Camille Norment: Gyre

Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present the Festival Exhibition 2023 by Camille Norment. The exhibition will transform the galleries of Bergen Kunsthall into an installation that draws all four main galleries together in an expansive sonic experience. Norment’s work explores the ways in which sound relates to bodies, places, and the constellations of experience, history and time embodied in these intersections. The title of the exhibition, Gyre, refers to a spiral motion or vortex, and the works’ occupation with cycles, loops, and oscillations repeat through scales of time and physically connect bodies through sonic exchange.

In the Bergen Kunsthall exhibition, each gallery will contain works that activate the space through different forms of sound production. Though some of these works are spectacular and large in scale, they inhabit the space as discrete objects that make use of the active acoustics of Bergen Kunsthall’s galleries. A large work in brass, presented in the largest gallery, is the centre of a complex feedback installation in which the surrounding noise in the space becomes a part of the future direction of the sound we’re listening to. Across the galleries, the composition also contains polyphonic drum-like rhythms, together with sounds of voices and the chattering of teeth produced by other objects in the exhibition. In addition, Norment will show a series of new works on paper, made through sound and magnetism, with iron and rainwater. A space on the second floor provides a research situation with records and publications that create a context for the works in the exhibition.

Norment’s work specifically employs ideas of sonic and social dissonance, an agency of listening, and the empowerment and transformative possibilities of sound. Her own repeated use of sonic feedback, a commonly censored sound, is related to an ethical politics of music, spirituality, and the paradoxical loops that constitute consciousness itself. 

A new publication will be released at the end of the exhibition, with texts by Nina Sun Eidsheim, Kathryn Yusoff and Camille Norment.

Camille Norment is a visual artist, composer and performer. Based in Norway since 2004, she represented Norway in the 56th Venice Art Biennale in 2015 with the large-scale three-part project Rapture.

Curated by Axel Wieder and Silja Leifsdottir.

Also opening
Ørjan Amundsen: Destiny
Ørjan Amundsen shows a new three-channel video installation in which mythology, technology, facts and speculation are woven together. The video material is based on appropriated content from unspecified sources and stems from the artist’s interest in advanced predictive technology, a tool originally used by meteorologists to forecast weather. Today it is part of what shapes our perception and conception of reality.

The three-part work—the installation, the videos and the sound—is inspired by goddesses of fate. In Norse mythology, they are known as Norns; the three goddesses twining the threads of fate for every human from the day they are born. In Greek and Roman mythology, one finds similar figures, the Moirai and the Parcae, also known as “the fates.” The desire to predict the future is a practice and phenomenon described in myths and religions around the world and is probably as old as humans. In Ørjan Amundsen’s new works, parallels are drawn between mythology and technology in the sense that for most people, understanding how algorithms, computer programs, and the interpretation of how our data are being used, is just as intangible as understanding predictions in mythology. In Destiny, the goddesses of fate are replaced by predictive technology, artificial intelligence, and machine learning; a newer form of predictive power that analyses, learns, and makes predictions based on algorithms and data obtained about individuals.

Ørjan Amundsen is based in Oslo and works mainly with video, text and music, most often in combination. Central to his practice are investigations of how digital media and information technologies help to shape our perception and conception of reality.

Curated by Silja Leifsdottir and Axel Wieder.

Free opening weekend: May 25–28 
Entrance to the exhibition during the opening weekend is free.

Press requests
Emilio Sanhueza, Bergen Kunsthall, T +47 99 29 89 84 / emilio@kunsthall.no