Mari Slaattelid: Kystverket

This year’s Festival Artist at Bergen Kunsthall, Mari Slaattelid, is one of Norway’s most recognised painters. For almost three decades Slaatte­lid has insisted on the potential of painting, independently of changing trends and the shifting status of painting within artistic discourses. Without locking the medium into any particular formal idiom, she alternates with ease between figuration and abstraction, between expressive and conceptual painting, and the intersections of painting in relation to other art forms such as photography and literature. 

Her exhibition Kystverket will consist almost exclusively of new works created especially for the galleries of Bergen Kunsthall. The title reflects the main motif in many of the new paintings: a coastal landscape with a lantern (navigation marker) and—in silhouette against the sky—an operator adjusting the light signal. With clear resonance in its geographical location on the coast of southwestern Norway, the exhibition can be seen as a site-specific response to the expectations and the format of the Festival Exhibition. Each work is led by a drive towards unimaginable and maximised colour combinations. The atmosphere of the landscape and the flickering of the light on the water surface are translated into unexpected and striking visual effect. 

The motif—where an object in nature becomes an anthropomorphic signal emitter—is something she shares with colleagues from the history of art, such as August Strindberg and Peder Balke in Nordic painting. But Slaattelid’s treatment is first and foremost surprisingly singular from picture to picture, depicting the distinctive triangu­lar shape of the lantern, as an alien element in the landscape, in combination with the male figure placed high above ground level, as an iconic juxtaposition. The works reflect the painter’s gaze; ways of seeing not only the surroundings, but also ways of dealing with representation, and how the non-material act of perception can be translated into the tactile presence of a painted work. The gaze is a recurring theme in the exhibition, appearing both in the lantern motif, where a circle is inscribed in a triangle like an “all-seeing eye,” and in a series of works depicting a human eye. The eye appears here as something bodily direct, and as an image of the indiv­i­dual gaze: the filter through which every one of us experiences the world. 

Mari Slaattelid (b. 1960) studied at the academies of art in Bergen, Oslo and Düsseldorf. She lives and works in Oslo. 

Curated by Axel Wieder and Steinar Sekkingstad.

The Bergen International Festival Exhibition is one of Norway’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art, and is considered the most prestigious exhibition commission for a Norwegian artist in his or her home country. The Festival Exhibition has been shown at Bergen Kunsthall since 1953, selected and organized by Bergen Kunsthall. 

The exhibition is presented in collaboration with Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, where a new version will be shown in 2020. 

A new book, Templates, will be published in col­la­­boration with Kunstnernes Hus and Sternberg Press. The book includes new texts by Mari Slaattelid, Aleksi Manilla-Wildhagen and Steinar Sekkingstad.

Jill Johnston, The Disintegration of a Critic
May 23-August 11, 2019

Bergen Kunsthall presents a research project and publication dedicated to the cultural critic, writer and lesbian icon Jill Johnston (1929–2010). 

Starting in the early 1960s, Johnston made a name for herself through a recurring dance column in the New York-based weekly newspaper The Village Voice, chronicling avant-garde activities in dance and art, especially Judson Dance, happenings and Fluxus events. Her observations expanded to include her own life and social and political surroundings, leading to the book Lesbian Nation (1973), which soon became a radical-feminist classic. Her autobiographical perspective of writing, and the way in which she linked culture to political observations, broke with established notions of criticism and became hugely influential for following generations of critics and writers. The exhibition focuses on the writing of Jill Johnston as a unique practice in the context of the post-1960s avant-garde and explores links between artistic practices and social politics. As a central element, a selection of columns from 1960 to 1974 will be published, together with further texts, in a book available for the exhibition. The exhibition presents works that feature in or relate to Jill Johnston’s columns, by Andy Warhol, Les Levine, Sturtevant and others, together with documents and archival materials.

The project is curated by Bergen Kunsthall, Fiona McGovern and Megan Francis Sullivan.

As part of the exhibition, a new publication will be available featuring reprints of selected Village Voice columns by Jill Johnston from 1960 to 1974, with new contributions by Ingrid Nyeboe, Jennifer Krasinski, and Bruce Hainley. The book is co-published by Bergen Kunsthall and Sternberg Press.

Related Plattform Events:
Plattform is Bergen Kunsthall’s lecture series connected to our exhibition programme and wider contemporary debates.

Mari Slaattelid & Gunnar Danbolt
Saturday, May 25, 2pm

Fiona McGovern, Megan Francis Sullivan & Axel Wieder
Saturday, June 1, 2pm

Chris Kraus
Wednesday, June 5, 8pm

Petra Bauer
Saturday, June 8, 2pm

Sigrun Åsebø
Saturday, August 10, 2pm