After School Special
, 20:00
This time around I have invited the two artists Helga Wretman and Kaja Cxzy Andersen who will serve us performative works. The artists are both born in 1985, and despite their young age they are busy on each side of the track, participating in various exhibitions and events.
The two of them are altogether quite different artists, but at the same time they seem to share a common thrive for practicing outside the natural arena their education suggests. Wretman with her education in the field of Modern and Contemporary Dance from Kungliga Svenska Balettskolan in Stockholm has performed mostly in the field if visual art while Cxzy Andersen with her formal training from Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art predominantly executes her artistic discourse on the web, in various channels such as chatroulette, skype, cam4, and various blogs
After the “show” DJ Knaggen (Bloodsport / Idiom / COLORS) will turn the evening into a nice party. Whereas he earlier filled various clubs in Bergen with changing decor and visuals during the club and art collective Blood Sport (later Idiom), playing pulsing electronic music – he now focuses on a more eclectic mix of everything from
90’s Hip Hop to the new psychedelic pop & old and new house music.
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Helga Wretman (born in Stockholm, Sweden) lives and works in Berlin. Her performances has taken place in venues such as Peres Projects, Berlin; Darsa Comfort, Zurich, Kunsthalle Athena, Athens and Atelierhaus a Monbijoupark for Based in Berlin. She often performs in collaboration with other artists such as AIDS-3D, Jeremy Shaw, Donna Huanca, Peaches and Reynold Reynolds, where she almost “infiltrates” the work as a design element by placing herself and her body at the disposal of the collaborating artists like a commodity. In her autonomous individual works she also takes on the role of a marionette in a metaphorical sense, letting herself be directed by the performance around her. For After School Special she is inverting the relationship between client and performer, taking over the staging herself.
“We look at the relation between media and a sense for safety in the virtual word. In the electronic space we are all able to do almost anything and nothing can touch us. What happens to the natural sensitivity to safety and the fear of fear, our basic and ancient animal reflexes? Sometimes it seems that safety is considered uncool and boring but at the same time, contemporary safety-gear forms a futuristic and almost alien shape and transforms the person wearing it into some kind of avatar, a virtual and untouchable version of themselves. The equipment functions to improve the vulnerable human body. “
-Helga Wretman
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Kaja Cxzy Andersen uses the internet to explore human intimacies and the application of intimacy through technology. She believes that the internet is an extension of human intimacy rather than a replacement of it.
“The emotional dimension of socializing on the Internet through interaction with a screen is apparent in Cxzy.biz by Kaja Cxy Andersen. The website is a blank rendition of the Facebook interface as a personal web page. This page also functions as the artist’s portfolio, where users may click through to view assemblages of .gifs, theatrical screenshots and emotive poems. In her practice, Andersen has used social networking and live chat as a way expressing internal emotions from heartbreak to frustrations with the medium while hanging out on the Internet.”
- Jennifer Chan-
“A whack on the head in the “real” world can kill you, whereas a whack in one of the virtual worlds will not.
…But what about my broken heart?”
- Kaja Cxzy Andersen-
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After School Special is supported by Arts Council Norway and the City of Bergen