Exhibition
The Beholder
The Beholder is a textile installation by set designer and visual artist Signe Becker. It is a sensual work where sound, light, and a large textile are composed and choreographed together into a holistic experience.
Wind, sound, light, textile.
Leaf, shell, sling, sack, basket, bag, bottle,
pot, net, container, womb,
O' behold
The Beholder.
The thing to put things in,
the container for the things contained.
O'behold
The holder
The being
The Beholder!
The Beholder is a response to the book The carrier bag theory of fiction, by Ursula K. Le Guin, which proposes the carrier bag as the first cultural tool, a correction to the masculine story we all know about the sword, spear or bone as the first device.
"If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what you have, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again - if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. It is the story that makes the difference."
(Ursula K. Le Guin)
Signe Becker is currently a research fellow at the Oslo Academy of the Arts. The Beholder is the fourth public work included in her research project Made life, staged objects and a staged self.
Sound design is made by Per Platou and light design by Martin Myrvold.
Co-producer: Black Box Teater
Supported by: Det Norske Komponistfond, Fond for Lyd og Bilde and Oslo Academy of the Arts
Tickets Black Box Teater: https://oitf.no/the-beholder/