Exhibition texts

The exhibition is mainly mounted chronologically. This way you can follow the development of Norwegian video art from the 1970s to the present. We show a range of historical works, starting with the early monitor-based videos and moving on to advanced technological installations. The exhibition is divided into eight themes referring to crucial intersections between techno­logical and art-historical developments in Norwegian video art. The themes are not mutually exclusive, an artist or a work of art can fit into more than one theme at the same time.

A conceptual foundation – Self-reflexivity and time
The emergence of video in the 1970s had close links to concept art. Concept art challenged the traditional techniques of painting, sculpture, graphic art and drawing. So did video art, there were no pre-existing conventions to govern what a video work should be. The reflexive possibilities inherent in the video camera as a tool allowed artists to mirror their own role as creative agents, and the audience’s response to their work. With its capacity for instantaneous and delayed playback, video technology enabled artists to engage in immediate and direct dialogue with the viewer, a type of involvement that was new.

Marianne Heske, Kjartan Slettemark, Morten Børresen
 
The material dimension – Sound and image
In principle, the video image is immate­rial and transient as it cannot be touched and is in motion. The material­ity of video is different from that of other media, which have surfaces or structures that can be physically touched and examined. The video image is flexible and unstable; its final form is not inalterably bound by the time and place when it was shot, or by a particular frame, as is the case in film and pho­tography. Nonetheless, we can still talk about the material aspect of video. The audiovisual product depends on how the signals that control the sound and image are varied both horizontally and vertically.

Kjell Bjørgeengen, Jeremy Welsh, Morten Børresen, Kristin Bergaust

The formal dimension – Composition and time
Many of the artists with a background in photography and painting who turned to video focused on the aspect of form. Works from the 1970s and 1980s still show the influence of late modernism, often combined with an expressive or conceptual idiom. The concern with form finds expression in strict compositions that emphasize the material dimension, not in an audiovisual sense, but in the detailed rendering of the motif. Artists frequently chose a single subject, with fixed camera angles and cropping, which evolved over time.

Per Maning, A K Dolven

The virtual – An expansive medium
The con­nection between analogue and digital forms of expression is crucial to the idiom of digital simulation. It is the relationship between audio and image that defines the specific character of video, both in analogue and digital video works.  With the emergence of digital techniques the possibilities in construction and reconstruction of images and sound were expanded. This is also where we find the foundation for the development of virtuality, with its computer-generated environments that mimic reality.

Sven Påhlsson, Matias Faldbakken

Performance – Time and context
Concept art’s emphasis on the proces­s offered fertile ground for the development of performance art, which uses the human body to express the ex­perience of time, space and materiality. The documenting of performances, actions and happenings was not initially intended as autonomous works of art. Material produced in this way was mostly viewed as a supplementary component in a broader process. But as concept art gradually gained institutional acceptance, the video documentation of performance works began to develop in new directions.

Elisabeth Mathisen, Marit Følstad

Identity – Staging and role-play
Questions of identity entered the agenda in the 1990s, with the debates about gender and sexuality that formed the core of “queer theory”. One book that proved particularly influential was Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). In this work, Butler introduces a performative theory that assumes unstable categories of identity thus re­jecting the fixed traditional categories of gender and sexuality. The explora­tion of body, gender and identity was a characteristic feature of Norwegian art in the 1990s.

Knut Åsdam, Ole Jørgen Ness, Lotte Konow Lund, Narve Hovdenakk

A shift towards film – Documentary and fiction
The increased use of video in the general public had great impact on Norwegian video artists.  The amateur documentary – material shot on handheld cameras, often unedited, with a casual approach to lighting and scene selection – entered into video art. This gave rise to a new genre of art documentary that combined features of amateur film with the devices of es­tablished documentary and fiction films. In the 1990s Norway saw a considerable growth in this kind of documentary, a form that continues to flourish.

Jannicke Låker, Bodil Furu, Per Teljer, Lars Laumann, Jason Havneraas

Poetic narrative – The mediated image
Digital technology provides an infinite number of possibilities for audiovisual change. With the development of high resolution images artists have taken a new interest in exploring the materiality of video in a poetic expression. By interlacing photography, film and video, new ways of storytelling present themselves. In this context the artist has the freedom to choose between a variety of materials in the form of photos, film, old television broadcasts and video-clips downloaded from the internet.

Trine Lise Nedreaas, Mai Hofstad Gunnes, Unn Fahlstrøm