Deadline for applications is Tuesday 18 February to attend our free art-writing course, in collaboration with Bergen Kunsthall and Office for Contemporary Art Norway. It has since taken place every ten years and mostly occupies public areas in and around the city. Yet the scale and ambition of the projects have dramatically evolved, reflecting with each edition ever more expanded ideas of sculpture, public space and site specificity.
Another high point afforded by the scale and relative infrequency of the exhibition is its engagement with its own history. Asher placed a caravan at various sites in the city and moved it around on a weekly basis, repeating the act for each iteration of the exhibition. At other places, the relationship between artwork and place is more inscrutable.
A DJ reads the news, presents advertisements and plays music. Seven LED screens occupy a large field near Lake Aasee and turn better- and lesser-known paintings into seemingly free-standing advertisements. The roof opens and closes as determined by an algorithm based on the growth of incubated cancer cells, their rate of reproduction in turn synched with the vitality of the space the movement of bees, CO2 and bacteria levels. A symbiosis of architecture, biological phenomena and symbolic landscape, the intervention suggests location and dislocation at once.
Set in a surreal readymade environment — a now-defunct store that previously specialized in selling Asian products — it operates between fact and fiction to speak about commerce in a globalized world. Footage of the tunnels is interspersed with images of a gigantic Chinese market selling products like those usually found in cent stores in the US.
The project points at globalization, illegal trade, exploitation of workers and that all accompany the invisible transfer of consumer goods. Designs by artists many participating in the event become permanent souvenirs for the visitor-participants — instances of self-expression that unite the outside of the human body with the performance of interior aesthetic sensibility.
