Vitrine, 2007-12
Video Art in Public Space
Vitrine is a platform for experimenting with video art in public space. It offers the artists and the public a unique opportunity to engage with multi-screen video works right on the side of the street. Every winter artists from around the world illuminate the Vitrine with back projection videos. Sannergata is a busy route for traffic moving in and out of Oslo, and the Vitrine has the potential of reaching thousands of viewers everyday.
Vitrine is aimed at exploring the potentials of multi-screen video works in public space and the notions of transience – moving images and moving public.
The 4th Season of Vitrine
Nov. 2011 - Jan. 2012
RED LIST RED by Nina Bang
12 - 26 January 2012
Opening: Thursday, 12.01.2012 at 18:00
As we, the human race, expand our domination over the planet we “humanize” all terrains of existing nature - an act that forces many other species into extinction. Civilization moves forward as it relentlessly crushes down other life forms in its progress.
Nina Bang takes the extinction of other life forms as the departure point for her new work RED LIST RED. The work is an appropriation of the list of threatened species made by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources. The four-screen video brings the list into an abstract space and gives it a visual impact.
Nina Bang, born in Oslo-1956, is a visual artist working with a variety of media including painting, digital prints, installations and video. Her works explore the meeting points between the natural processes and technological progress. Bang studied art at Statens Kunst og Håndverkskole and Statens Kunstakademi (National Academy of Fine Arts) in Oslo during the 1980s.
Along with exhibiting widely around the country, she has carried out several public art commissions and currently she is working on a new commission for Sam Eyde high school in Arendal, Norway. Nina Bang lives and works in Oslo.
Antena by Santiago Parres
1-15 December 2011
Opening: Thursday, 1.12.2011 at 19:00
Santiago Parres (born in Valencia - Spain, 1968) is a self taught artist, writer and photographer. He works with a variety of media combining literature, graphic design, photography and video in his projects. He lives and works in Valencia.
Antena is a contemplative multi-screen video commissioned for Atopia’s Vitrine. Shot from the same angle but in different times of the year. The four videos display a single antenna and its background sky. Being a receiver the antenna attracts flocks of birds and becomes a momentary watchtower.
NATURAL FEATURES (times 3 + 1 )by Gunvor Nelson
17- 30 November 2011
Opening: Thursday, 17 Nov. 2011 at 18:00
Gunvor Nelson (1931, Stockholm) is one of Sweden's internationally most prominent artists in her field - film and the moving image. She is one of the pioneers in experimental film and has, as few Swedish artists, had the recognition of a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Nelson has said that for years she has wanted to slow down NATURAL FEATURES (1990) – her film that uses paint to animate stills, mostly of faces. To this end, she had her 16 mm film converted into a high-definition video and began editing three separate copies. It took her over a year to fulfill her wish, to slow down her own found footage and get the three new films to work together. The result is a masterful triptych entitled NATURAL FEATURES times 3 (2011), in which the looped video projections move in and out of sync with one another and with a single soundtrack.
For her exhibition on Atopia's Vitrine Gunvor Neslon has made a new 4th screen to interact with the other 3 without the soundtrack.
"... In NATURAL FEATURES I used cut-outs, photographs, mirrors, water, toys, paint, ink ... in many different combinations. The central theme is faces. A dark delicacy lingers. "
Gunvor Nelson will be present at the opening.
The Third Season of Vitrine
November 2010 - March 2011
Four proposals by the following artists are selected for the third season of Vitrine:
1. Terese Bolander, Kristine Stark & Nanna de Wilde (Stockholm, Sweden)
2. Vadim Schäffler (Berlin, Germany)
3. Guy Sherwin (London, UK)
4. Anna Martine Nilsen (Oslo, Norway)
HERE IS NOW presents a series of everyday events that take on a ritual character. In this work the four windows of Vitrine are transformed into storefronts of different shops. The videos show a Jeweler setting up her window display, a Butcher selling meat, a Miller filling up bags of wheat, and a Window cleaner washing the windows of an empty shop. These performance-like events are all shot through glass walls and the images carry the reflections of their surroundings. Giving rise to multiple layers of images HERE IS NOW transforms the Vitrine into the meeting point of different places and reflections, those that are filmed in the past and those that are of the present.
Anna Martine Nilsen (Oslo, 1974) studied at the Oslo National Academy of Arts and the School of Photography in Gothenburg. She works with still photography, film, and video installations. Her works have been screened in various international film festivals as well as Norwegian National TV and they have been exhibited widely in art venues across Europe and South America. She lives and works in Oslo.
“Taking material from an unrealized film that I’d shot in 1973, featuring a London railway station, I have reworked it for the four screens of Atopia’s Vitrine. Each screen shows the same framing of the station platform, but the time is different. We see trains pulling in, passengers getting off, workmen walking by. The film plays on our desire to unify the disrupted space of the platform and to make continuous the various events that pass through it.”
Guy Sherwin studied painting at Chelsea School of Art in the late 1960s and taught film printing and processing at the London Film-Makers' Co-op (now LUX) during the mid-70s. His films investigate fundamental qualities of cinema such as light and time, and often use serial forms or live elements to extend the possibilities.
Recent works, made in collaboration with artist Lynn Loo, include performances that use multiple projectors and optical sound (sounds made from light) in conjunction with improvised music. These have toured to venues in Europe, US, Asia, and Australia.
He has produced two dvd/books of his works: Guy Sherwin: Optical Sound Films 1971-2007 pub. LUX 2007 and Messages pub. LUX 2010.
A rock concert audience leaps forward and starts to dance as the band hits the stage. 20 seconds of high energy is stretched out to fill 30 minutes of time in Motion. With black/red colors and high contrast Motion gives us a portrait of intense physical energy at the moment of its release.
Vadim Schäffler studied fine art at Braunschweig College of Art (BA, 1996 & MA, 2003). He works with digital landscapes, non-places, creatures and people and he brings them into a confrontation with each other. A touch of narrative is often found in his works along with pictures of deformation, struggles and conflicts of the “virtual” and the “real” world. His media are video, installations and digital prints. Vadim lives and works in Berlin.
“Jenny *1910 †2006” is a four screen video installation that documents the entire belongings of a deceased woman. The artists collaborating on this project purchased Jenny’s estate in an auction in 2006 and catalogued all the items. They created a photographic archive of the estate containing 4,529 images. These images are now composed in the form of a four screen video installation for Vitrine. In this public display of the estate of a woman who lived to be 96 years old the artists attempt to perform an experiment with objects and the memories that surround them. How do we relate to a person through his or her belongings? When objects are placed in such a context they gain particular histories and act as signifiers beyond their own object-hood. They instigate different fictions in the mind of every viewer. One helplessly gets occupied in creating a portrait of that person which could only be fictional. Hence fiction and reality loose their boundaries and remind us of the idea that they are both constructions of the mind.
For more information about the project please see www.dodsbo.com.
Terese Bolander (1976 - Västerås, Sweden), Nanna de Wilde (1975 - Västerås, Sweden) and Kristina Stark (1978 - Borås, Sweden) studied together and received their MFAs from The Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm in 2006. They currently live and work in Stockholm, Sweden.
www.terese-bolander.net www.nannadewilde.com www.kristinastark.se
Video Jam on Atopia’s Vitrine celebrating the end of its second season
Aan evening of projections and discussions about video art in the public space.
Thursday 18.02.2010 from 18:00 to 21:00.
This event aims at investigating the position of video art on public space and the influence of public space on video art. Several artists and art critics will take part in this event. They will play around with different combinations of projections and compositions on the Vitrine and discuss the results of their experiments. This event marks the end of the second season of Atopia’s Vitrine project.
Participants include:
Pierre Chaussy
Bjørn Erik Haugen
Narve Hovdenakk
Haraldur Karlsson
Brede Korsmo
Beate Petersen
Veronika Reichl
Birgitte Sigmundstad
Leif Magne Tangen
stills from works of Veronika Reichl on Vitrine during the Video Jam
The Second Season of Vitrine Project: December 2009 - February 2010
The second season of Atopia's Vitrine project started on Thursday, 19 Novembe 2009 and it ended on Feb18, 2010.
The second season of Vitrine presented the commissioned works of 5 artists from different countries.
For this project we had sent out an open call for artists and we had received 85 applications from 17 different countries.
Artists and Dates:
- Miguel Jara (Colombia) 19.11 - 03.12.2009
- Jonathan Monaghan (USA) 03.12 - 17.12.2009
- Heike Baranowsky (Germany) 07.01 - 21.01.2010
- Andrew Salgado (UK) 21.01 - 04.02.2010
- Michael Wurstbauer (UK) 04.02 - 18.02.2010
Atopia's curator group for Vitrine 2009-10 consisted of:
Samir M'kadmi (artist/curator), Linn Lervik (artist) & Farhad Kalantary (artist/curator/coordinator of Atopia).
Michael Wurstbauer was born in Munich, 1975 and studied Fine Art Photography at the Glasgow School of Art (BA, 2003). He works mainly with time-based media in an investigation of mental states, subjectivity and repetition. His video works have been shown in numerous festivals across Europe, and he lives and works in Glasgow.
Eastbound - Along Bath Lane, Glasgow brings the location of Atopia into a visual confrontation with the alleys leading to downtown Glasgow at night. This is an interaction that makes the Vitrine into a crossroad for two modes of urban spaces and two singular times.
The four video works of Wurstbauer are made with stop-motion animation technique. His camera gradually moves through the alleys and takes us on a silent journey through the hidden paths of Glasgow. Here the vacant backstreets of the city assume a restless movement, and a sense of anxiety fills up their emptiness.
Installation view, Eastbound - Along Bath Lane, Glasgow by: Michael Wurstbauer
Andrew Salgado (b. 1982, Regina, Canada) graduated in 2005 from the University of British Columbia. In 2009 he received his MFA from the Chelsea College of Art & Design in London, and he lives and works in Vancouver, Canada and London, England. His works have been shown in numerous international venues and his participation in Atopia’s Vitrine is his first solo exhibition in Norway.
Salgado’s works employ large-scale figurative oil paintings and videos that engage in an intense exploration of the body, identity, and sexuality.
Paint Your Black Heart Red is a video performance acted on 4 public screens of Atopia. These four acts illustrate various attempts at physical transformations and shifts of identity that at times seem to be brutal. The videos explore the uncertain territories of becoming the other and they make visible the fragility of the body and its physical boundaries.
Paint Your Black Heart Red is also the performative act of Atopia’s Vitrine to explore its own persona as a set of public art screens. With this exhibition Atopia introduces a radical shift from the conventional practices of public art. It questions the prevailing notions of public art where all has to be “pleasant to the eye and friendly to the environment”. Once again Atopia foregrounds the questions pertaining to concepts of the public, its construction and the limits of freedom bestowed on the arts in public space.
What are the definitions of public art? Do we draw or do we locate these borders and how far could we (or should we) push these boundaries?
Installation view, Paint Your Black Heart Red by: Andrew Salgado
Heike Baranowsky, 1966 was born in Augsburg, Germany and lives in Berlin. She studied art in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin, and received her MA in Fine Art from Royal College of Art London (1999).
From 2005-8 she was a Professor at Kunsthøgskolen in Bergen, Norway and from 2008 she has been working as Professor at Academy of Fine Art in Nuremberg, Germany.
Baranowsky has exhibited her works extensively in America and Europe with solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Frankfurt (1997), Entwistle London (1999), Kunst-Werke Berlin (2001), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2005), Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin (1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2010), G Fine Art Washington, DC (2006), and Kunstfenster at BDI, Berlin (2008).
She participated in the New Contemporaries ’98 (1998), Berlin Biennale, (1998), Loop - Back to the Beginning, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York / CAC Cinncinati, Ohio (2001), en route, Serpentine Gallery, London (2002), MoMA Reopen, Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004), Convergence at E 116˚/ N 40˚, 789 Dayaolu Workshop, Beijing (2005), 40 Years Video. Video Art in Germany from 1963 until today, ZKM, Karlsruhe and other venues (2006), DESTROY, SHE SAID, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2007), and As Time Goes By, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin (2009). www.heikebaranowsky.de
Passage opens a seascape on the side of Sannergata. Parallel to the hasty movement of cars, busses and people on the street, we see a container ship appearing on the 4 screens of Atopia’s Vitrine and joining the traffic. With the control of timing the work merges the fast with the slow through the high-speed of the seascape and the ship that seems to slowly move in reverse.
Passage presents a rare instant of poetry as Public Video Art. If poetry relies on the use of language, the poetic imagery is a sole dependent of timing.
Installation view, Passage by Heike Baranowsky
Jonathan Monaghan (New York, 1989) is a young artist working with 3D computer software to create digital sculptures, prints, and animations. He is currently earning his MFA at the University of Maryland, USA.
Calling All Angels is a digital animation work that shows various creatures undergoing transformations in a 3D environment.
Made for Atopia’s four-screen outdoor exhibition space the work attempts to engage the physical space in a dialogue with the virtual. In this setting the creatures appear to signal a physiological distress and uncertainty.
Calling All Angels is visible from the street everyday from 15:00 until the next morning (3 – 17 December 2009).
Miguel Jara (Bogotá-Colombia -1983) is a young visual artist working with video and animation. He has received his Masters degree in visual arts from the National University of Colombia, 2008, and he is based in Bogotá.
In the Woods is a new animation work of Miguel Jara, which is commissioned for the Vitrine 2009-10. Jara’s gripping compositions are built with the simple act of drawing with pencil on paper. His animations focus on the natural forces and elements and work with the dynamics of the multi-screen setting of Atopia’s Vitrine. Jara portrays the constant battle of life through the gaze of wolves, the rumblings of the skies, and the flight of birds. He attempts to translate powers of the nature into the transient context of a normal street scene. In this process our street becomes the scene of a fairy tale, where the Nordic wolves roam around the neighborhood and once again put their claim on this territory.
Installation view, In the Woods by Miguel Jara
The first season of Vitrine project: December 2008 – March 2009:
For the first season of Vitrine five artists were invited to produce new works for exhibition in the period of November 2008 to March 2009. Working with the ideas of transience and the encounter of moving images with the moving public, the invited artists created exciting works that were on display throughout the winter.
Liberating the Multi-Voiced Bodies
by Samir M'Kadmi
Exhibition period 21 Feb - 7 March 2009
"Liberating the Multi-Voiced Bodies" is a new video installation by Samir M'Kadmi made for Atopia's Vitrine. This is a multi-screen video installation that addresses several issues pertaining to the art in public space. Using double standards and gates of accessibility it questions the Legitimacy of the public itself. Who do we call public? What is the public comprised of?
On the other hand the work is concerned with the issues of human rights and the freedom of expression from a global perspective. "Freedom of expression can no longer be conceived as a regional or national matter but a global issue. Societies all around the world are interdependent and so are the rights of their inhabitants" from such a perspective Samir M'Kadmi's work foregrounds the repressive regimes of North Africa and wonders about their impact on the freedom of an individual passerby on the streets of Oslo.
Samir M'kadmi is an artist and curator, working in the field between art and technology. He places his research on the interaction between fine arts and socio-political and environmental issues. He perceives the artist as a social actor and a critical power. His work calls into question the traditional and persisting definitions that detain the artists to the role of commodity producers only.
Klöckner Track Variations
by Greg Pope
Opening: Saturday, 7, 02, 2009 at 18:00
(7 – 20 Feb. 2009)
Greg Pope was born in UK, 1960 and studied art at Brighton Art College, 1985.
After exploring punk rock bands and absurdist performance, he founded Brighton based Super 8 film collective Situation Cinema in 1986. From this group came Loophole Cinema (London 1989)—using 16mm multi-projection techniques, performing numerous events around Europe until 1999. They also produced “The International Symposium of Shadows” in London in 1996. Working collaboratively and individually, Pope has made video installations, live art pieces and single screen film works since 1997.
“Klöckner Track Variations” was shot on 16mm film in a deserted industrial zone in Germany in 1993. This four screen video installation is a reinterpretation of the original footage and it brings the site of Atopia’s Vitrine into a dialogue with a distant place in time.
WATER AND GLASS
by Jeremy Welsh
Opening: Saturday, 24, 01, 2009 at 18:00
(24 Jan – 6 Feb 2009)
WATER AND GLASS is a four screen video installation made for Atopia’s Vitrine project. The imagery of the four videos are combined of panoramic shots of landscapes, images of water drops in close up, and reflected urban landscape seen in the glass surfaces of modern architecture. This work continues the investigation of space, time and image that has characterized many of Jeremy Welsh’s recent works.
Jeremy Welsh (UK, 1954) is an artist, writer and curator who is a Professor in Fine Art at Kunsthogskolen in Bergen, Norway. Welsh has been working with video and electronic media since 1980 and his works have been exhibited widely around the globe. He has also written extensively on art and electronic media in various magazines, catalogues and books.
In the Middle of the End
by Bull.Miletic:
Opening Thursday, 18, December 2008 at 18:00
(18 – 31 December 2008)
BULL.MILETIC is Synne Bull (Norway, 1973) and Dragan Miletic (Serbia, 1970). They have studied art at San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 2003, 2000), and they live and work in Oslo, Norway. Their works have been exhibited in various venues in the US as well as in Europe.
“In the Middle of the End” is a four screen video installation produced by Bull.Miletic for Atopia’s Vitrine project. It shows black & white images of glowing light bulbs as they swing in the darkness. In these carefully timed sequences the moving light bulbs appear to successively crash against the glass of Atopia’s projection window and explode.
Prelude
by Farhad Kalantary
Opening: Sunday 14.12.2008 at 18:00
(14 - 18 December 2008)
“Prelude” is a video work by Farhad Kalantary that will start the new season of Atopia’s Vitrine Project.
© Atopia Stiftelse, 2017- -
