Double Bridges (2024), Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen
1st. floor –
”The embassy” (2024), textile color digital flag print, potato, orange, blueberry.
“Rollerdust” (2024), swedish seed balls.
“Blinking Twig” (2024), twigs, tape, diode light system, 9V battery.
“S O S” (2024), Diode lights, 9V battery, fly, mosquitos, glue.
“Sensitive bin bags blowing” (2024), text, floorplan title of imaginary bin bags, blown away.
“A hold of space (for ants to possibly march through in formation)” (2024), text, floorpan title of an imaginary emotional border, crossing the gallery room.
”Passive-aggressive lemons” (2024), garden hose mounted to cafeteria kitchen sink, water pumps, sensors, Arduino, juice bottles, lemons and lime playing passive-aggressive.
”A place where everything comes from” (2024), blown up fridge, lemons, aluminum powder, german fuse.
”Potatoes tickling the walls” (2024), potatoes, walls.
”Giving birth to a dog” (2024), color digital photo print, beer bottle, 58 x 140cm.
“Handshakes” (2024), color digital video without sound of legally binding contract by handshake, projected on the side of a stack of printed A4 performance contracts. 3’02”.
Basement –
“Controlling the Mediterranean Sea” (2024), color digital video with sound, steel frame 164 x 278cm, lycra. 28’10”.
Solo exhibition granted by Hordaland Kunstsenter and The Faculty of Fine Art, KMD Bergen.
Photo credit Sara Larsen Stiansen and Hordaland Kunstsenter. Published in ArtViewer, 2024.
Video 1 ˜ exhibition show reel.
Video 2 ˜ “Controlling the Mediterranean Sea” video excerpt.
Full exhibition text:
Rolling dustballs over muffled spaghetti western soundtracks. A cast of needy objects that might cry when left alone. Passive-aggressive lemons that spit if you come too close to their personal space. Objects as interns and cheap labor assistants. Sticks and berries as quite profound lead performers, even when stepped on or in an exploded state. Sensitive flags waving with me posing in a bikini in front of a wood stack. An imagery sequence of giving birth to a dog. Shrimps being tricked into signing really bad exploitative performance contracts, caught on camera. Sensitive bin-bags blowing. An attempt to control the Mediterranean Sea with finger-activating guitar chords. A passage for ants to potentially march through. A place where everything comes from, a blinking twig and potatoes tickling the walls.
The exhibition Double Bridges features recent works displayed as mixed media installations where elements are scattered across the ground floor of the art centre’s exhibition space, like objects washed up on a reversed beach; anchored in the basement by the video work Controlling the Mediterranean Sea, and underwater recording of Kaja while holidaying in Crete. The video captures her giving immediate and odd spontaneous instructions to cinematic sound scapes or moods; that for the confused post-production guitar is sometimes near impossible to interpret or play. An arrangement of pieces – including video, photography, water and sound, together with locally sourced and personal elements such as food from the fridge, found objects picked up from the street, dust, insects, herself – are all part of a cast – as stand-ins for friends, lovers, certain emotional states, collaborators, assistants, interns and free labor that are exploitable and replaceable.
In Double Bridges objects are presented as temporary performers – that could also be interpreted as objects playing art objects. Implications of hierarchies are made, alongside reflections on the construction of an artistic practice; how it so often is dependant on and built upon the bodies of ‘others’. In the gallery space, self-critical, humorous observations meet personificated and sometimes action-based role-plays, all of which bridges and bridges back over real and imagined hormonal landscapes.
– Hordaland Kunstsenter, 2024.