5 December 2014 – 18 January 2015
UKS

EXHIBITION
KJERSTI VETTERSTAD

QUEST IN PARADISE
VENUE: UKS
December 5 2014 – 18 January 2015 | Opening 5 December at 19:00
I Artist talk 17 January 2015 at 14:00

The ephemeral is central to Kjersti Vetterstad’s Quest in Paradise, the last major exhibition of the year at Unge Kunstneres Samfund’s temporary home at Tullinløkka, Oslo. The exhibition spills out from the main hall to fill every room of the basement venue. With a series of video and sound installations – and a poisonous plant – Vetterstad transforms UKS into a microcosm. The eternal is juxtaposed with the most fleeting, revealing the cycles to which we all belong. At the same time, the artist asks questions about how we as humans relate to nature: Is nature a locality? Are we distinct from nature? What would the world look like if we seriously respected non-human entities?

THE AGRONAUT

An intense interest in landscape and the place of humanity in natural cycles form the background for “Quest in Paradise”. At the heart of the exhibition is The Agronaut, a documentary film that transports us to the Spanish region of Catalonia, where Vetterstad spent a long period following Montserrat Canudas Jorba, who lives like a hermit on her farm outside the village of El Bruc. The title of the film, taken from the pun Jorba uses to describe herself, plays on the Argonauts of the Greek myth of Jason and is an acknowledgment of Jorba’s own role as a navigator in the landscape she lives in and off. Jorba’s retelling of the history of the surrounding area, its landscape and the people who have inhabited it, is interspersed with images and stories from her life on the farm – a life lived in acceptance of the mechanisms that shape our surroundings. “We’ll all return to the earth,” she says in the film. “We too are biodegradable.”

The Agronaut takes us on a journey through time, from the era of fossils and into the future as Jorba envisages it. And time is an important theme for “Quest in Paradise” as a whole. By exploring the inconstancy of the world in which we live, these works distance themselves from a linear conception of time and come closer to a more cyclical perspective on life.

RESTING PULSE

UKS’s project room hosts a sound work based on recordings from a single morning at Jorba’s farm. The work functions as both a time capsule that captures a specific time and place and documentation of the mundane, incessantly repetitive moments that would otherwise not be noticed. The same can be said about the video installation Prophesies of the Oak on show in the main hall, which documents drifting clouds, the death throes of a beetle, and the living, breathing landscape one can find on the body of a dog.

This work also includes a sound piece composed by the musician Mirejam Shala. In her composition, Shala uses binaural beats, which correspond to and stimulate the brain-wave frequencies associated with, among other things, relaxation, memory and deep sleep. To these, she has added a fourth frequency: that of the so-called Shumann resonance, an electromagnetic phenomena that pervade the surface of the earth and the lower reaches of the ionosphere.

Vetterstad’s works are a response to a specific area in Catalonia, which in “Quest in Paradise” is recreated within a new frame. Despite the obvious presence of a human protagonist, this artistic reconstruction alludes to things that lie beyond human control and exist independently of us.

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kjersti Vetterstad (Drammen, 1977; lives and works in Oslo and Drammen) trained at the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen and at Konstfack in Stockholm. Together with Monica Winther, she has formed the performance duo Mor & Jerry. More recently, she has established the collaborative project Fine Day with Peter Mitterer / Sex Tags. Another aspect of her artistic practice is the use of experimental teaching techniques at Prosjektskolen in
Oslo.

All exhibitions at UKS are selected by the UKS jury and curated by Johanne Nordby Wernø. The exhibition “Quest in Paradise” is supported by Arts Council Norway and the Audio Visual Fund.

UKS will be closed for the Christmas holiday from 22 December – 5 January 2015.

Images from the exhibition “Quest in Paradise”, 2014

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