Attribution

In 2009 Ignas Krunglevicius received the Sparebankstiftelsen DnB NOR art stipend NOK 100 000 for the work Interrogation. The members of the jury praised Krunglevicius ability to captivate the viewers on an intellectual as well as an emotional level. The strong dramaturgy reinforces the sensation of empowerment and/or lack of power that revolves the act of interrogation. When presenting a specific situation through animated text, sound and monochrome color fields a bigger picture emerges colored by our own experiences and prejudice about what is being told. When Krunglevicius now returns to Oslo Kunstforening with his first solo exhibition in Oslo the piece Interrogation is on view once again but this time together with older works and a new video installation, Narrative with Unexpected Outcome.

In his works Krunglevicius uses documentary material from transcripts of group therapy sessions and police interrogations, and psychiatric interview manuals. In the exhibition interrogation and therapy methods are presented side by side, aiming to either lead to a confession in the suspect's case, or to discover hidden or forgotten memories explaining a specific behavior pattern in a patient. Krunglevicius is interested in uncovering coded systems that are used in society to control individuals and situations. His scores, also presented in the exhibition could also be seen as coded systems; abstract to those who do not read notes and full of information for those who do.

The title of the exhibition, Attribution, refers to a term used in Social Psychology for how we explain or interpret causes of events, others and our own behavior. There are two main types of Attribution, the personal, often referred to as internal and the situation based, the external. Internal attribution describes a behavior pattern linked to an individual's personality and character while external attribution is used when the cause of the given behavior is linked to the situation in which the behavior was observed, surrounding environment and/or social situation. The two types lead to very different perceptions of different behavior patterns.

Artist talk
Sunday January 23 at 14.00
The talk will be held in English

Interrogation
The video installation Interrogation is based on an actual transcript of a police interrogation. The dialog is presented as animated text on two wall projections: one with the police officers questions and the other with the answers of the suspect. A load harshly pulsating electronic soundtrack parallels the interrogation method used in this specific case, victimizing the suspect and at the same time objectifying the viewer: we become active witnesses to the act. By staging an interrogation the work exposes the mechanisms of social crime. Interrogation tries to reflect over voyeurism and the mass paranoia of violence today.

Confessions (score)
Krunglevicius collected eight confessions, hand written or court transcripts, of convicted criminals. He then reduced them using only those sentences were the criminal is talking about his or hers own emotions. The perpetrators personal landscape of guilt is revealed with no descriptions about the actual criminal act. Krunglevicius investigates how the most extreme act of violence contains something that we can all recognize in ourselves; the inner psychological patterns of reasoning and justification, remorse and/or the lack of it. Three of the four scores included in the exhibition are printed acoustic music performances that were premiered on June 18th 2010 at the Norwegian Academy of Music as part of Krunglevicius Master graduation. Confession No. 7 is on view on a monitor next to the printed scores.

Interrogation (score)
Interrogation was premiered on 20th of February 2009 at the Norwegian Academy of Music.

Transference
The patient is not satisfied with regarding the analyst in the light of reality as a helper and adviser who, moreover, is remunerated for the trouble he takes and who would himself be content with some such role as that of a guide on a difficult mountain climb. On the contrary, the patient sees in him the return, the reincarnation, of some important figure out of his childhood or past, and consequently transfers on to him feelings and reactions, which undoubtedly apply, to this prototype. This fact of transference soon proves to be a factor of undreamt-of importance, on the one hand an instrument of irreplaceable value and on the other hand a source of serious dangers. This transference is ambivalent: it comprises positive (affectionate) as well as negative (hostile) attitudes towards the analyst, who as a rule is put in the place of one or other of the patient's parents, his father or mother. (Sigmund Freud)

Death Tape (score)
The Death Tape Q042, is the final tape recorded by Jim Jones, the founder of the Peoples Temple, before the mass suicide of the 900 residents of Jonestown in Guyana in November 1978. This recording document the moment when Jones urges the members of the Jonestown community to come forward to receive the poison - first for their children, then for themselves - as Jones describes the horrors of what would await those who did not commit what he described as "revolutionary suicide". During the investigation the FBI found a large collection of recordings by Jones, the last one was named the Death Tape, the number Q042 indicated the code system used by the FBI for the tapes. Commissioned from ensemble POING for contemporary music festival ULTIMA'09. The score was first premiered on September 17th 2009 at Litteraturhuset in Oslo.

Narrative with an Unexpected Outcome
The video installation Narrative with an Unexpected Outcome documents a dialogue from a group therapy session as animated text. Each screen represents a different persona from the therapy session. During the 1970s and 1980s Australian therapist Michael White and his colleague David Epson (New Zealand) developed a therapy form using narrative as an important element in the therapeutic conversation. In the session used in Ignas Krunglevicius work a young teenage boy is the protagonist.