Hordaland kunstsenter 2024
2024 - In Art Projects
Theia
Marie Nerland
25th of May - 11th of August 2024
With: Mette Edvardsen, Jiska Huizing, Andrea Sørlie Barrett, Mariama Fatou Kalley Slåttøy, Icaro Zorbar
Curated by Mathijs van Geest
Opening: Saturday 25 May 2024
13:00: Performance by Marie Nerland and Andrea Sørlie Barrett
14:00 - 17:00: Exhibition on view
The performance is also shown on Sunday 26 May at 12:00 and 13:00.
Please note that the performance starts on time! Duration approximately 20 minutes. The event is free to attend but available spots are limited. To reserve your spot send an email with preferred time slot to: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
The project Theia by the Trondheim based artist Marie Nerland consists of an exhibition, several performances and an upcoming publication. Theia is inspired by a widely acclaimed hypothesis about how the moon came into existence. It suggests that billions of years ago a large planet from the early solar system, sometimes described as a sibling planet to Earth, collided with the Earth with immense impact. While parts of Theia integrated with Earth’s body, a large piece of the planet got caught in Earth’s orbit, becoming the Moon as we know it today.
To speak of the event that birthed our moon rather than destroyed an entire planet, suggests a hopeful narrative about the journey of objects and how they are altered in multiple and complex ways, through changing circumstances and sometimes clashes. Building upon this story of collision, the exhibition and its associated events are based around the motif of encounter, threading through both objects and artistic practices.
The installation shown in the HKS gallery space consists mainly of found objects and architectural structures used to support previous exhibitions, gathered from various art institutions in and around Bergen, such as plinths, benches and left-over wall structures. When they come together, these individual pieces each with their scars and damages - otherwise discarded or stored away - form a tableau of memories and past events.
Nerland has invited several artists to take part in the project. The performance she has developed for Theia is co-created with and performed by the dancer Andrea Sørlie Barrett. The artists Icaro Zorbar and Mette Edvardsen have both been invited to present a newly produced performance piece, which will be presented in the gallery space during the last weekend of the exhibition.
The Oslo based artist Jiska Huizing has also been invited by Nerland to create a new work, an audio piece that adds sound to the installation and exhibition space. This work, combined with a recording of the performer Mariama Slåttøy reading a text written by Nerland, resonates through the gallery space in a loop.
A video work and a series of photographs showing an eclectic selection of objects yet all belonging to the same life, are dispersed throughout the exhibition space, integrated in the installation. Like going through someone’s moving boxes studying their belongings, these images - moving and still - provide a sense of how the past and the present are tangled up in one another. Seen as a whole Theia seems to ponder the question: What is a memory?
Program during the closing weekend
Friday 9 August
18:00: Performance lecture by Marie Nerland
Saturday 10 August
16:00: Performance by Icaro Zorbar
17:00: Performance by Mette Edvardsen
18:00: Kitchen Dinner
Sunday 11 August
8:00 Morning session: Sound piece by Jiska Huizing
More information about these events will be announced later.
The publication produced as part of Theia will be released towards the end of 2025.
Bios
Marie Nerland is a Norwegian artist and curator who has studied political science, comparative literature, and holds an MA degree in Theatre Studies from the University of Bergen and a MA-level degree in curatorial practice from the Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Her artistic practice focuses on performance and text-based work, often made in collaboration with other artists. Nerland is the founder of Volt, a long-term, Bergen-based curatorial project that focuses on commissioning and presenting new contemporary artworks by practitioners working across a diverse range of media. Since 2019 Nerland has been part of the long-term project The Wetland Pavilion – an initiative based in and around Oslo’s Østensjøvannet nature reserve.
Her most recent projects are Machine Membranes, with Nayara Leite and Mari Kvien Brunvoll, at Lydgalleriet (2023); Reveries, with Icaro Zorbar, at Oppland Kunstsenter, Lillehammer (2022); Lyset midt i oktober at Paviljong Våtmark, Østensjøvannet, Oslo (2022); Echolocation at P////AKT, Amsterdam (2019); Signposts Tromsø at Small Projects, Tromsø (2019); Signpost at Hordaland Kunstsenter (2018), all three in collaboration with Nickel van Duijvenboden; and a lecture performance at Landmark, Bergen Kunsthall (2017).
Icaro Zorbar is an Oslo-based artist from Bogotá, Colombia. He has an MA from the Art Academy in Bergen in 2017. His work is rooted in questions about the fragile human attempt to survive time. Memories and technology are closely linked. He seeks to formulate narratives in poetic circumstances through the intervention of devices, sound, and video. He has recently shown work at Vestlandsutstillingen 2022, Oppland Kunstsenter, Lydgalleriet, Modern Art Museum in Bogota, Osnabrück Kunsthalle, and the Lyon Biennale.
Mette Edvardsen has a an artistic practice situated within the performing arts field as a choreographer and performer. Although some of her works explore other media or other formats, such as video, books and writing, her interest is always in their relationship to the performing arts as a practice and a situation. She has worked since 1994 as a dancer and performer for a number of companies and projects, and develops her own work since 2002. She presents her works internationally and continues to develop projects with other artists, both as a collaborator and as a performer.
Jiska Huizing is a Dutch artist living and working in Oslo, Norway. Working with sound, photography, artist books, text and guided walks, they create work that contains a sense of searching and wandering, and that questions the ways in which we perceive our surroundings. Huizing holds an MA from the Bergen Academy of Arts and Design. Their work has been presented at amongst others Van Etten, Lydgalleriet, RUMMUR_radio, Vestlandsutstillingen 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, Academy Minerva and HIAP, Helsinki.
Andrea Sørlie Barrett is a Norwegian-Canadian dancer based in Oslo. She graduated from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2021 with a BA in Contemporary Dance. Since then she has worked as a performer in projects with choreographers such as Tendai Makurumbandi, Tormod Midtbø, Ingri Fiksdal and Fieldworks.
Mariama Fatou Kalley Slåttøy is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and holds a BA degree in Performing Dance. She works within the field of independent performing arts as well as at institutional theatres, and has worked with choreographers, directors and artists such as Ingri Fiksdal, Fredrik Floen, Eline Arbo, Ole Martin Meland and Jon Tombre. She has been involved in a number of theater productions, musicals as well as film and TV projects - developing and producing her own and others’ dance short films, and as a dancer and actor.
The exhibition has received funding from Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen Municipality and Vederlagsfondet.