Before Tomorrow Live

Before Tomorrow Live, a program of performance, sound, screenings, and conversations, is taking place at Astrup Fearnley Museet over the autumn of 2023.

Before Tomorrow Live reacts to positions in the Astrup Fearnley Collection, as well as the abstract and material confluences that gather works together in our current exhibition Before Tomorrow. By inviting artists working with impermanent and durational practices into the museum, the intention is not only to expand the types of medias that the museum engages with, but also to foster alternative institutional frameworks and test new modes of programming. In particular, the program includes the work of several practitioners situated between dance, choreography, and performance.

A series of conversations with artists whose work features in Before Tomorrow, including Ann Cathrin November Høibo and Mikael Lo Presti, will take place within the exhibition. These conversations create an additional layer to the program, providing an opportunity for practitioners to reflect upon the exhibition and the work of their peers. Furthermore, scholars, art critics, and leaders in the visual arts will reflect on developments within the arts ecosystem, institutional practice, and the work of artists in the Astrup Fearnley Collection.

The program builds upon recent projects at Astrup Fearnley Museet, such as the presentation of Paul Maheke’s The Origin of Death, and performances by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme earlier this year. Curated by Owen Martin, with Inger Fure Grøtting and Marthe A. Andersen.

Thank you to CODA—Oslo International Dance Festival, Dansens Hus, Ultima—Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, and Torpedo Press for their collaboration.

Program:

Performance:​ Allora & Calzadilla, Clamor
Saturday, September 16, 1–4pm / Sunday, September 17, 1–4pm
Allora & Calzadilla sculpture Clamor (2006), explores the relationship between sound, music, and the architectural typologies of war and its aftermath. A large sculptural hybrid chamber resembling a bunker, a ruin, a cave, and a sound booth, is the locus of a live performance event as well as a musical archive, staging a confrontation of this form of sonic expression back to earliest of military encounters.  For the live performance event, live musicians playing various repertoires of war songs from different geographical territories and historical periods confront each other creating a monstrous montage of war music, somewhere between a symphony and cacophony. Clamor stages a musical, bodily, and corporeal investigation into the nature of these songs in the context of today’s global state of war.

Jennifer Allora (1974, USA) and Guillermo Calzadilla (1971, Cuba) are a collaborative duo of visual artists who live and work in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Through a research-based approach, their works trace intersections of history, material culture, ecology, and geopolitics, using a multiplicity of artistic media that include performance, sculpture, sound, video, and photography.

Talk: Hamza Walker on Kara Walker
Thursday, September 28 6pm
Hamza Walker, director of the non-profit arts space LAXART in Los Angeles, and former Director of Education and Associate Curator of the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society, will discuss the work of artist Kara Walker. He was involved in Kara Walker’s first solo show at the Renaissance Society in 1997, as well as the exhibition’s seminal catalogue, which serves as a key reference for her practice.

Kara Walker’s expansive mural THE SOVEREIGN CITIZENS SESQUICENTENNIAL CIVIL WAR CELEBRATION (2013), a new acquisition for the Astrup Fearnley Collection, is currently on display in the main exhibition space as part of Before Tomorrow. Walker, regarded as one of the leading artists in the United States, is known for her tableaux of cut-paper silhouettes and films, which address racism, violence, and sexual violence, and the history of slavery, among other subjects.

Artist on the collection: Mikael Lo Presti
Tuesday, October 10, 6pm
Mikael Lo Presti, in conversation with curator Owen Martin, will reflect on his own work in the exhibition Before Tomorrow as well as the Astrup Fearnley Collection more broadly. The audience will be invited to explore the exhibition alongside the artist and curator.

Performance: Oona Doherty, Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus
Saturday, October 14, 4pm
Dancer and choreographer Oona Doherty’s Hope Hunt and the Ascension into Lazarus, performed by Sati Veyrunes, will take place both directly in front of the museum and in our galleries. Situated between physical theatre, dance, and performance art, this work manipulates and reimagines the gestures of working-class masculinity, in a search for hope.

This performance is in collaboration with CODA Oslo International Dance Festival and Dansens Hus, where Doherty’s Navy Blue will be performed on October 12 and 13.

Talk: Jonas Ekeberg  
Thursday, October 19, 6pm
Talk by Jonas Ekeberg in conjunction with the launch of the English-language version of his publication Post-Nordic—the first extensive survey of Nordic art during the transition from postmodernism into what might be called “the period of contemporary art.” In his lecture, Ekeberg will consider how Astrup Fearnley Museet, and its exhibition Before Tomorrow, are connected to the Nordic art scene of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Performance: Naama Tsabar, Untitled (Double Face) 
Saturday, October 21, 1pm / Sunday, October 22, 1pm
In Untitled (Double Face) two guitars are joined to form one instrument that has no back. The act of multiplying serves almost as a handicap, one that imposes new movement and sound. It now takes two people to activate this musical instrument. When played, the sculpture imposes a hyper intimate relationship upon the musicians, facing one another,  and holding the guitar between them. Every movement is felt and heard, with their backs to the crowd.

Between sculpture and instrument, form and sound, Tsabar’s work lingers on the intimate, sensual and corporeal potentials within this transitional state. Collaborating with local communities of female-identifying and gender non-conforming performers, Tsabar writes a new feminist and queer history of fluency.

Screening: Matthew Barney, Redoubt
Thursday, October 26, 6pm
Redoubt, by artist and director Matthew Barney, creator of the CREMASTER Cycle, DRAWING RESTRAINT 9, and the film opera River of Fundament, unfolds as a series of hunts in the wilderness of Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains. The characters communicate a mythological narrative through dance, letting movement replace language as they pursue each other and their prey.

Screening, talk, sound: Jonathas de Andrade, Olho da Rua and Jogos Dirigidos
Thursday, November 2, 6pm
Olho da Rua (Out Loud), 2022, and Jogos Dirigidos (Directed Games), 2019, by Jonathas de Andrade, will be screened with live soundtrack performed by three musicians, including composer Homero Basílio. Previously presented in this format at public venues in Portugal and Brazil, the two films will be presented for the first time in the Nordic region. Drawing upon Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, they center the testimonies of communities who give voice to the complexities of contemporary Brazilian society—its cultural and linguistic diversity but also its stark inequalities. 

Olho da Rua, which was filmed in Recife, follows a cast of 100-nonprofessional actors without formal housing, and moves between direct address and collective assembly in a public square. In Jogos Dirigidos, hearing-impaired members of the Várzea Queimada community, in northeastern Brazil, share their everyday experiences through a locally developed form of sign language.

Performance: Angela Goh
Thursday, November 23, 6pm
Angela Goh, an artist working with dance and choreography, whose practice is regularly presented in both contemporary art and traditional performance contexts, is staging a recently conceived work at Astrup Fearnley Museet. Borrowing and reconfiguring gestures and actions from previous compositions, temporality is compressed and expanded through repetition, with deviations in each iteration. A narrative is created through the slight differences in each repeated sequence, pointing to an instability in how we apprehend time and its relation to the body.

Artist on the Collection: Ann Cathrin November Høibo
Thursday, November 30, 6pm
Ann Cathrin November Høibo will reflect on her own work in the exhibition Before Tomorrow, as well as the Astrup Fearnley Collection more broadly. The audience will be invited to explore the exhibition alongside the artist.

Performance, DJ set, closing party: Atiyyah Khan
Saturday, December 2, 8pm
Cape Town-based DJ Atiyyah Khan will perform at Astrup Fearnley Museet with a new set to mark the closing of Before Tomorrow, connecting divergent and underrepresented music histories to tendencies and artistic practices in the exhibition. Khan’s multi-pronged practice spans arts journalism, research, and sound archiving, as well as writing for major newspapers in South Africa, and self-publishing. Common themes in her work focus on topics such as spatial injustice, untold stories of apartheid, jazz history, and underground art movements.

She co-founded the music collective Future Nostalgia in 2013, and as DJ El Corazon, her sets explore the connections of musical forms across borders, to evoke curiosity and discover sonic possibilities. Since 2017, she has collaborated with choreographers and artists in the creation of new work. Her current work continues both in the field of journalism and the study of sound.