Oslo 0165
Norway
Hours: Wednesday and Friday–Sunday 12–5pm
Thursday 12–7pm
T +47 22 19 50 50
info@uks.no
Founded for artists by artists in 1921, UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society) is one of Norway’s core institutions for supporting new productions and exhibiting the practices of young, contemporary artists.
After a full year of renovation, UKS reopens in splendid new surroundings with the group exhibition Open Systems, followed by a solo exhibition by Martin White.
There’s a saying in Norway that one can live on air and love alone. We know that isn’t quite the case. To finalise our big renovation, UKS is asking for help with the fundraiser Air & Love. Your support goes toward securing a space of solidarity for young artists and art lovers.
This spring, UKS invites bookworms and thought pirates to join Close Readings, a monthly, informal reading circle open to all, at which UKS and art historian Sara Yazdani explore how to read and think together with and through texts, artworks and objects. The season continues with the exhibition series Young Dumb & Broke which displays a single early work by a once young and unknown, now older and esteemed artist. Considering informal social functions, intellectual exchange and attempts at friendship as fundamental parts of its remit, UKS continues its Minibar evenings and the walk-in-workshop How to Practice? at which rotating local and international practitioners—such as Jules Fisher, Tai Shani and Admir Batlak—serve up their tricks, tools, fears and desires for artistic survival over a bowl of hot soup.
Air & Love
Fundraiser
UKS has opened our new home in central Oslo but we need help to secure an upgraded ventilation system to supply a steady stream of fresh air for our visitors. In return, UKS offers a house full of love for art and the best environment for experiencing it—together. You can acquire magnificent and affordable works by artists A K Dolven and Damla Kilickiran in exchange for your support. If you like what we do and can spare a few coins, we kindly ask that you consider supporting the campaign.
Alice Slyngstad, Anna Andersson, Danae Io, Miriam Hansen, Yujin Jung: Open Systems
January 14–February 26
An open system is porous, its boundaries are permeable by energy and matter. It is in constant exchange with its surroundings; information, myths, capital, ideas, scent, debris and people flow inexhaustibly between and through open systems, which are wholly dependent on input, process and output. For the inaugural exhibition at UKS, five young artists take over the building, presenting fragments from online dating; the myth surrounding the city of Thebes; sculptural repetition; the lunchbreaks of Korean factory workers; and a space clothed in a miasma of ancient plants. Each work a system of its own, they inhabit UKS’ new headquarters as we open our doors to spark the exchange of energy.
Martin White: Big Science: Volume 1
Opening: March 24
March 25–May 7
From 1956 to 1977, freewheeling Norwegian psychiatrist Dr. Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen experimented on patients at Oslo’s Gaustad Hospital by implanting electrodes into their brains without their consent. For the past six years, Martin White (b. 1978, AU) has combed through the doctor’s archives, forensically building a story that bears witness to the dense entanglement of Gaustad Psychiatric Hospital, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundation, the US Military, Airforce and Navy, NASA and the Psycho Pirate, a comic book character. With Big Science: Volume 1, which collects issues #01–#04 of the serialised artist book, White draws us into an intricate web: a sprawling, underground, dispersed and illicit print project that reveals the chaotic, interdependent and haphazard structures of power, psychiatry, propaganda, influence and ideology.
Open Systems is supported by the Norwegian Arts Council, The Mondriaan Fund and the Danish Arts Council.
Martin White’s exhibition is supported by the Norwegian Arts Council, the Norwegian Visual Artists Fund and the Bergesen Foundation.
