Åsa Elzén: Notes on a Fallow—The Fogelstad Group and Earth / Edgar Calel: Ni Musmut (It's Breezing)

Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present an extensive exhibition by artist Edgar Calel, his first solo presentation in Europe. Working in a variety of media, Calel celebrates the traditions and spirituality of his Mayan Kaqchikel heritage in Guatemala. His works are often grounded in attentive relationships with the earth and its elements, playfully challenging Western conventions and perspectives of permanence.

The works, made specifically for the spaces of Bergen Kunsthall, continue Calel’s engagement with the Mayan Kaqchikel cosmovision and the connections of its concepts and practices to other cultural contexts. At the centre of this exhibition is a large-scale installation of soil, rock and fire that connects the elements of a site for jun k'obomanik, or giving thanks through offering rituals. Within this microcosm of a landscape, we find a series of hanging stones and a group of 76 ceramic pots, filled with water and flower petals and accompanied by wooden sticks, titled Oyonik (The Calling), alluding to traditional cultural practices. This is presented as material and ritual—the artist and the Bergen Kunsthall team will light candles under the rocks each day upon opening the exhibition. Calel’s works require entrusting devotional forms to an institution. The artist views such collaboration as a means of opening these traditions while remaining in dialogue with ancestral practitioners. 

A new wall-scale embroidery work shows the home of Calel's family. The work, made in collaboration with his family, creates a direct connection between the home and the exhibition spaces. A selection of artworks by Calel's artistic community and family are presented in one of the gallery spaces, with a common theme of the garden.

Edgar Calel (born in Chi Xot—San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, 1987) is considered a leading voice of institutional critique among a broad generation of Latin American artists. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (2023) and the Liverpool Biennial (2023), and his works are part of the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Tate, UK, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and others.

Parallel to the exhibition by Edgar Calel, we present Notes on a Fallow–The Fogelstad Group and Earth by Åsa Elzén. Elzén has worked with the legacy of the queer feminist Fogelstad Group, that ran the Women Citizens’ School at Fogelstad (1925–54 in Julita, Sörmland).

At a time when industrial agriculture was emerging, the Fogelstad Group was highly critical of pesticides, chemical fertilisers, and farming on an increasingly large scale but with less biodiversity. Through educational and political work, the group proposed radical methods for the transformation of privately owned land to forms of hereditary and transferable land tenancies, and donated land to the state to be granted to the unemployed, through so-called “åborätter” (Åbo rights).

At the centre of Gallery 5, a large carpet made by Åsa Elzén is displayed on a podium where visitors can walk and sit without shoes. The work is a transcript of a carpet titled En Träda (“A Fallow”) made by Maja and Amelie Fjæstad in 1919–20. Transcript of a Fallow is the centrepiece of Elzén’s continuously growing project that blurs the lines between historical materials and new works as Elzén delves into the group’s practices in ecology and resilience. 

The exhibition includes A Growing Fallow Archive, which showcases materials related to the original carpet. The accompanying audio piece features excerpts from texts on fallow land and the history of the carpet's making, while the video exhibited consists of quotes from legal documents concerning ownership rights. The project also features a series of photographs by Axel Fredriksson, documenting daily life on the farm, and objects related to the (archival) history of En Träda (“A Fallow”).

Åsa Elzén (b.1972 in Visby, Sweden) lives in Näshulta, Sörmland. Elzén is currently collaborating with Malin Arnell on Forest Calling—A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge, a public art commission related to Fogelstad, supported by Public Art Agency Sweden.