10:45-11:45
re-radio
Karen Werner
University of Bergen (3rd year presentation)
Moderator: Geir Harald Samuelsen
12:00-13:00
Oceanic Horror - or The Horror of the DROP
Søren Thilo Funder
University of Bergen (3rd year presentation)
Moderator: Geir Harald Samuelsen
Karen Werner: re- radio
University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and design, The Art Academy - Institute of Contemporary Art
re- radio enacts artistic practice and collaborations as a means for living together differently. Radio —discarded, weak, fuzzy, analogue— and the radio station, including Radio Multe 93.FM, are the creative mediums for this inquiry and how we come together. re- radio jams signals, causes interference, co-creates communications. re- radio holds a space for engaging and struggling with what living together differently means and whose contributions and voices are needed in this context. re- radio follows currents through re- lationality, re- search, re- sonance, re- pair, re- ciprocity, re- thinking. re- radio roots this inquiry to local contexts within Bergen, Norway, while linking to global concerns.
Karen Werner is an artist, sociologist and PhD Fellow in the Department of Contemporary Art - Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design in Bergen. Karen makes radio stories and performances, often collaboratively, and launches experimental radio stations including SkottegatenFM and Radio Multe 93.8FM in Bergen. Karen’s work has been supported by Tonspur Kunstverein Wien, Kone Foundation/Saari Residency, Wave Farm, Hemera Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Bergen Senter for Elektronisk Kunst, Veno Gård Kunst, Røst_Air and others.
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Søren Thilo Funder: Oceanic Horror - or The Horror of the DROP
University of Bergen, Faculty of Fine Art, Music and design, The Art Academy - Institute of Contemporary Art
Oceanic Horror or The Horror of the DROP explore the potentials of utilising the genre of horror fiction to create new narratives in a political and time-based artistic practice. It is invested in the temporal qualities and entanglements of the horror genre and how these relate in strange ways, not only to our current tempor(e)ality, but also to art practices using the temporal as material. The research project searches for a certain condition found in horror fiction, that relates to its relentless nowness, its proposed prolonging of this now, its relation to eventality and the quasi-event and finally how horror fiction wants to do things to the body - not only in a simple reaction mode but really in the very temporality experienced in and by the body.
Soren Thilo Funder will present developed parts of his research project, together with notions on its final stages still under development.
Søren Thilo Funder is a visual artist working primarily with video and installation. His works are mash-ups of popular fictions, cultural tropes and socio-political situations, projections and histories. Through narrative constructions invested in written and unwritten histories, the paradoxes of societal engagement, temporal displacements and nonlinear narratives, Thilo Funder proposes spaces for awry temporal, political and recollective encounters. Soren Thilo Funder is on his final year as PhD Candidate in Artistic Research at The Art Academy - Department of Contemporary Art, University of Bergen.
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Karolin Tampere: How can landscapes shape how you see yourself and the world?
UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Academy of Arts / University of Bergen, Faculty of Music, Art and Design
My artistic project will be realized from the field of curatorial practice with an anchor point in the multidisciplinary networks and context(s) of the circumpolar north. It is still being (re-)formulated, a process which I consider an conscious method for flexibility and to be used actively for supporting the goings-on. Allowing my research to be perforated and informed by changes in the world at large and life in general. To actively engage in the ongoingness of becoming, with a non-linear, collaborative approach informed by uncertainties, to stay present in the unknown.
Part of the international feminist research collective Ensayos, I have since 2010 with an ecofeminist prism, searched for parallels between the relationship to climate and natural conditions in the northern areas, to investigate conditions in similar geographical areas in the far south. My PhD project is a continuation of these studies where I want to practice a practical-curatorial investigation and play of «landscape».
The title of my research is work-in-progress and aimed to act as a guideline to keep me onboard a ship sailing without a compass; something that would open up several thematics and themes for wonder and could move in many directions and through several (non-)disiplines; something open ended. Enabling to investigate loose threads, anchoring them across unforeseen spaces and places of the mind and bodies in space. The geographies, locations, sediments of both past and present his/her-stories in language, tacit knowledge, sound, senses, geopolitics, care, traces, collaboration, scent, climate, ecology and economy.
I thought the Landscape Convention's landscape definition could be an interesting first starting point to see if I could make use of it as a working tool/a prism that could lead my thinking and give directions to my curatorial investigations within the topics I am interested in.
«Landscapes are not just areas characterized by natural and cultural factors, but human perceptions of these areas must be recognized as one necessary part of the concept of landscape: "Landscape" means an area, as people perceive it, whose distinctiveness is a result of the influence of and the interaction between natural and / or human factors.”
Karolin Tampere (b. Tallinn, Estonia) is a PhD Research fellow at Tromsø Art Academy, UiT - The Arctic University of Norway and Faculty of Fine Art, University of Bergen.
She is a visual artist and curator currently based in Tromsø, Norway. Part of her practice is to write for artists, often commissioning new works, striving to present artistic practice and work with an transdisciplinary approach. Her most recent writing appears in the British Council-commissioned publication Where Strangers Meet, on the work of Futurefarmers.
She has a particular interest in collaborative and socially engaged practices, sound and listening. Since 2004 she has regularly contributed to the “forever lasting” art project Sørfinnset Skole/the nord land with artists Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen, and together with Åse Løvgren the ongoing collaboration Rakett was initiated in 2003. During 2013 and partly 2014 she was serving as director of Konsthall C in Stockholm and transformed the directorship into a collaboration named the Work Group/Arbetslaget with artists akcg(anna kindgren and carina gunnars) and Anna Ahlstrand.
Tampere is since 2010 part of Ensayos - a collective feminist research practice enacted by artists, scientists, activists, policymakers, and local community members. Sustaining focus on the ecopolitics of archipelagos for the past decade, Ensayos have developed distinct inquiries into extinction, human geography, and coastal health. Most currently Ensayos was in the online artist residency at New Museum, New York, with the project “Ensayos: Passages. Between 2017 - 2022 Tampere had the position as curator at the North Norwegian Art Centre in Svolvær, Lofoten archipelago and amongst other realized several site sensitive and context specific projects with artists across the region of Northern Norway. Together with Hilde Mehti, Neal Cahoon and Torill Østby Haaland she co-curated LIAF2019 which received the Norwegian Critics price of honor.
In 2022 she is contributing to «The Gift» where Ensayos supports the HOL HOL TOL - The Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Ensayos collaborators Caitlin Franzmann (Australia), Christy Gast (New York, United States) and Randi Nygård (Norway) are working with “pods” of artists and ecologists to explore the ecology and culture of peatlands local to their regions. The three groups, with collaborators including Freja Carmichael (curator and Ngugi woman of the Quandamooka people), Denise Milstein (sociologist), Renee Rossini (ecologist), and Karolin Tampere (curator/artist) have conjured gifts of scent from international peatlands that contributes to the multisensory experience of the pavilion in Venice.
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Amor Rojo (Red Love) - Revolutionary love or the legacy of Alexandra Kollontai
Oslo National academy of the Arts, Academy of Fine Art
Project leader: Dora Garcia
Project period: 2021-2024
Amor Rojo (Red Love) is an archival research, writing and experimental art film project. It uses the figure of Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952), a Marxist theorist and Soviet revolutionary, radical feminist and sexual activist, as a guide to walk the labyrinth of female freedom, sexual emancipation, and love as weapon; and to make the necessary connections of a complex narrative bridging an ocean from Moscow to Mexico, from 20th century socialist feminism (Kollontai) to 21st century revolutionary love (Chela Sandoval).
But this story can be told backwards as well. "Amor Rojo" is born of the feeling of wonder at the latest feminist demonstrations in South America and specifically in Mexico, a country that has been marked by gender violence. The performative qualities of those demonstrations, the way they appropriate and re-signify public space, re-write official history, traditionally dominated by male, white figures, is at the centre of this research project. The performance strategies developed by the various feminist groups that have taken the initiative in this deeply symbolic fight, is an open book to study: unique and situated.
Equally, from a performance studies point of view, the actions these groups develop, such as occupation (of public space, of government buildings) and inscription (re-writing monuments, official texts, public messages) connect with a tradition of politically engaged women who were compulsive writers. The most significant ones for this study would be Gloria Anzaldua, Chela Sandoval, Alaíde Foppa, Rosa Luxemburg, and, Alexandra Kollontai. In the words of Gloria Anzaldúa: “A woman who writes has power, and a woman with power is feared.”
The action of writing is studied as a performative gesture that has political consequences: "La revolución será feminista o no será", revolution will be feminist or won't be, could be read in the protest signs of the demonstrations in Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico, 2019.