Artist talk: Martin White, Matthew Berka and Jan Verwoert

We have the great pleasure of inviting you to Is this OK?'s first artists’ talk - Saturday March 16 at 2 PM - between Martin White & Matthew Berka and Jan Verwoert, critic, writer and professor of art and theory at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. The event is free of charge and open for all.

Artistic labour is usually dislocated from the exhibition format, and is therefore also dislocated from the public. Cultural labour on an institutional level, that is the labour of the people working at institutions, is similarly dislocated and invisible from the public's view. Is this OK? relocates multiple levels of artistic labour into the exhibition format.

Martin White (b. 1978) and Matthew Berka (b. 1992) have collaborated previously on performance works using live video, video interviews and documentary techniques in a live context. White studied Fine Art at RMIT in Melbourne and completed his MFA at the Norwegian National Academy of Art in Oslo in 2017. In 2002, he received a post-graduate diploma in Dramatic Art from the VCA in Melbourne. He has previously directed theatre, film and television. White’s work has been shown at film and performance festivals internationally and he has exhibited in group shows in Melbourne, Malmö and Oslo. White had a solo show for Tokonoma at MELK in 2018 and has an upcoming solo show at Podium. Alongside his artistic practice, White has published essays and reviews, sat on award and grant panels, worked as a researcher, and occasionally taught. Matthew Berka lives and works in London. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Media Arts/Sound) from RMIT University. Previous exhibitions and screenings include SUPER FIELD, Melbourne (2017), The Ecology of Place, Melbourne (2017), Image Inverts, Close-Up Cinema, London (2017) and Home Movies, Bologna (2017). In addition to his practice he has curated exhibitions and screenings, worked as a video editor and collaborator in theatre and film.

Jan Verwoert teaches at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam, and the de Appel curatorial programme, Amsterdam. Verwoert is a critic and writer on contemporary art and cultural theory. He is a contributing editor of Frieze magazine and his writing has appeared in different journals, anthologies and monographs. He is the author of «Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous» (MIT Press/Afterall Books, 2006), the essay collection «Tell Me What You Want What You Really Really Want» (Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute, 2010), «Animal Spirits—Fables in the Parlance of Our Time» together with Michael Stevenson, (Christoph Keller Editions, JRP, Zurich, 2013) and a second collection of his essays «Cookie!» published by Sternberg Press/Piet Zwart Institute (2014). His work is focused around the desire to develop concepts that redescribe the role of emotion, motion, action, intuition and sentience in the practice of art and thinking. His criticism is directed against a new system of control in which the pressure to perform (imposed by ourselves on ourselves, at all times) goes hand in hand with the demand to produce events, deliver results, represent identities and surrender to evaluation.

The talk will take place in English.