Sparebankstiftelsen DNBs stipendutstilling 2020

This year's Sparebankstiftelsen DNB's grant is divided between three recipients, and the Grant Exhibition will take place digitally and in the urban space.

Oslo Kunstforening and Sparebankstiftelsen DNB is pleased to present a grant exhibition for the thirteenth consecutive year.

 The three participating artists in this year’s edition are Berivan Erdogan, Hanni Kamaly and Kjetil Skøien.

Many cultural institutions have used the pandemic to reconsider access to programming and culture. As an agile response to the financial pressure put upon artists by the pandemic, and to ease the pressure to remain physically open to the public, Oslo Kunstforening has made the extraordinary decision to disperse both this year’s Sparebankstiftelsen DNB award and the public presentation of the works. 

The award will therefore be shared equally between the three nominated artists: Berivan Erdogan, Hanni Kamaly and Kjetil Skøien, who will produce works offsite, outside of the physical gallery format. The money that is saved by not mounting a physical exhibition has been reallocated, which in addition to the usual production fee and participation fee and the shared grant will equal NOK 150.000 to each artist. 

In addition to supporting the three artists, the grant exhibition will promote art practices that do not require physical or social presence in the gallery itself thus redefining the ways in which the exhibition can be both accessed and experienced.

This year's Sparebankstiftelsen DNB's Grant Exhibition will take place digitally as well as in civic space, on Instagram as well as on OK's website, starting December 10 until February 07, 2021.

Something that we as artists, as art professionals and as viewers need to ask ourselves regularly is: where does this imagery come from? Not only what is the provenance, but what is the circumstance of its creation as an image, what are the politics of its creation, who has created it, whose image is it, whose artifact is it or does it represent? 

Photography has, since its inception, been right at the centre of these questions. Who has the right to photograph an ‘other’ and therefore whose photograph is it? What does it mean to make an object from an individual - a subject? What roles do intention, or purpose play in the ‘taking’ of a photograph? What if the photograph is for science, medicine, or other research? Or what if it is for pornography? Is there a difference? What happens if the intention, or context is erased, or changed? Does that change the image itself? 

Museums are in the profession of creating and changing context as objects are displayed in new relations to one another, or displayed in a manner in which they were never intended. The objects themselves are testaments to the long history of object ‘discovery’, theft, trade, exhibition, examination and in some cases repatriation. This problematic history should be discussed, not as an insistence of erasure or censorship, but as a cautionary tale for how our current behaviors may be interpreted in the future. There will never be a correct position in this discussion. All we can do is to annotate and contribute to a lineage of adjustments. Equilibrium is not static, but requires a constant shifting of weight. It is an active process.

This year’s Sparebankstiftelsen DNB Grant is shared equally between the three exhibiting artists, and the exhibition itself is not in the physical gallery. This decision was taken in response to the current pandemic; to financially assist all three of the artists; and to ease the pressure to remain physically open during a pandemic. The exhibition will therefore be visible through our website, through social media and on the streets of Kvadraturen. 

Hanni Kamaly’s work deals with the colonial legacy of exhibiting humans and how this practice ignited the trade in photographs of people of other cultures – the exotification of those people, cultures and places. Kjetil Skøien’s practice deals in part with the abundance of this imagery as a found material in the world. What happens when it is re-appropriated and placed outside of its original context? Does this change its intention? Does coming upon this image accidentally change who I am? Does it place me as a viewer into a power dynamic? And Berivan Erdogan’s work explores what happens when we as artists exploit ourselves and our own personal and cultural histories for the purposes of artistic creation. She asks how we can exist as both victims and perpetrators of power abuse, as artists and viewers?

The premises of Oslo Kunstforening at Rådmannsgården itself speaks to Scandinavia’s colonial legacy; both of Denmark’s colonization of Norway, and the start of the University of Oslo’s collection of human remains at the Anatomigården, next door to this building. To disperse the physical exhibition and present it digitally allows us to exhibit free of this physical context, but also begs the question; what sort of neocolonial context do we find ourselves in digitally? Who owns digital imagery, where is it stored, for whom, for how long and for what purpose? As we find ourselves on the cusp of tech giants’ establishment of data farms throughout Scandinavia, these all become pertinent questions to ask.

Kamaly, Skøien and Erdogan deftly use camera-based practices to draw our attention to the context, dynamic, power, history, legacy and politics of image creation, and object display. Each of these artists occupies a different strategy and position in this conversation, contributing to a nuanced understanding of this complex dynamic.

Berivan Erdogan

The Vulnerability of an Artistic Process is a digital archive of materials (correspondence, outtakes, auditions) accumulated in the making of Berivan Erdogan’s 2019 short metafilm Ang. Berivan’s Film in which Erdogan performs a version of herself (Berivan), recreating events that are hypothetically her own personal history, which triggers further memories of past ordeals. The film purports to be based upon Berivan’s childhood memories of an emotionally abusive and controlling father. In the metafilm, Berivan is casting the role that is a representation of her father. The power imbalance inherent in an audition as well as the content of the fiction create a dynamic wherein Berivan becomes a perpetrator of the same kind of power abuse that she is reacting to.

The Vulnerability of an Artistic Process pulls the curtain back on the process of making this film, adding another layer of authenticity, or fiction. It makes us as viewers consider the fiction of what purports to be documentary, or the truth of what purports to be fiction. In Erdogan’s work, truth and fiction, victim and perpetrator, past and present, memory and premonition are all permeable membranes. The work also creates in us a tension as we confront our own assumptions about victimhood, fathers, daughters and perpetrators. In the work, Erdogan is an embodiment of her parents’ political history as Kurdish refugees, and their trauma. She, as a character, is wrought both in reaction to and perpetuation of that violence. 

The Vulnerability of an Artistic Process discusses the violence of representation, the power dynamic of artistic creation, the exploitation of trauma and the complexity of an artist exploring their own experiences for artistic content. The Vulnerability of an Artistic Process ultimately asks what is the ethical cost of an artist pursuing a cathartic transformation?

Hanni Kamaly

ULRIKAB is a two-part video that takes as its starting point in the story of Johan Adrian Jacobsen (1853-1947) and his brother Bernard Fillip Jacobsen (1864-1935) both of whom travelled widely collecting both ethnographic objects and indigenous peoples from around the world for exhibition in museums and human zoological exhibits throughout Europe. 

ULRIKAB is titled after one such family: Abraham, Ulrike, Sara, Maria and Tobias Ulrikab from Labrador, Canada who were brought by Johan Adrian Jacobsen to Carl Hagenbeck in Hamburg for an exhibition in Tierpark Hagenbeck. Abraham Ulrikab recorded his experience of being on display in his diary, a rare first person primary historical source from this point of view. 

Individuals on display from all over the world formed a lucrative business for Hagenbeck and the Jacobsens, not only in the name of entertainment or curiosity but also for ethnographic and race science as people were photographed and measured in order to establish a racial type and hierarchy. Photographs of the exhibited people also sold to the public exceptionally well and were collected avidly. 

As key figures, Jacobsen’s journeys unravel the history of Norwegian colonisation, museum collections and the repatriation of cultural property. Hundreds of objects collected by the Jacobsens remain in museum collections around the world, including at the University of Oslo, the American Museum of Natural History and the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin. This is the dark and sometimes nefarious business side of knowledge production, the compulsion to collect, and human curiosity.

Hanni Kamaly’s work traces the complex trade networks of both subjects and objects as commodities for the purposes of display, exhibition and science, altering these individual’s subjectivities sometimes violently in the process. Kamaly’s work therefore problematizes the act of exhibition and the power relationship it creates by meticulously mapping displaced objects and individuals, tracing their journeys. Her work investigates the construction of identities, critically examining who gets to write and display history.

Kjetil Skøien

For the past eight years, Kjetil Skøien has taped found photographs onto vacated shop windows, or other ‘non-spaces’ at street level throughout Oslo. Skøien has sourced the found photographs from second-hand books or magazines. This work was until recently anonymous.

Most of a city’s visual language is dominated by commercial or corporate images such as advertising, corporate branding or signage. Skøien's project takes images away from being instrumentalised or owned and reinstates their materiality as printed matter, separated from their digital, textual, copyright, commercial or even original cultural contexts. 

The selection of images that Skøien makes follows his artistic sensibilities. They respond directly to the environment and the cityscape as a whole, they can be harmonious with their new context, or stand in counterpoint. Skøien carries preselected images with him on a daily basis. When he encounters a space in which he can intervene he ‘blindly’ takes one of the preselected images. In the way the artist offsets his active choices and decisions with chance processes. It is an ongoing work of playful civil disobedience. 

As in remix or sampling, there is an intentional appropriation, a reclamation of both printed visual material, and the streetscape. The juxtaposition between image and placement suggests narrative, but does not demand to be read. Apart from Skøien's sourcing, selecting and placing the images, a sign of artistic continuity and artistic intent is the beige masking tape on all four corners with which they are taped up. 

Sometimes the pictures remain where he has taped them for a long time, weeks or even months, other times they remain only briefly. The work is constantly evolving and can be read and reread differently each day depending upon the route a viewer takes through Oslo. The work contributes to a rich psychogeographic experience of Oslo as the images, or their placement trigger our subjective memories. This project is one that Skøien plans to work on for the rest of his life.

Jury

The jury leader is Behzad Farazollahi, visual artist and founding member of MELK. The remaining members are Randi Grov Berger, visual artist and founder of Entrée, Marianne Hultman, artistic director of Oslo Kunstforening; Mike Sperlinger, writer, curator and professor of theory and writing at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Elise Storsveen, visual artist.

Background

Since 1986 Oslo Kunstforening has held a competitive exhibition and awarded a stiped, with the kind support of Sparebanken Oslo og Akershus.

Since 2008, Sparebankstiftelsen DNB and Oslo Kunstforening have awarded grants to Ellisif Hals and Susanne Skeide (2008), Ignas Krunglevičius (2009), Ann Cathrin November Høibo (2010), Kaia Hugin (2011), Marie Buskov (2012), Sandra Mujinga (2013), Ingrid Lønningdal (2014), Andrea Bakketun and Christian Tony Norum (2015), Tor Børresen (2016), Emilija Škarnulytė (2017) and Eirik Sæther (2018) and Germain Ngoma (2019).