8 March – 14 April 2013
UKS
EXHIBITION
POSSESSIONS
Curated by FRANK
With works by Serina Erfjord, Klara Lidén, Sidsel Paaske, Tove Pedersen, Roee Rosen and Martin Skauen.
The exhibition takes “Possessions” as starting point to address the complexities of the term: as an act of taking control, claiming ownership, and a state of being possessed by demons and emotions. The selection of artworks evokes ambiguities of gender, desires and complex power relations, to allow for contradictions and collisions of the past and present to surface. It presents various explorations of the operations of power, identity construction and dominant ideologies, confronting solidified modes of thought that oppress the possibilities of ambiguity and paradox.
Klara Lidén’s video work, The Myth of Progress, functions as an allegory of the show as a whole, questioning the understanding of Western advancements. In it, the artist glides backwards through a cityscape, moving at her own pace as the world around her continues its course. Roee Rosen’s Out (Tse) is another central work. It presents a possession episode in which Israeli right-wing ideology is internalized within the body of a woman and exorcized through a domination/submission scene. The complexities of possessions are extended to erotic tapestry from the 70s, a drawing of a mother and child, a symbolic sculpture, a found object and an intervention in the “watchtower” in the exhibition space.
FRANK is a platform run by Liv Bugge and Sille Storihle. It was established in April 2012 to nurture art and critical discourse revolving around gender issues, desire and sexuality. The incentive to form such a platform came from the realization that Oslo, to a large extent, lacked a scene that critically addressed gender issues. The platform operates in different locations and with various co-curators, Possessions is the first major curatorial work by FRANK.
Artist talk by Roee Rosen
Saturday March 9th at 6pm
Osterhausgate 12
Roee Rosen (b. 1963) is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. He will present two fictive identities, The Jewish Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank (1900-1943), and the young Russian Poet and artist Maxim Komar-Myshkin who committed suicide in 2011
Rosen’s painting and text installation, Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995-1997), stirred a scandal when first exhibited at the Israel Museum. Eva Braun was later recognized as groundbreaking in its approach to the representation of the holocaust, and was exhibited in Berlin and in New York and Warsaw. In 2012 the project was part of Rosen sole exhibition Vile, Evil Veil at the Institute of International Visual Arts (INIVA), London.
Rosen dedicated many years to his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as writing biographical and theoretical text about her, and the novel she supposedly authored. Rosen’s book, Justine Frank, Sweet Sweat (Sternberg Press) was listed as one of the best books of 2009 by Artforum magazine. In 2008, Frank’s “retrospective” was exhibited at Extra-City, in her native town, Antwerp (an exhibition curated by Hila Peleg).