Entrée Retrospective 12 13 14
Colophon Publisher Entrée ISBN 978-82-999017-1-0 Editor Randi Grov Berger Texts Camilla Brochs-Haukedal Susanne Christensen Eleanor Clare Cecilie Holck Espen Johansen Heather Jones Mette Karlsvik Julie Lillelien Porter Anna Lundh Dillan Marsh Steinar Sekkingstad Arne Skaug Olsen Espen Søbye Line Ulekleiv Graphic design Asbjørn René Josdal Jens Johan Tandberg Print Livonia Print Artists Jørund Aase Falkenberg Azar Alsharif Rosa Barba Javier Barrios Are Blytt Christian von Borries Marco Bruzzone Danilo Correale Espen Dietrichson Leander Djønne Ida Ekblad Tora Endestad Bjørkheim Sammy Engramer Serina Erfjord Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena Marit Følstad Kjersti Foyn Mathijs van Geest Pedro Gómez-Egaña Ulrika Gomm Steinar Haga Kristensen Jeannine Han Tamara Henderson Lisa Him-Jensen David Horvitz Marianne Hurum Toril Johannessen Omar Johnsen Sanya Kantarovsky Annette Kierulf Caroline Kierulf Terence Koh Lars Korff Lofthus Ingeborg Kvame Oliver Laric Erik Larsson Liz Magic Laser Else Leirvik Malin Lennström-Örtwall Gabriel Lester Lewis & Taggart Cato Løland Klara Sofie Ludvigsen Anna Lundh Bjørn-Henrik Lybeck Cameron MacLeod Jumana Manna Dillan Marsh Kyle Morland Bjørn Mortensen Santiago Mostyn Randi Nygård Oliver Pietsch Raqs Media Collective Dan Riley Borghild Rudjord Unneland Athi-Patra Ruga Anngjerd Rustand Arne Rygg Vilde Salhus Røed Espen Sommer Eide Andrea Spreafico Kristin Tårnesvik André Tehrani Sandra Vaka Olsen Kjersti Vetterstad Lina Viste Grønli Sinta Werner Bedwyr Williams Magnhild Øen Nordahl Stian Ådlandsvik
Index Espen Johansen, essay s.7 2012 s.17 Anna Lundh s.20 Anna Lundh, lecture s.24 Sinta Werner s.30 Stian Ådlandsvik s.33 Arne Skaug Olsen, review s.37 Camilla Brochs-Haukedal, review s.38 Cato Løland, Oliver Pietsch s.40 Anngjerd Rustand s.44 Susanne Christensen, essay s.46 Flag Bergen, Nesflaten, New York City & Stavanger s.49 Heather Jones, interview s.56 Natasha Marie Llorens, essay s.66 2013 s.71 Lars Korff Lofthus s.74 Magnhild Øen Nordahl, Omar Johnsen s.76 Azar Alsharif s.80 Vilde Salhus Røed s.84 Cecilie Holck, essay s.89 Dillan Marsh s.90 Camilla Brochs-Haukedal, review s.93 Eleanor Clare, Dillan Marsh, essay s.96 Christian von Borries s.98 Pedro Goméz-Egana s.100 Randi Grov Berger, essay s.102 André Tehrani s.104 Kunstforum, interview s.108 2014 s.113 Espen Sommer Eide, Kristin Tårnesvik s.116 Line Ulekleiv, essay s.118 Espen Søbye, essay s.122 Terence Koh s.126 Julie Lillelien Porter, review s.132 Oliver Laric s.134 Marit Følstad s.136 Steinar Sekkingstad, essay s.139 Terence Koh, book launch s.146 Mathijs van Geest s.148 Tora Endestad Bjørkheim, Bjørn-Henrik Lybeck s.150 Mette Karlsvik, essay s.152 Lewis & Taggart s.154 Bjørn Mortensen s.156 Cato Løland s.158 The Artists Supper Club s.160 Artists Biographies s.163
Mathijs van Geest And then it s April already Flag Bergen 2012 6
On Entrée Espen Johansen It is March 2012, and the people of Bergen have just caught the first glimpse of spring. Entrée is already about to open it s second show of the year, but this one is quite different. Ten international Bergen-based artists have been commissioned to design their own flags, soon to be raised all over the city of Bergen. This is the first exhibition where Entrée subordinates its immaculate white cube window gallery and moves into public space, interacting with a new and broader audience. Surely, lots of people must have stopped in their tracks for a split second or more to ponder the origin of a puzzling flag they had never seen before, before continuing on their daily quests. Others started their journey at Entrée, which served as a hub where all the flags were displayed. From wall mount brackets all along the wall, the large flags loomed from floor to ceiling in the crammed space. They bared a certain resemblance to the famous row of flags in front of the un building in New York, only that their considerable size (200 x 145cm) displayed indoors made Entrée look like a curious embassy of the arts. In the gallery one could get a map pointing out the different locations of the flags around town, so touring the city in search of the flags like a treasure hunt, became as much a part of the exhibition as the flags themselves. The project is equally complex and equally simple, so it should not come as a surprise that the flags also attracted attention from elsewhere, and later expanded and travelled to the picturesque village of Nesflaten, the city of Stavanger, Tromsø and to the buzzing metropolis of New York City (as part of Performa 13). With these adaptions, it grew immensely and came to include flags from sixty artists. The thought-provoking implications represented by the flag project appeals so strongly to us all because the flag holds such important connotations; entire nations can be signified through a flag, thus a flag can unite and segregate, and helps categorizing them and us. The different flag designs were based on colors, forms, photos, pictograms, logos, texts and drawings, and partially blended in, partially stood out in the cityscape. Flags are a pretty much unanimously recognized as a powerful symbol, and its tremendous importance as a signifier is unquestioned bordering on the mystical in most parts of the world. So placing the flag under artistic scrutiny is nothing new (think Jasper Johns), but as opposed to treating the flag as a painting, this project does pretty much the opposite when it takes the works outside and they are allowed to keep their original function. Fast forward, to the autumn of 2014, Entrée was back in New York City to establish a small satellite gallery for a limited duration of time. The venue showed both scaled-down versions of ongoing or upcoming shows 7
Lewis & Taggart Double Standard II 24 karat gold leaf on promotional material from Standard Gallery, Oslo 2014 8
from the programming in Bergen, as well as exhibitions made exclusively for the space. The first exhibition presented Canadian artist-duo Lewis and Taggart, an exhibition that acted as a prelude for their upcoming show in Bergen (2015). A Nice Pair, which happened to open on September 11, centered on the formal investigation of things in pairs, the notion of the double and the poetic mirroring between them. Such as their plinth with marble top, stacked on top another identical plinth, showing the upper part of a small paper bag together with its mimicking double, handmade from metal. Or the series of promotional postcards from the commercial gallery Standard (Oslo), which were plated in gold leaf except for where the word standard appeared (twice); a smart and humorous pun playing with the notion of the double standard and the gold standard. When Marit Følstad opened her exhibition Sense of Doubt in New York, she was simultaneously exhibiting in Bergen. The ambitious exhibition included two new two-channel video installations and a neon piece. From a fixed camera angle the viewer could see a back-faced woman staring into exploding fireworks, or being exposed to toxic CO 2 gas. The sober, eerie aesthetic of the videos left the visitor to immerse in the atmosphere. In a large plywood installation a neon piece showed the letters, revolution, before some of the letters went out, changing the word into evolution, revolt, and finally ruin. The exhibition as a whole was a dark and almost bodily experience, enhanced from the ambient sound piece by musician Svarte Greiner. Entrée also went elsewhere when they produced the exhibition Trialog, with artists Magnhild Øen Nordahl and Omar Johnsen, for Platform Stockholm in Sweden. Nordahl s sculptural works seemed to draw inspiration from modernist sculpture as well as from architecture and furniture. Comprised of steel tubes and plates resting on a wooden framework painted partially in bright colors, the works appeared to be dictated by utilitarian needs. That the objects also had a function was quickly realized, as the sculptures were as a matter of fact functioning as speakers. An analogue modular electronic synthesizer made by Johnsen was connected to the sculptures, and the instrument was able to play through the metal plates, which were connected to transducers. Through the experimental collaboration between the two artists, they managed to reanimate the sculptures. By giving them a function, they made them into something more than aesthetical objects, and by doing exactly that; they simultaneously drew attention to the craftsmanship and its physical qualities, both from a technological and aesthetical point of view. So far I have looked primarily at the outside projects by Entrée, and there are more, but at Entrée s core is naturally the exhibition program run from their main venue in Nøstegaten 42. Looking at the programming, and comparing it to Entrée s earlier years, it is apparent that the institution has matured since 2009. Starting out as an artist-run space with a very limited budget, Entrée has gradually developed into something that rather resembles a miniature Kunsthall. It does not behave like a merely static institution, satisfied regurgitating finalized concepts and exhibitions, but instead 9
takes a more active role as a producer of content in close dialog with the exhibiting artists. Those who are invited to exhibit are commissioned to make new works, and are given around a year preparing for their show, enabling them to marinate in their ideas for a sufficient amount of time. Bergen is a relatively small city but it can boast a vital contemporary art scene, and a number of the artists that have exhibited at Entrée are also based in the city. For several of them, Entrée was the place where they had their first solo exhibition, while others were more established. There is also a wide span between the types of projects being shown in the space, so I will in the following briefly present some of Entrée s exhibitions from the last few years. In Something that stands for Something/Double Described Tautologies, Sinta Werner made two large-scale wall paintings in the gallery space and showed a series of collages. Through elaborate fictitious elements, Werner investigated semantics and the relationship between the representation and the thing represented. In Inset, Werner used the end wall of the gallery as both canvas and motif. Like a mise en abyme, she painted the wall as if it were approximately a meter further back, thus repeating parts of the floor and the walls in the painting (a work few noticed until it was pointed out). In the other mural, Raumsignatur, Werner imitated and blew up in size one of her geometrical diamond patterned pencil drawings, which were hung on the same wall on top of the other. These different approaches of repetition and perception were both critical and playful, as she obscures preconceived ideas on original and copy. Stian Ådlandsvik s Abstract Simplicity of Need consisted mainly of a bare drywall structure running zigzag the length of the gallery. On this structure there were several square holes as well as framed pictures of broken drywall. At the far end of the gallery rested a sledgehammer. This one, however, was hinged along the shaft, giving it a comical, helpless appearance. One cannot help but try to piece the different works together, decipher the narrative and figure out how they all relate to each other. It is tempting to imagine that the artist, or someone else, smashed holes in the drywall to the point where the sledgehammer gave in and became limp as a noodle. The muted, conceptual exhibition could also be perceived as an investigation concerning production and the material state of construction/destruction. Succeeding Ådlandsvik s exhibition was Anngjerd Rustand s The Dust Will Roll Together, which showed a series of minimal drawings and paintings. Mounted from the ceiling, the drawings were installed around the room, forming a kind of landscape one could enter, rather than merely observe from a distance. The thin paper reacted immediately to one s presence, making the viewers extra cautious as they walked around in the exhibition. The drawings and paintings could be described as both lyrical and compulsive in their appearance, made with just enough careful strokes so that you would not think of it as unfinished. Colored pencils drew up lines that seemed to follow an inexplicable logic, composed through movement, rhythm and pauses. Some of the colored lines created shapes that looked organic, while other strokes seemed to be dictated by geometry. 10
Flag Bergen All flags united Entrée 2012 Sinta Werner Inset Wallpainting 2012 11
3D scanning marble columns at Kode Art Museums of Bergen with Oliver Laric. 2013 12 Terence Koh installing sticks, stones and bones. 2013
For the Sake of Color was a photo-based exhibition with works by Vilde Salhus Røed, who, despite having studied photography, rarely takes photos herself. Rather, she explores and revisits notions and preconceptions of photography from a conceptual point of view, addressing its technical, material and narrative sides. The exhibition title points back to the archive of Leif Preus, a photo enthusiast, who later founded Norway s National Museum of Photography. For the exhibition she recontextualized and modified these archived photos, and juxtaposed them with text and sculptural elements, creating new works that served as both representation as well as objects. Another archive-based exhibition was Korsmo s Weed Archive, by Espen Sommer Eide and Kristin Tårnesvik. The material derived from biologist Emil Korsmo (1863 1953), who collected and catalogued throughout his career an extensive archive of weeds. His prized research helped agricultural workers increase harvest in a time of food-shortage after World War 1. The archive contains numerous charts, posters, texts, as well as plants, roots and seeds neatly organized in a herbarium. In the spirit of the biologist, Sommer Eide and Tårnesvik started systematizing the material once more, after their own desires, which resulted in an experimental presentation of carefully chosen excerpts from their findings. Pages from the herbarium were being projected on sheets of paper hanging from threads in the ceiling. The projector lamps were the only light sources in the room that for the occasion was darkened with sunscreen filter on the windows. The archive was in a way turned inside-out, in the sense that its rational and scientific mode of being was being deconstructed into something irrational, but in turn into something more poetic. Instead of showing us the formula for battling weeds, they showed us some facets of the archive, the archivist and that which was being archived. Both exhibitions were later shown again, Salhus Røed s exhibition in Preus Museum (Horten) and Sommer Eide & Tårnesvik s exhibition at The Stenersen Museum (Oslo). For a small, non-profit gallery to produce exhibitions that gets picked up by museums and collected by them should surely be considered a remarkable feat, and it serves as a testament to the artistic quality of Entrée s programming. In Yuanmingyuan 3D by Oliver Laric, concepts of authorship and reproduction were questioned and negotiated. With a 3D scanner, digital recordings were made at kode Art Museums of Bergen of seven columns from the Old Summer Palace in Beijing. The files were then 3D-printed in white plaster and displayed on a large plinth in the exhibition, with the download address on the gallery window for everyone to be able to make their own copies. At the same time the original columns were being kept approximately half a mile away, already removed more than 4,000 miles from their original context, in the process of soon to be returned to their origin. Cultural artifacts of historical interest have been acquired by more or less cynical means throughout the ages, and despite being treasured possessions by museums all over the world, these items can sometimes cause a 13
serious cultural or political headache for the people involved, whom for different reasons claim ownership over them. In the case of the seven columns from the old summer palace in Beijing, they were purchased by the Norwegian Johan W N Munthe (1864 1935) a general in the Chinese army around the turn of the 20th century, who later donated his large collection of artifacts to the museum in Bergen. After almost a century in the museum s possession, a very lucrative deal was made between a Chinese investor group and the museum, in order to have the columns returned to China for a long-term loan. Laric, through his gesture of 3D printing the sculptures and uploading the scanned files online, does not provide any sound advice in the matter as to who is their rightful owner. Instead he is pointing to the recurring predicaments concerning ownership and authenticity, and draws a parallel between this case from more than a hundred years ago, as well as copyright and ownership conundrums in the internet-age of today. The project created discussions online, and was later exported to James Cohan Gallery in New York and Kunsthaus Hamburg. Terence Koh opened the exhibition sticks, stones and bones on a dreadful and stormy night with a powerful performance onboard a small boat confronting an unruly ocean. Koh decided to close down two galleries in town, and at Entrée he blocked the doors with a humongous pile of firewood. A small note on the door explained that the galleries were closed, and you should walk to the other gallery, or take the boat that was set up as a shuttle door to door. The exhibition involved in addition to galleries Entrée and Tag Team also public space and an Artists Book, serving as a tour guide. A lighthouse was placed in the city plaza, and the journey between the locations became an integral part of experiencing the exhibition. Albeit only a brief description of a chosen few of Entrée s exhibitions, it should be clear that the gallery has initiated a varied program. As an institution it does not show any signs of being governed by a set agenda, aiming to promote a particular niche of contemporary art. Rather it displays a conscientious cacophony of different artistic practices, mediums and expressions, contained within the pristine white cube that, whenever needed, becomes modified to the unrecognizable in favor the exhibitions. While it might be tempting to draw a line between recurring themes or elements, on closer inspection it becomes evident that there are just as many differences. The eclectic mix of artists reveals an experimental attitude and an ever-expanding scope. Generally speaking, the invited artists do appear to subscribe to a certain set of similar aesthetic principles, as the exhibitions usually emit a sense of sobriety and quiet grandeur. Looking aside from the attempt to pinpoint a possible red thread in the programming, what is clear is that Entrée has become more firmly established and more refined over the years. The gallery today is somewhat different from the gallery it started out as, more than five years ago. There has been a steady, organic growth and while the productions might be bigger and some of the artists might have become more established, Entrée s curious approach appears to remain intact. 14