After School Special
, 20:00
After School Special are thrilled to present our very first “traditional art exhibition” – traditional in the sense that there will be art works on display that are not time based like performance or video, but rather works of art made to be hung on a wall.
The idea behind this particular evening was born out of the need to present these exact types of art works – just because we simply can’t. The fact that Landmark’s architecture has no “real” walls has been both the problem and the inspiration.
The missing walls has left a longing to present art made for walls. One always wants to make the impossible possible, right? We have been searching for a way to “solve the problem” of the missing walls when we eventually came up with the idea of inviting two artists, someone to design and build a structure that could support the art works, and also the artists to present. The result is an exciting collaboration where the artists Nedberg & Kantun has designed and built a structure to support a series of new oil paintings made by the artist Hedvig Biong.
The positive dialogue between Audar Kantun b. 1985 and Joar Nedberg b.1984 was conceived along the back row at the Art Academy in Bergen in the year 2010. The conversations ran, amongst other things, from a common hate/love relationship with the black-and-white landscape tradition of photography. The boys took the dialogue into practice, packed their backpacks and set out to expose 8 × 10” landscape photographs that at later date is shown in exhibition contexts. Since then different projects has appeared. In 2011 they stumbled upon a red crate in a container outside Bergen Art Museum, which became the source of the gallery-concept Mill Race Gallery. To this day they share an office in a studio collective in Damsgårdsveien in Bergen where they construct and exchange tricks.
At the moment they hatch out a framework for Biong’s paintings and taste the description of this latest task… Design and Construction… They find it tasty.
Kantun & Nedberg goes where the wind is blowing – very well to where the pepper grows.
Hedvig Biong b. 1985 studied at the department of photography in the Art Academy in Bergen. She is a member of the artists collective Gruppe 11 alongside several other collaborative projects and her own artistic practice. Biong works with drawing, performance, photography and painting.
At sixteen Biong was invited home to an old artists in her home town Toten for a cup of tea. The artists was a local celebrity that painted abstract paintings. He had set a few rules for how one should approach art. The artist thought of the painting’s ability to express other aspects of human existence, the aspects that could not be explained through logic and intellect. He looked at emotions as an abstract phenomena that best could be put to express through the abstract. He talked about paintings in the context of music – and the colors in association with taste. He believed that the senses had systems that belonged together in illogical ways.
In recent years, Biong have been painting figurative motifs on the front of the canvas and abstract paintings on the back. On the front she sought after the fragile, understandable and figurative – while the back was something she was ashamed of from time to time. The brutal intuitive, meditative, unintelligent, uncontrollable, expressive and primitive. The abstract images were for Biong a byproduct, made up of the need to let go of the control, move away from the desire for perfection and to merely exploit the materiality of the oilpaint in it self. There was a need to get away from the painting having to mimic something it is not. Paintings that do not copy the reality – but that function as objects in their own.
The exhibition opens Wednesday 2nd of May at 20:00 and will be up throughout Thursday the 3rd of May when Skrivekunstakademiet (the Academy of Creative Writing) are hosting a reading inside the exhibition. After School Special the 2nd of May are curated by Marthe Elise Stramrud and supported by the Municipality of Bergen and the Norwegian Arts Council.