Exhibition

Avgang 2022: Kunstakademiets masterutstilling / Folk tror Foxtrot

"Tror" is a Norwegian word that is somewhere between “think” and “believe”. Folk tror foxtrot might not make sense because you can’t think a dance, but it makes me wonder, how would I think or believe a dance? How does that thought move and feel? Foxtrot is based on how a fox moves, it makes me think about a fox trotting with short and quick steps through a forest. Dance is also a nice way people spend time together, and we can finally dance and be close together after two years with Covid. – Eli Mai Huang Nesse, graduating student

The working process leading up to this exhibition started with a curatorial question: if exhibitions generally are spatial expressions of the societies within which they are produced, what kind of collectivity does the format of the group exhibition represent?

Curated group shows are usually thematic compositions of individual artistic positions juxtaposed with each other, where each work is presented as autonomous and remains largely unaffected by the other works in the space. This image of collectivity could be interpreted as a mirror of a society where individuals are often brought together through abstract relations, such as wage labour, or by casting a vote in an election, consuming a product made by an unknown worker, or interacting on social media. These assemblages of seemingly autonomous individuals are supposed to look like freedom, but are they also representing a difficulty of coming together and being transformed by each other?

Artworks, or people, that are brought together in this way – being together without being together – seldom fall in love or become close friends, just as they do not argue, support each other or start a revolution. So what would it mean to construct an exhibition that starts from a different desire, striving for the artworks to get closer, to touch in some way?

A Degree Show is often thought of as an end point, but this is first and foremost a beginning. After two years of living and learning under pandemic conditions, this exhibition is an occasion to come together to interpret “touch” in the widest possible way, getting closer through sound, light and smell as well as spatial experiments and social interaction – rather than an answer to a question, it is the continuation of an ongoing dance.

Artists: Benedict Beldam, Patricia Carolina, Tansiyu Chen, Henrik Follesø Egeland, Chloe Elgie, Makda Embaie, Cirenia Escobedo Esquivel, Mattias Hellberg, Kaja Krakowian, Eli Mai Huang Nesse, Jonatan Nilsson, Hanne Nilsen Nygård, Lesia Vasylchenko, Hamid Waheed, Annalise Wimmer.

https://kunstnerneshus.no/program/utstillinger/avgangsutstillingen-2022

Photo: Istvan Virag