Little Vikings are Never Lost

After everything I’ve been saying about the Norwegian language being absent from Norwegian art, a Scottish friend of mine asked me to to help her out with a norwegian translation for a performance. You can see Little Vikings are Never Lost by Jenna Watt this week at the Arches Live! festival on the 18th, 19th and 20th September at 7.10pm.

I won’t give anything away about the work but it sounds like its going to be great as was picked out as one of the highlights of the festival in the Scotsman this week.

Check back later for a review!

Eija-Liisa Ahtila – Jeu de Paume

I was really happy to get a chance to catch the end of Finnish artist Elija-Liisa Ahtila’s exhibition at the Jeu de Paume last week. The show was refreshingly ambitious and engaging with excellent use of sound and visuals particularly in The House, a three screen installation which examined the link between what we hear and what we see.

I loved the combination of magic and whimsy in the videos and also the use of Finnish language. Sometimes it seems as though in the world of the international art fair English is the only language of contemporary art. This is especially true in Scandinavian works exemplified by the recent Norwegian contemporary art exhibition Lights On which was populated almost entirely by English language rather than Norwegian language art. I once was told, and I don’t know how true this is, that Norwegian will die out in 300 years due to the dominance of English. If a work is strong then it will communicate to international audience across the language barrier. We need to use languages or we will lose them.

The Jeu de Paume has an interesting video podcast showing some installation videos of the exhibition which is worth watching and a few interesting screen shots of the work. This shot is taken from Where is Where? a newly commissioned piece which although did not quite justify its hour long run time was definitely worth watching.

Lights On – Norsk Samtidskunst

Following on from my last post I am reminded of an exhibition I visited of Norwegian Contemporary art in Oslo at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art. A lot of the work seemed to focus on the political with very mixed results.

You can read my full review of the exhibition here but I wanted to draw peoples attention to one of the pieces in the show Some Remarks on Discardedness by Stian Ådlandsvik. This piece was a reconstruction of a working slide machine made out of wood and as a visual image I can’t seem to shake it from my mind weeks after seeing it.

Although small and unassuming this sculpture encapsulated much about our throw away society without cynicism. And not only that the image of the slide machine, which is so central to art and art history, says a lot for arts role in the current political situation.

Art, artists and art institutions do not stand outside the world we are a part of it, no matter how much we like to pretend we are on the outside looking in.