National Museum of Norway

Tori Wrånes
Hot Pocket
April 20–September 3, 2017

SIRKLING (CIRCLING): May 19–21, Performance by Tori Wrånes

National Museum of Norway
The Museum of Contemporary Art
Bankplassen 4
0151 Oslo
Norway

www.nasjonalmuseet.no
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The light pulsates on and off as if the hours of the day have changed their rhythm. The sound of an invisible bird flapping and of wind blowing surges through the gallery spaces as visitors are slowly turning as they sit on a rotating stage. Are we inside a cave, or inside an indefinable furred animal turned inside out? 

The Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to present Hot Pocket by the internationally renowned artist Tori Wrånes (b. 1978). A unique voice on the contemporary art scene, she uses costumes, props, voice and movement to create suggestive and hypnotic pockets of time—secret, highly charged spaces and mesmerising utopias. Wrånes’ all-encompassing projects draw us into a magical, dreamlike world where anything is possible. She twists and reshapes traditions into spellbinding experiences—a concert in a ski lift, a ballet of construction cranes or an opera on bicycles.

Hot Pocket is the largest presentation of Tori Wrånes in Norway to date. The gallery space in the Museum of Contemporary Art is transformed into an extensive tableau where life inside a parallel universe is unfolding. It is a performative exhibition where sound, light, image and movement challenges presumed appearances. Generous in its embrace of the quirky, this pocket outside of normality offers an uncanny safe-zone for the unusual. 

World premiere
Alongside Hot Pocket Wrånes will premiere her new performance SIRKLING (CIRCLING), a co-production between the National Museum and the National Theatre in Oslo. In five exclusive shows in May Hot Pocket will realize its potential as scenography for a performance encompassing close to 40 furred creatures singing and moving about in circles as they are preoccupied with their peculiar routines.

Tickets are available through Eventbrite.

Tori Wrånes’ work has been shown at Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria; SculptureCenter, New York; Dhaka Art Seminars, Bangladesh; Colombo Art Biennale, Sri Lanka; De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam; Grand Palais, Paris; Carl Freedman Gallery, London, and elsewhere. She has completed commissions for, among others, the Sydney Biennial, Performa in New York, the Bergen International Festival, and Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö.