FAEN EXHIBITION

Meta.Morf X – FAEN EXHIBITION: FY FAEN SÅ BRA! / Gallery KiT, March 8 – 22, 2020 / Curator: Zane Cerpina

Curatorial note by Zane Cerpina

Darknet spa for meditation? Scenography made in collaboration with fungi? A love story between a woman and her plant? A deep-sea dive into our biological origin and possible future? FY FAEN SÅ BRA! FAEN (Female Artistic Experiments Norway) Exhibition: FY FAEN SÅ BRA! is the second group exhibition by four young female artists based in Norway: Annike Flo (NO), Anne Cecilie Lie (NO), Renate Synnes Handal (NO), Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir (IS/NO) and curated by Zane Cerpina.

FAEN Academy
FAEN Exhibition is made by the FAEN Academy – a pilot project supporting the development of new artworks by young female artists working with experimental art in Norway. The FAEN Academy focuses on art productions from concept to exhibition-ready work in close collaboration with FAEN partners. 

The FAEN Academy is needed to give production and exhibition opportunities for young female artists working with cutting edge art and experimental artistic approaches. The FAEN Academy offers an interdisciplinary, supportive, and reflective environment for producing experimental art. It is for artists that address and challenge contemporary issues in society, politics, culture, and ecology: art that makes the audience question and reflect on the world through new, unique experiences and perspectives. 

FAEN Exhibition 2020
During Meta.Morf 2020, FAEN is showing a selection of works that have been further developed especially for the exhibition at Gallery KiT in collaboration with FAEN. The selected works explore the contemporary challenges of co-existence with each other, non-human species and ecological phenomenons, as well ourselves and our role in this age of crisis called the Anthropocene. 

Exhibited Works
Annike Flo’s “c o c r e a t : e : u r e s :  s h i f t” is a performative aesthetic experiment created in collaboration between the artist and non-human guests that already live at the Gallery KiT. Her work invites visitors to see themselves as a meta-organisms. 

Renate Synnes Handal’s installation “Polyphilia” challenges us to fall in love with plants. “Polyphilia” derives from her project “Another Partner” that follows a romantic relationship between a lady and her plant. 

Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir invites the audience into “The Darknet Spa” to investigate the dark side of our digital hive-mind and experience the collective psyche we have formed through the digital technologies.

Anne Cecilie Lie’s bio-digital art installation “Intersected Waterbodies” is the result of an artistic research project that dives into the deep-sea mining industry investigating our biological origin and imagining our possible future.

Organizers
FAEN Exhibition is organized and curated by Zane Cerpina / TEKS – Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre. The FAEN experts include Kirsty Kross, Kristin Bergaust, Hege Tapio, Gyrid Nordal Kaldestad, Ståle Stenslie and others. 

The FAEN exhibition at Meta.Morf is sponsored by Arts Council Norway and TEKS. 

Anne Cecilie Lie

Meta.Morf X – FAEN EXHIBITION: FY FAEN SÅ BRA! / Gallery KiT, March 8 – 22, 2020 / Curator: Zane Cerpina

Anne Cecilie Lie [no]
Intersected Waterbodies

Intersected Waterbodies is an interdisciplinary, bio-digital artwork investigating a toxicological web of (tech) bodies, liminal spaces and the sea.

Today’s digital ecology is inextricably linked to extraction: of the Earth and through the exploitation of marginalized bodies, as well as emotional mining through social media, among others.

Intersected Waterbodies is rooted in the city of Trondheim, which has a long history of digging deep into the body of the landscape, now exploring extraction below the seabed through NTNU to, allegedly, create an ethical and sustainable technological future.

Facing the current environmental reckoning is urgent, but will a truly just future rise from excavating the place from which, most likely, all life on Earth originated, the planet’s last refugia, setting unknown chain reactions in motion?

Moving from the exploitative Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantationocene into Donna Haraway’s restorative Chthulucene, marginalized worlds entangled with ours and that enable us to exist, come to the foreground. What life forms might be here in the future to come? And how can we leave as graciously as possible with those that are left behind in mind?

Anne Cecilie Lie
Through her work, Anne Cecilie Lie (b. 1983) examines how to create in the Anthropocene, with its accompanying philosophical and ethical questions, as well as for possible futures. She points out blind spots in social and built structures and proposes new alternatives for co-existence to the human-centric/exceptional. 

Site-specificity and cross-pollination are intrinsic to her work, inspired by Donna Haraway’s theories of tentacular thinking, based on feministic, post-colonial, scientific and science fabulating approaches to collaborative futures with humans and non-humans alike. 

Object-Oriented Ontology and Timothy Morton’s concept of Dark Ecology are also significant influences, where ecology includes all life and “non-life” such as technologies. 

Through multisensory experiences, Lie seek to skew the human-centric view by highlighting marginalized other worlds that are interwoven with ours and enable us to exist. 

Lie works with sound, performance, installations, and text, alone and in collaboration with others in the creative field, as well as partners within fields of scientific research and life sciences, knowledge producers such as educational institutions, libraries, and local communities. 

Anne Cecilie holds an MA in scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy and a BA in Fine Arts from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts.

www.annececilielie.com

Annike Flo

Meta.Morf X – FAEN EXHIBITION: FY FAEN SÅ BRA! / Gallery KiT, March 8 – 22, 2020 / Curator: Zane Cerpina

Annike Flo [no]
c o c r e a t : e : u r e s :  s h i f t

c o c r e a t : e : u r e s :  s h i f t is Annike Flo in partnership with the myriad of beings living in the KiT gallery space, its human visitors and yet to be discovered guests. The project is a performative experiment attempting to shift our perceptions of other beings from other to kin, and our perspective of self from singular to plural.  

s h i f t  is inspired by the Human Microbiome Project which, among other discoveries, has revealed that microorganisms living within us play key parts in, and influence our immune system, our brain, and our genome, which all used to be biological explanations of the individual self. There is no clear line between us and other, you and your surroundings. How and where do we start to feel like a metaorganism?  s h i f t  plays with the idea of the historical Salon as a place of meeting + discussion, but also as a non-sterile and fluid aesthetic that can facilitate human-microbe encounters. Away from a scientific or medical lens, s h i f t  gives space to, nurtures and allows microorganisms to flourish where they already live, in this case, KiT’s gallery space, and on offerings donated by visitors.  

Annike Flo
Through her practice, Annike Flo investigates how to create in the age of the Anthropocene, working  with themes of agency, and our relationship to ourselves and other organisms from a scenographic perspective. By including others who do their own worlding in staged spatial events, together with a human audience and herself, her work plays with the fusing of reality and performance. Annike holds an MA in scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy (2018) and a BA in costume for performance from London College of Fashion, University of the Arts (2010). After graduating from LCF she specialized in design for immersive and participatory theatre (secret cinema, punch drunk, immersive cult), which she brings into her current artistic practice. Flo currently works as artistic project leader for Norwegian BioArt Arena, NOBA, in Ås.

www.annikeflo.com
www.cocreateures.space

Renate Synnes Handal

Meta.Morf X – FAEN EXHIBITION: FY FAEN SÅ BRA! / Gallery KiT, March 8 – 22, 2020 / Curator: Zane Cerpina

Renate Synnes Handal [no]
Polyphilia

Polyphilia – the practice of/desire for intimate relationships with more than one partner. 

«She told me relationships are always about giving and giving. Not giving and taking, like we’re conditioned to believe. As a verb, to give means -to freely transfer the possession of (something) to (someone). But as a noun, the word has a more intimidating tone — the capacity to bend or alter in shape under pressure. 

So how (and what) can I give? Do I have to change form to make it clear that I love?

Plant-persons are absolute masters when it comes to the act of giving. They grow and alter their shapes until the day they die. They give themselves to everyone – behaving as food for almost every living being on the planet. Even their waste product is sorely needed, as their trash maintains the atmospheric oxygen levels on our planet.

In my quest to find love, I’ve come to look at them for inspiration and guidance. Could it, perhaps, be true that it’s easier to give yourself to multiple partners rather than only one? Could it be that plant-persons have some answers for us?»

Polyphilia is a piece specially made for gallery KiT and Meta.Morf Biennale, and is part of Renate Synnes Handal’s ongoing project En annen partner. In it the artist explores topics like love, relationships, and loneliness — navigating through the art- and everyday life together with her special partner Gullis (Epipremnum Aureum). 

Over the past two years, they’ve lived and worked together, all the time with a focus on developing their romantic bond. By now, they have shown three fragments from their shared reality, Suddenly, you complete me at Bergen Kunsthall, 36 at Visningsrommet USF and En annen partner at Atelier Nord ANX. They have also traveled to Renate’s hometown Ålesund, where they did a residency in the middle of the forest in Telemark, as well as they have taken a charter-trip to beautiful Agia Marina, Crete. 

Renate Synnes Handal
Renate Synnes Handal is based in Bergen, where she got her master’s degree in Fine Art from the University of Bergen in 2018. Her practice can best be described as a platform for story-telling, where big ontological questions function as a blurry backdrop. What are we? How do we live now? How do we choose to relate to ourselves, each other and our surroundings? It is a practice that examines the political responsibility we possess as people-persons, since we freely get to decide who and what we include as important in our society.

Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir

Meta.Morf X – FAEN EXHIBITION: FY FAEN SÅ BRA! / Gallery KiT, March 8 – 22, 2020 / Curator: Zane Cerpina

Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir [is/no]
The Darknet Spa

The Darknet Spa is an immersive sound installation that focuses on the topic of anonymous internet browsing through what is called the Darknet or Dark Web. The Dark Web is that part of the internet that operates outside the fringes of digital society, a lawless, virtual land where you are free to roam without government regulation or corporate intervention. The terms ‘surface web’, ‘deep web’ and ‘dark web are often used to illustrate the “geographics” of the internet and to explain the different levels of accessibility and encryption. 

Freud ́s model of the human mind categorises three levels of consciousness: the conscious, subconscious and unconscious. The Darknet Spa offers the audience to delve into the unconscious of our digital hive- mind, offering a glimpse into the darker sides of our collective psyche. The artwork investigates the responsibility we place on our technologies and how they ultimately function as a mirror that reflects back to us the broken parts of our society. Simultaneously the work underlines the gap between our physical and digital experiences, incorporating the viewer’s body into the Darknet as a materialized physical space. 

Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir (IS/NO)
Unnur Andrea Einarsdóttir is an Icelandic visual artist and musician. Her work explores our relationship with technology and the utopian and dystopian manifestations of our digital present. It investigates the divide between our virtual lives and physical bodies, and how global networks influence our identities, societies and collective perception of reality. Unnur Andrea works mainly with video, performance, and installation, often seeking to create an immersive and encompassing experience for the viewer. As a singer and music producer, the sonic elements remain an important and central factor in most of her work.