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23/5/2012

Marianne Heier

Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen

Curated by Solveig Øvstebø

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For more information and material about Bergen Kunsthalls exhibitions, please contact Information Officer: Stein-Inge Århus.
Tel. +47 55 55 93 10, or +47 45 24 00 92
stein-inge@kunsthall.no

Opens Thursday 24 May. Performance at the opening

Bergen Kunsthall - Bergens Kunstforening
Rasmus Meyers alle 5 - N-5015 Bergen
Opening hours Landmark: Tuesday - Friday 11am - 6pm
Thursday 11am - 8pm
Friday & Saturday 11am - 5pm

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