HYLAND
type of video installations shown at NoPlace.
Exposing the limits of science, challenging the senses,
sculptures and performances to question functional
architecture—these themes characterize the cryptic
presentations at One Night Only.
A recent offering at 1857, a video parody of sunbathers
on a city rooftop, mixed with fantastical allusions to a
dirigible crossing the Atlantic, is another romp into the
unknown. It's humorous, yet also extremely mind-bending.
"We are dramatically pushing the envelope, doing
plays, visual arts, experimental music and film, work that
you don't ever see else-where,"
says Will Bradley, the artistic
director at KunsthallOslo, a
gallery where 28 tons of clay
were once transformed into
figures meant to glorify mankind
free of chains.
"We're part of Oslo's new
energy, the new intensity
that drives the experimental.
Marginal modernistic work, like the play Laksespe-let, a
tragedy ending in an apocalyptic bloodbath, or the film
Travelling Waveforms, is no longer marginal. Oslo is free
now, free to explore."
Anarchic, defiantly probing the hidden depths of
human consciousness, and often unsettling, the art
at these galleries is inherently linked to Norway's most
famous writer, Knut Hamsun, who influenced Hemingway,
Kafka, and Thomas Mann. He advised writers to describe
"the whisper of blood, the pleading of bone marrow"—
carnal instincts vividly mirrored in Anja Carr's surreal yet
entertaining, psycho-kitsch Pop Art at Pink Cube.
This page: Anja Carr