Facts
Instead I went back to the office and back to work, and the enchantment broke. But at least for a few minutes there I saw the familiar sights of the city I've lived in for 12 years with the eyes of the artist inside of me; a crane wasn't just a crane and the buildings around me were important coulisses on the stage of my life.
"To watch and understand art is a learning process, and to understand and fully benefit from contemporary art is probably that what demands the highest level of effort from the audience". Hilde Marie Pedersen is the responsible intermediary at Bergen Kunsthall, and she gives me the tour of Knut Åsdam's Festspillutstilling (Festival Exhibition) 2010. "We have visitors of every age and from different parts of the country and the world, and my biggest challenge as a mediator, is to get people to see and embrace contemporary art as they do with other types of art. I often feel I have to convince them; kind of shake them out of their traditional way of looking at art and into understanding and appreciating also modern art. Sometimes it is easier with kids and children, as they have not yet made up their minds as to what art is".
How to see contemporary art
Bergen Kunsthall has visits from kindergartens and schools on a regular basis, and Hilde Marie has registered the development in how the children look at, experience and comment upon one exhibition from another. "It is obvious to see that they absorb the art and also their everyday surroundings in a new way when they get used to going to exhibitions. What is exciting about contemporary art, and especially this exhibition, is that one gets to be a part of the art, the installations, in a whole other way than one gets i.e. by going to a traditional museum with paintings on the wall. In this exhibition the presentation of the art, the surroundings, the use of light, everything - is part of it, and built up and put together in order to give the audience the best experience".
Knut Åsdam's Festival Exhibition
My guided tour starts in gallery "NO. 5", where expressive still frames from one fourth of Knut Åsdam's Festival Exhibition project are presented as photographs, neatly lined on the walls. His exhibition is structured around three projects that deal with specific geographical areas. "Common for the three projects is that they present urban, migrated and multicultural locations".
"NO. 5" hosts the part of the exhibition that shows Oslo, more precisely Groruddalen, that has a mixed residential pattern that includes both public housing projects and owner-occupied areas. The area has an immigrant population of about 50%, compared to 25% in the rest of Oslo. Åsdam's pictures illustrate the urbanity and the migrated culture from a different angle than one would expect. He uses the architecture, a bus, the way peoples interact and use their environment in his pictures, and we are invited to interpret life in Groruddalen through his "snap-shots".
In addition to the photo project from Groruddalen, the exhibition consists of a film project from Tripoli in Lebanon, a film project from Abyss in London and a new work based on Åsdam's own archive of found photo material.
Psychasthenia
You have to leave the first exhibition and enter through another door to visit the three other projects. Physical boundaries have been built up, forcing guests to enter at a "gateway" through the high fences, that gives associations to a sport's arena or a prison. Two films are running continuously on large screens in two different rooms. There are no doors between them, and you can hear the sounds from the other while watching the one. In both rooms concrete stands have been built, to sit on and act as part of the sport's scenery. Ivy grows on parts of the fences. I feel almost like stumbling around in Åsdam's scenery, being sucked into his art rather than watching it. Like one of the kids that Hilde Marie has shown around in the exhibition said; "we're in the middle of the film". The use of architectural installations in his works is not new for Åsdam, and Hilde Marie refers to his exhibition "Psychasthenia" from 1999. "Between the shaped and the shapeless, where you lose sense of direction and locality and are unable to sort out your impressions, that is when you experience psychasthenia. On the border between countries, in prison, in chaos". I've learned a new word today, and through Åsdam's exhibition and Hilde Marie's explanation I think I understand it.
Abyss
"This film is in the borderline between the artistic and feature. It lasts for 43 minutes and contains a lot more narrative than other art films. At the same time it is too fragmented to classify as a feature film". Abyss shows human beings in an urban area of London, shows how they act, live and parts of their surroundings and tells their story through scattered clips. "The dialectics between the people and their environment is illustrated in an aesthetically beautiful film, and the use of shapes and colors is fabulous", says Pedersen, "but while enjoying it's beauty you can not avoid getting captured by the story of the film, which is sad and gripping. The main character collapses, both psychologically and physically, and this results in a loss of ability to orient and to sort out all the impressions from the environment and the people around her. Her observation of reality in the film is somewhat related to the feeling the audience gets from watching".
Tripoli
The film from Tripoli is a lot shorter. It is filmed in the ruins of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer's stranded vision of an ambitious, international market place in what historically used to be a market centre in the Middle East. The traces of optimism from the days of glory, standing as a gaping wound, creates a somewhat scary and unpleasant scenery. An area that intentionally should have been crowded with lots of happy, bargaining people is empty, except from the actors of the film. The once so proud country has not yet managed to fully recover from the civil war in 1975 and the war with Israel in 2006, and the two historical events stands in stark contrast to each other as they meet in the unfinished monuments that build the scenery of this film.
untitled: archive (migration)
The walls are fully covered with printouts in the fourth and last room that forms Knut Åsdam's Festival Exhibition. Countless A4-sized prints hang on every inch of all four walls and I feel a bit dizzy before I am able to fix my eyes on one motif. There does not seem to be any kind of order in all the pictures. They are from all kinds of countries, old pictures, newer pictures, historical events, insignificant events, in color and in black and white. They stand however good together, and without being able to put finger on why they do so, there is no doubt that if you should have to name this part of the exhibition, the name would be 'migration'.
"I suppose I could stand in that room for hours, and still discover something new", I tell Hilde Marie as we stand in the room, both spinning on our own axis while looking up and down with flickering eyes. "Suppose you could", she replies, "I never get tired of this room, and I have spent quite some hours here so far. The interesting thing about this part of the exhibition is that it only exists here and now. While the rest of the exhibition is already booked for a tour in Europe, this part of it will never be recreated".
And I assure you; that alone is all the reason you need to visit Bergen Kunsthall and Knut Åsdam's Festival Exhibition within the next week. The exhibition lasts until 22. august.
Read more about the exhibition on: http://www.kunsthall.no/