Public defence: Marte Eknæs

The city today is in continuously shaped by an infrastructural underbelly that entangles us in a web of resources, energy, power structures and impact far beyond our sight and reach. This is a reality starkly illustrated by the climate catastrophe. The art institution reflects this entanglement, framing the artwork in a series of ethical dilemmas.

Active Forms – The Artwork and its Infrastructures is a research project investigating the relationship between the artwork and the combined context of the unstable urban landscape, the climate crisis, the art institution and the personal experience of early parenthood. The question I ask myself is as simple as it is fundamental: How to continue making art within this condition?

Based in the understanding that the infrastructural is a shared space between artwork and its context, it investigates the position of art within this condition as both hazard and opportunity. In order to make an artwork which stands apart from society’s power structures, the way this space is utilised or navigated must differ. Making art at the time of climate crisis creates restrictions and responsibilities. However, by recognising that the process itself has potential for meaning, the consequences of decisions and strategies – the ethics - become an inherent part of the work.

The artwork and its context are also examined as interconnected entities through a wide understanding of form which encompasses both the composition of sculptures and structures that organise society. Based on the idea of affordances, form is a malleable quality which can be activated by those seeing, directing or imposing it. Active forms are, according to Keller Easterling, the bits of code in the operating system - or the infrastructure - of the city.

Through the mediums of sculpture, video, lecture performance and text I search for ways the artwork can engage its context through production, exhibition and continued afterlife. And with Marina Vishmidt’s idea of critique as a temporality, the artwork can be a vehicle, or in itself an infrastructure. Working with the specificity of each situation I enter into, I arrive at multiple and flexible strategies including an expanded understanding of the sculptural object, sharing activist tools and navigating through the bureacracy of a city council. All these are ways the artwork can get to know its own deeper inherent form and harness its infratructural powers.