calendario eventi  :: 

X

Inaugurazioni | In corso
	Luglio 2025
l	m	m	g	v	s	d
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30	31

27/5/2015

Two Exhibitions

Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen

Gestures of Disappearance

The exhibition brought together, for the first time, four seminal artists, each of whom disappeared from the art world in different ways and for different reasons.

The exhibition gives a comprehensive overview of the life and work of the little known but influential pre-Dadaist poet, critic and rabble-rouser, Arthur Cravan, as well as post-war American based artists Bas Jan Ader, Chris Burden and Lee Lozano. As the title “Gestures of Disappearance” suggests, the exhibition focuses on the ostentatious, performative and, for some, inescapable aspects of artistic withdrawal.

When each of the artist’s scepticism about the social and political capacities of art reached its climax, their doubts in their own role as an artist became visible in both artworks and symbolic gestures. These gestures negotiated the individual possibilities within a societal framework that all four criticised, sometimes drastically, with sharp insight and little will to compromise.

Lozano and Cravan left the art world for good. Burden did not. Ader died during his last project, an attempt to cross the Atlantic from Cape Cod in his one-man yacht. The melancholic and existentialistic tone of the exhibition makes tangible the artists’ struggles with their identities and future perspectives. It points to an artistic model or myth of the artist rooted in romanticism, a position which had become ever more fragile, irrelevant and inadequate.

----

Ane Hjort Guttu

Ane Hjort Guttu is the 2015 Festival Artist. This exhibition will present a new body of work, commissioned by Bergen Kunsthall, which investigates issues of power, freedom, the role and responsibility of the artist, and the possibilities and limitations of so called ‘political art’.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a major new film, shot on location in Bergen, about a young art student who assumes the role of a beggar on the streets of the city. The work takes up a challenging position amidst the current debate on the prohibition of begging in Norway and the authorities’ treatment of the Romanian Roma. At the same time it gathers together a number of themes to which Guttu constantly returns in her works: the use of and access to public space; the scope of action for art and artists in the face of a politically sensitive situation; how we can or should position ourselves in relation to poverty and inequality; or whether effective political action is best achieved outside of the frame of art?

These themes are further explored through a number of other works in the exhibition which investigate the way in which the visual space of the city is changing. The privatization and commercialization of public space is another current issue in Bergen, where the municipality has recently signed a contract with an international agency for a significant increase in urban advertising. Set against the debate around begging, it highlights a contradictory and complex debate around the use of and rights to public space, and the way these different activities and demands also infringe on our personal space and psyche.

Image: Ane Hjort Guttu: Tiden går, still. 2014. Foto: Cecilie Semec FNF

Opening: 28. 5. 13:00

Bergen Kunsthall
Rasmus Meyers alle 5
Opening Hours:
Tuesday - Sunday 11 - 17
Thursdays 11 - 20

stampa

permanent link