EXHIBITION
NORA JOUNG: DING DONG

Opening: Friday 16 February  |  7-8:30pm at UKS  |  8:30-10pm at Kunstnernes Hus
Opening performance: Friday 16 February  |  7:30pm at UKS
Exhibition: 17 February – 28 March, 2018
Venues: UKS & Kunstnernes Hus

PRESS:

– Review in Vi ser på Kunst (journal)
Trippin’ at the gates of womb, Vi ser på Kunst, 03.03.2018

– Review in Morgenbladet (weekly newspaper)
Loungemonologer, Morgenbladet, 09.03.2018

Please join us Friday 16 February from 7pm for the opening of the exhibition Ding Dong by Nora Joung. The exhibition is presented at both UKS and Kunstnernes Hus as part of UKS’ series of double exposés running through Spring 2018.

Visual artist, critical writer, and occasional performer, Joung’s practice reflects the prosaic and popular powers seeping through the seams of even our most intimate words and expressions. For her grand new UKS commission, Joung dwells in the threshold between the guarded privacy of a (Norwegian) household and an outside, resounding the ring of the doorbell in her exhibition title.

At Kunstnernes Hus, Joung creates an enlarged, theatrical environment—overlooked from a mezzanine entrance—shrinking now puppet-sized audiences into a larger-than-life blue-lit living room fully equipped with rug and sofa, and centered around a TV. Quoting platitudes from soap operas, inherited marketing clichés, and news trailers, the screen evokes a hyperbole of the (often commercial) powers that pour into personal space via this relentless channel.

At UKS, three different structures—a rectangle, a circle, and a triangle—each uphold a different function. A tall rectangular stage supporting a sofa forms the setting for a selection of Joung’s live works, while a low circular platform furnished with lounge chairs is activated by occasional talk shows. Raising questions of contemporary loss of seclusion and radical transparency or self-surveillance, a final, triangular structure holds a set of video screens. One filmic work ponders Viennese architect Adolf Loos’ equally amusing and dated bridging of clothing, applied design, and the private house to aspects of male and female bodily withdrawal and exposition.