Warren Brodey: Earthchild – A Time Journey, Guttormsgaards Archive, Blaker
Exhibitions that have stayed with me this year have, in many ways, been tied to reflections and feelings about how the technology we surround ourselves with could have been different. In comparison to today’s time-thieves and war machines, encountering the cybernetician Warren Brodey’s sensitive experiments from the 1970s was particularly intriguing. “Brodey sought to make the potential paths of technology visible so that it might be possible to take another route,” I scribbled in a note during Evgeny Morozov’s lecture at the opening. These diverging routes were conveyed through Brodey’s books, the magazine Radical Software, and a documentary featuring glimpses of children’s toys that, in an organic fashion, responded to play.
Sanna Helena Berger, BOURSE, Centralbanken, Oslo
In the gallery named after the bank that once occupied the same premises, Berger exhibited five thousand one-kroner coins – an amount equivalent to the exhibition’s production budget. The coins were decoratively mounted in a precise line along the gallery walls, while the rest of the money was placed in a random drawer elsewhere in the building. The exhibition came across as a measured yet capricious response to a precarious artist economy, an art market where art circulates as currency, and a timely, assertive materialisation in an era when money is no longer physical and capital detaches itself from tangible value creation.
Dubmorphology (Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison), Risten Anine Gaup, Runa Bergsmo, and Rámavoul Elle Bigge/Ellen Berit Dalbakk, Our Time is Now, Arctic Moving Images and Film Festival, Evenskjer
The festival transported all attendees by bus from Harstad to Várdobáiki Sámi Centre. Here, the artist duo Dubmorphology, comprising Gary Stewart and Trevor Mathison, performed alongside artists and musicians Risten Anine Gaup, Runa Bergsmo, and duojár Ellen Berit Dalbakk / Rámavoul Elle Bigge in a performance structured as a feedback situation. In this setup, Dubmorphology responded to the contributions of the other performers from behind the mixing desk, incorporating sounds such as the rustling of a sølje (brooch) amplified through contact microphones. The event was captivatingly unpredictable – a kind of search for unplanned encounters in sound across cultural backgrounds and artistic expressions operating on entirely different premises than those of language or images.
Johanne Edvarda B. Slaatta is a writer with a background in art history from Humboldt University in Berlin. She is currently studying at the Kabelvåg School of Moving Images and is a member of Hærk, a curatorial collective focused on film and video art. Previously, she co-managed the gallery Plum Trim in Oslo.
Translation: Marie-Alix Isdahl
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here
