographic prints in the two rooms of this gallery and they could hardly be more beholden to the craft of photography. But this does not mean that photography only comes down to this. This is the thing about Havneraas: the camera, the picture, the notion of photographer even, do not add up to his art – the event, the engagement with the subject is just as important.

Ah-ha, one might respond, but there are still clearly photographs hung on these solid walls. Not only this but they are surely inspired by traditional photographic portraiture. We even have an inkling as to their photographic lineage – they pay homage to the photographs of soldiers taken before the great civil war battles. We might protest further that in our daily lives we are bombarded with a hundred pictures a minute, the majority of which we would categorize as photographs, we most certainly know what a photograph is and what it does, we recognize these as photographs. But here, perhaps, is the point: if all of those mass media images are photographs, then there are no photographs in this exhibition because photography can do so much more than that. And here, it does.

The angels in the exhibition are inspired by archival images of Unionist soldiers before battle. When the pictures were taken these were fated figures, lost, strangely angelic: images entirely commensurate with the suffering of that time. Today, of course, we have our own crises, not least in Norway where there are already a million images of recent traumatic events, and so a key question might be, what is the appropriate medium, technology, and presentation that can do justice to the pervading sense of disquiet of our times? How might we capture our earthly angels? And in the next moment, how do we keep memory alive, meaningful, not allowing it to slip into instantaneous archiving?

For Havneraas it requires a special form of photographic installation that is an event in itself, a constellation of processes.

Havneraas’ work embraces the new beside the old. All of the images in the exhibition, some seemingly arcane, others art historical or ritualistic in reference, are nevertheless contemporary, attuned in counter-intuitive ways to our times. Indeed, they are forward looking in the sense that the artist is creating a new mythic outlook that rejects the failings of our cheapened media. The two films in the exhibition are shot with high definition video but through the lens of a traditional large-format camera, producing a very special, singular light and in the process disregarding the fetishization of the old and the seduction of the new.

We have probably lost something in photography in our image-saturated times, not least an appeal to the emotions beyond sentimentality, but this truth might still be recovered from its history. In Angels Before The Battle, Mother there is, in part, an allegorical return to another time and place, the American Civil War, when photography seemed to do more, when its portraits could invoke love, true (not tabloid induced) pathos, moments when we were neither our earthly selves nor yet departed – all of us potentially angels in the making.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

(FOUC

Richard Alexandersson

27.04.12 – 06.05.12

Opening: Friday 27.04.12, 20.00 – 23.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

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NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

PLATOU’s CAVE

Per Platou

13.04.12 – 22.04.12

Opening: Friday 13.04.12, 20.00 – 23.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

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NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

PLATOU’s CAVE

Per Platou

13.04.12 – 22.04.12

Opening: Friday 13.04.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

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NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

PLATOU’s CAVE

Per Platou

13.04.12 – 22.04.12

Opening: Friday 13.04.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

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NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

HALDEPUNKTER

Sigmund Skard

23.03.12 – 01.04.12

Opening: Friday 23.03.12, 20.00-23.00
Performance starts at 21.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays



Two fragments

-

When
a) recorded
b) repeated
c) collected
d) compared

The difference.
Makes sense.

-

Observations are essential.
They inspire a desire for finding a direction.
A system where the fragments can be arranged.
And temporarily clarified.

There is beauty in the process,
and its remains will be displayed.

-

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

FRENZY

Gro Gjengedal Navelsaker
Ingeborg Annie Lindahl
Jane Sverdrupsen
Janna Thöle-Juul
Veronica Rebecca Johansen

Curated by Tommy Olsson

24.02.12 – 11.03.12

Opening: Friday 24.02.12, 20.00 – 23.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





It came from the west, my friends, and it hit me right here!!! And it will hit you too.

As is often the case within the intervowen fabric of hidden agendas and unforeseen minor setbacks – or indeed, minor disasters – that constitutes this place where we do our job (i.e. contemporary art – the contemporary term for “modernism”, or if you prefer, “pop-corn modernism”) – here and now, as ever so often, the gallery/showroom/institution (i.e. “the white cube”, home of “the dark circle”) functions as the place where all ends meet. Timing is of course crucial. So is location. This was not intended to counterbalance the interior design-approach to art that takes place elsewhere. Oh no, this is actually No Place we’re talking about here. Oh, Lord, why not leave as quick as possible and live forever after?

Because you need this.
And you need it bad.
Admit it, you need it now.

Because now you know.
And things will never be the same again.

“Why?” you ask. Because we’re in this situation together, and the situation is never stable, never fixed. We’re in constant flux, and already reading this far you get the idea – don’t make me go on with this topic or we’ll end up in life as illusion-country. That is not where this is going. Not without fighting back. Utterly pointless These are the facts; FRENZY is a show born out of the other city. The city that is not Oslo. The city that is really No Place. Yes, Bergen. You heard me. Bergen. Smooth, where Oslo is rough. Hardcore, where Oslo fails. Vibrant, where Oslo is past tense. And the other way round. Lame, where Oslo is hot. Conservative, where Oslo is radical. But most of all; West, where Oslo is East. You couldn’t possibly find a better “second largest city” anywhere. I mean, where would that be? Birmingham? Gothenburg? Aarhus? Akureyri? Tampere? Battambang? With all respect; No. No. No. Place. No. Regrets. No. Nothing. Nothing will remain. And these words on Nothing will end up where they belong – in a vast unexplored space.

However, to keep things down to earth, if only for a moment; By pure coincidence – or is it a massive Freudian slip from the curator? – the participants all happen to be women in their early thirties. Lets be fair; that’s interesting, right? Why is that? Could it possibly boil down to the curator’s personal taste in women? I mean…they’re not exactly ugly or anything, right? And, you know, he’s got a reputation and such. Could be interesting to know what this is about, so here’s what he wrote recently in one of the neverending chats he had with the nice people in this place that is not a place:

“Personally, and you have to take my word for it, I really didn’t think about the sex-factor until fairly recently. I just, you know, thought these five artists shared some common ground in their work, and in their approach, their way of doing research. Indeed, even the fields of research seem to overlap every now and then. It kind of makes sense though. That they’re all female I mean. But my humble ambition didn’t really go beyond my wish to export some of the vital momentum in Bergen to Oslo. Because I feel Oslo needs to catch up in some areas. Not to say Bergen is in any sense where it’s really happening big time, but fact is – there’s something going on the other side of the mountain and it is wise not to be ignorant about it. Then again, five women in their early thirties, all of them still doing their masters degree, is of course not in any way representable for the whole picture. However, they do represent a certain critical, sharp focus – it might be a generation-thing, or it might…well, I think it probably is, to do with gender. Something…kind of hard to define for a man, ok? I don’t know what it means to be a woman. I hardly know what it means to be thirty. But from my point of view…uh…there’s something about that shared experience, and the way they manage to twist that around until it becomes an advantage. Deep down there’s a diabolic motor running the show, and you know, it’s not mine – I just work here. However, I very much think it essential to distribute this here and now”

So much for patos. So much for ambition. All sacrificed for vision. Or was that visionary? The personal politics of Gro Gjengedal Navelsaker, the environmental statements of Ingeborg Annie Lindahl, the mad – really mad – science of Jane Sverdrupsen, the unpredictable fairytale-gone-wrong-interventions of Janna Thöle-Juul, and the re-thinking of the term “gothic” by Veronica Rebecca Johansen is, at least as an idea, certainly a potent potion for those involved enough to be familiar with their work. Nightmarish. Hard. Brutal. Determined. You know…female. Yet, if we’re to believe the curator, all this is secondary to something he has yet to make clear – but really, can you trust this fat old slob that embodies the old saying that all art critics are failed artists? (No, that was…Frank Zappa about the music press, wasn’t it?)

Really? No. But you’re lucky in that respect; this is not a matter of trust (as if anything could be). It is really up to you. It is always up to you. And you will feel what I feel. Alone. Naked. Blind. A constant state of desire. And you will remember these words when they hit you where it hurts the most. When you realise how alien all this really is. And that it doesn’t matter what you think. And the disease in the strangers eyes is your disease. On this very day. In this very moment. This moment of FRENZY that will not last, but make its irreparable damage along the course.

Of course, we have failed.

That’s it. Just another goddamn failure.

Action. Time. Vision.

The Ceremony is about to begin.

Again.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

ROBERT JOHNSON WHERE YOU AT?

Tommy Høvik

09.02.12 – 19.02.12

Opening: Thursday 09.02.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





“I know no other grace but that of being born,” he cried. But I could sense his clenched teeth when he continued: “An impartial mind finds that enough.” I sat with him a while and left with the scolding words: “But no man is impartial when confronted with life and death.” Once again enough unsaid.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

ROBERT JOHNSON WHERE YOU AT?

Tommy Høvik

09.02.12 – 19.02.12

Opening: Thursday 09.02.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





“I know no other grace but that of being born,” he cried. But I could sense his clenched teeth when he continued: “An impartial mind finds that enough.” I sat with him a while and left with the scolding words: “But no man is impartial when confronted with life and death.” Once again enough unsaid.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

ROBERT JOHNSON WHERE YOU AT?

Tommy Høvik

09.02.12 – 19.02.12

Opening: Thursday 09.02.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





“I know no other grace but that of being born,” he cried. But I could sense his clenched teeth when he continued: “An impartial mind finds that enough.” I sat with him a while and left with the scolding words: “But no man is impartial when confronted with life and death.” Once again enough unsaid.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

ROBERT JOHNSON WHERE YOU AT?

Tommy Høvik

09.02.12 – 19.02.12

Opening: Thursday 09.02.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





“I know no other grace but that of being born,” he cried. But I could sense his clenched teeth when he continued: “An impartial mind finds that enough.” I sat with him a while and left with the scolding words: “But no man is impartial when confronted with life and death.” Once again enough unsaid.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

ROBERT JOHNSON WHERE YOU AT?

Tommy Høvik

09.02.12 – 19.02.12

Opening: Thursday 09.02.12, 20.00 – 23.00
...
Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





“I know no other grace but that of being born,” he cried. But I could sense his clenched teeth when he continued: “An impartial mind finds that enough.” I sat with him a while and left with the scolding words: “But no man is impartial when confronted with life and death.” Once again enough unsaid.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

BORDERS AND SHADING
ALIGNMENT AND SPACING

…

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

IMMEDIATE THEREAFTER

Tor Jørgen van Eijk


13.01.12 – 15.01.12

Opening: Friday 13.01.12, 20.00 – 23.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





Compared to much of van Eijks earlier work – where there’s a pervasive tendency towards obstructing the immersive powers of the moving image by coercing the flow of signals into abstract patterns or jumbling the depiction of linear time by obsessive repetition – Immediate Thereafter is notably straightforward in its narration and the treatment of its subject. The sanctimonious hands-off approach in the way it’s edited, caters to the conventional documentary format almost to the point where one suspects the artist of trying to reestablish the naive realism of the medium’s past and restore to video the ability to mediate perception. Although not a purely functional instance of witnessing (the opening shot features a short sequence where the camera man self-consciously adjusts the aperture of the camera), for the first twelve minutes of IT there are no repetitive loops, no speculative cuts or superimpositions, no motions towards formalist abstraction or self-referentiality; simply the enactment of an almost passive receptivity in the form of a slow-paced walk through the terror-stricken city.


By playing on the common intuition that manipulation and referentiality is inversely proportionate, that the attainability of a mediation of truth relies on exercising restraint in the editing room, IT’s largely unmanipulated stream seems to propose that we are witnessing an attempt at reconnecting with the referent of the image and at bridging the esthetic distance that the technological process of video creates between the recording and the recorded event. This act of bridging here takes the form of an ignoring of the endless possibilities for manipulation that working with video gives rise to. By way of this subtle negotiation of the video-image’s relation to its referent, van Eijk is tapping into our desire for art’s fictional durations to once again coincide with a perceptible reality, to seize to be virtual and, as such, politically ineffectual. But the subjugation of any underlying reality to the purely virtual paradigm that recording something onto video always entail, renders the difference between an image that has a real source and one that was generated from within the machinery of video irrelevant.


Panning across the empty streets van Eijk’s camera occasionally finds window panes that have fallen from their frames, and in their shattered state some of them look “rolled out” over the pavement beneath, like welcoming doormats or runway carpets. These broken shop windows – together with interim roadblocks and police in yellow vests – are all enveloped in long stretches of the ubiquitous and flimsy barrier tape that signals, contrary to the accidental image of the doormats, that you are in fact not welcome. This oxymoronic double-message: a coy invitation to enter (the doormat) encapsulated by a larger dissuasive argument (the barrier tape) is analog to the rhetorical structure of video viewed as a social and cultural phenomenon, which harbors a similar contradiction in the relation between its often unspoken promise to magically connect your perception to the actual situation that engendered the image (consider the documentary aspirations of video’s historical legacy) and its obvious inability to actually transcend the virtuality that follows from its technological premise.

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

””””””TXT D TXT, 4SAKE D RST””

Henrik Pask

16.12.11 – 18.12.11


Opening: Friday 16.12.11, 20.00 – 23.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays





9 is 1 too many 8 is 2 too many 7 is 3 too many

6 is 4 too many 5 is 5 too many 4 is 6 too many

3 is 7 too many 2 is 8 too many 1 is 9 too many

(starg8”s, discarn8”s, astroheavyw8”s) <<<>>>

NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:


SHAPE ATTEMPTING ESCAPE
Pleasure and taste on the outside of language

Lars Brekke


09.12.11 – 11.12.11

Opening: Friday 09.12.11, 20.00 – 23.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

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NoPlace, Oslo proudly presents:

AGALMA

Maja Nilsen

25.11.11 – 04.12.11

Opening: Friday 25.11.11, 20.00 – 23.00
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Opening hours 14-17, Saturdays and Sundays

Maja Nilsen’s work is heavily influenced by the baroque. But despite her thematic focus, the work is not didactic, it is not intended to elucidate. And even if the Baroque poses a strong current in her work, it is only one of many themes and references running through.

…