Opening Weekend: Edgar Calel + Åsa Elzén
20:00
Edgar Calel
Ni Musmut (It’s Breezing)
30 August 2024 — 5 January 2025
Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present an extensive exhibition by artist Edgar Calel, his first solo presentation in Europe. Working in a variety of media, Calel celebrates the traditions and spirituality of his Mayan Kaqchikel heritage in Comalapa, Guatemala. His works are often grounded in attentive relationships with the earth and its elements, featuring animal-vegetal motifs and playfully challenging Western conventions and perspectives of permanence. The works in the exhibition “Ni Musmut (It’s Breezing)”, made specifically for the spaces of Bergen Kunsthall, continue Calel’s engagement with the Mayan Kaqchikel cosmovision and the connections of its concepts and practices to other cultural contexts. The artist’s use of the Kaqchikel language and reflexivity of his presence in the places he travels belong to a practice that is celebratory of the daily role of spirituality among his people and vigilant of daily threats of exclusion and cultural erasure.
At the centre of his exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall is a large-scale installation of soil, rock and fire that connects the essential elements of a site for jun k’obomanik, or giving thanks through offering rituals. Within this microcosm of a geological and agricultural landscape, we find a series of hanging stones and a group of 76 ceramic pots, filled with water, flower petals and accompanied by wooden sticks, titled Oyonik (The Calling) that allude to traditional cultural practices, but also open up to new readings in a changed context. The works are presented both as material and ritual – the artist and the team of Bergen Kunsthall will light candles under the rocks and take care of the altar-like pots each day upon opening the exhibition space. Calel’s works require entrusting devotional forms to an institution, and the artist views such collaboration as a means of opening these traditions while remaining in dialogue with ancestral practitioners. At the same time, the works challenge established notions of a work and its ownership and highlight the artistic contributions Calel’s community make to contemporary notions of ritual, performativity and ecological thinking.
A new wall-scale embroidery work shows the home of Calel’s family, seen from above. The work, made in collaboration with members of his family, creates a direct connection between the home – as a place for gathering and shared rituals – and the exhibition spaces, which are also spaces for social interaction and reflection. A selection of artworks by Calel’s artistic community and his family are presented in one of the gallery spaces, with a common theme of the garden, including intricate paintings of flowers and plants by his mother.
Åsa Elzén
Notes on a Fallow – The Fogelstad Group and Earth
30 August 2024 — 5 January 2025
Parallel to the exhibition by Edgar Calel, we present “Notes on a Fallow – The Fogelstad Group and Earth” by Åsa Elzén. For a long time Elzén has worked with the legacy of the queer feminist Fogelstad Group, that among other things ran the Women Citizens’ School at Fogelstad (1925–54 in Julita, Sörmland). At a time when industrial agriculture was emerging, the Fogelstad Group was highly critical of what they saw coming, such as pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and farming on an increasingly large scale but with less biodiversity. They argued that humans’ relationship to earth should be based on love, and the idea that earth should not be owned, but cared for. Through educational and political work, the group proposed radical methods for the transformation of privately owned land to forms of hereditary and transferable land tenancies, and donated land to the state to be granted to the unemployed, through so-called “åborätter” (Åbo rights).
In 1919, Elisabeth Tamm of the Fogelstad estate commissioned a carpet from artist Maja Fjæstad with the wish that it would be based on a fallow, in line with her “peace-with-the-earth” practice. To leave land fallow means to let it rest from human production for a period of time in order to counteract soil depletion. The fallow can also be seen as a counteract to the drive for speed and efficiency that came with industrial agriculture.
At the centre of Gallery 5, a large carpet made by Åsa Elzén is displayed on a podium where visitors can walk and sit without shoes. The work is a transcript of a carpet titled En Träda (“A Fallow”) made by Maja and Amelie Fjæstad in 1919–20. Transcript of a Fallow is the centrepiece of Elzén’s continuously growing project that blurs the lines between historical materials and new works as Elzén delves into the group’s practices in ecology and resilience. Using the term “transcript” instead of “copy” also suggests a historiographical process intertwined with the present, making a contemporary reading part of the piece’s history. The method involves carefully listening to someone else’s work and forming an intimate, embodied, situated relationship.
The exhibition includes A Growing Fallow Archive, showcasing materials related to the original carpet. The accompanying audio piece features excerpts from texts on fallow land and on the history of the making of the carpet, whilst the exhibited video consists, to a large extent, of quotes from legal documents concerning ownership rights. The project also features a series of photographs by Axel Fredriksson, a self-taught photographer documenting daily life on the farm, and objects related to the (archival) history of En Träda (“A Fallow”).
While researching the Fogelstad Group, Elzén also investigates the concept of “the fallow” as an artistic methodology and ethical standpoint, exploring its connections to temporality, memory, environmental degradation, and queer feminist and more-than-human historiography.
Opening Party
Fri 30 Aug 22:00
Free
Daiyen Jone, aka DJ La Cubaneza, is a Cuban flautist, improviser, composer and educator living in Bergen. With roots in Cuban and Latin American music, Daiyen Jone has expanded his musical universe to include everything from jazz to ambient, and everything in between. From spinning soulful rhythms on the dance floor to creating meditative soundscapes, La Cubaneza takes you on an exciting journey through sound and culture from around the world.
