By Valentina Sansone
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Brody Condon's performance streamed live at the opening of Momentum 8. Photo by Vegard Kelven.
The 8th edition of Momentum, the Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, takes place in Moss, a small industrial city in the Oslofjorden. The coastal town, 54 kilometres from Oslo, is mostly known as the place where Edvard Munch spent four years of his life. It’s a somewhat claustrophobic town, if it weren’t for the stunning landscape of the fjord, lightened by the late-hour brightness of the summer season. For that reason, Moss feels like the perfect location to explore the them of this year’s biennial – chosen by curators Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Birta Gudjonsdottir, Stefanie Hessler and Toke Lykkeberg: ‘Tunnel Vision’.
Momentum 8 reflects upon the isolating conditions of our contemporary networked era, as well as the role of different kinds of obsession in artistic practices: artists who devote their life to one single field of research, or the repetitive actions of Conceptual performances. The obsessive refrain of ‘Tunnel Vision’ immediately materializes in Julius von Bismarck’s Jugendbewegung (Youth Movement, 2015) at Momentum Kunsthall, traditionally the main location for Momentum and one of the two main venues of this year’s Nordic Biennale.
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Julius von Bismarck’s ‘Jugendbewegung’ (2015) at Momentum Kunsthall. Photo by Vegard Kleven
Here, a driverless Polo car constantly revolves on its own axis. The day of the opening, the artist occupied the driver’s seat of the vehicle, and a few days later, Von Bismarck, whose work often deals with motion and rotating systems, could be found floating within his Egocentric System at Art Basel Unlimited. In Moss, the empty car’s repeated movement recalled the artist’s presence, and, generated by a seemingly malfunctioning device, a sense of potential danger.
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Steingrimur Eyfjörd’s ‘The Yellow Earring’ (2015). Photo by Vegard Kleven
Part of the town of Moss is located on the peninsula of Jeløy, where you can find Galleri F15, Momentum 8’s second location. Here, Steingrimur Eyfjörd’s site-specific installation includes a group of sculptures, found objects, collages and paintings from the mid-1980s to the present day, re-assembled for Galleri F15’s space. Based on everyday gestures, Eyfjörd’s The Yellow Earring (2015) recalls the domestic imagery described in Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s short novel Too Loud a Solitude (1977).
‘Tunnel Vision’ also addresses what the curators refer to as the contemporary technological society’s version of psychedelia – that is, drugs that have now been developed to ‘narrow down the mind’. In one illustration of this state of mind, large-scale paintings by Chilean-born Cristóbal Lehyt (Untitled, 2013) originated from drawings produced in a trance state. (Momentum 8 places a strong emphasis on Latin American artists, also showcasing works by Rio de Janeiro-based, Catalan artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané and Mexican born, Berlin-based Brody Condon.)
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Christine Ödlund’s ‘Tower of Eukaryote’ (2015). Photo by Vegard Kleven
In the spirit of rejecting strict logic as a methodology for art-making, Polish New York-based artist Agnieszka Kurant worked with a clairvoyant, whose predictions were collected in articles written by journalists, whom Kurant invited to write for a fictional edition of the New York Times (Future Anterior) (2007). Clairvoyant visions also arose in Christine Ödlund’s work: the Swedish artist has been studying how plants communicate. She combines ecological elements with the synesthetic, magic and supernatural. Here she created a powerful intercommunicating system of coloured infrared light, a large-scale diptych, and a spiral garden with a tower of stinging nettles and butterfly larvae (Tower of Eukaryote, 2015).
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Zhala’s performance at Momentum Kunsthall, 13 June 2015. Photo by Ingeborg Øien Thorsland
‘Tunnel Vision’ also expands to include effects on gender and political identity. Swedish-born performer, musician and feminist queer activist of Kurdish descent Zhala mixes elements from the club scene in Stockholm with personal issues related to her own identity, origins and history. She often burns Kurdish and Swedish flags during her shows. On the opening day of the biennial, Zhala performed at Momentum Kunsthall on top of the voluminous, coloured-wig-covered installation by Hrafnhildur Arnardottir a.k.a Shoplifter. Zhala also specially conceived a soundtrack for Momentum 8, which can be heard looping up the staircase at the Kunsthall, and which fills the bookshop at Galleri F15 (like a moment ago, when we just stood here, 2015). In another work that pervades the spaces of the biennale, Sissel Tolaas designed a perfume that emanates from mechanical devices placed throughout the exhibition (MOLECULEMOVX_015, 2015), producing a potentially headache-enducing scent.
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Valia Fetisov & Dzina Zhuk & Nicolay Spesivtsev in front of screens showing their Paranoiapp mobile application, 2015. Photo by Ingeborg Øien Thorsland
Moscow-based artists Valia Fetisov, Dzina Zhuk and Nicolay Spesivtsev created a custom mobile app, Paranoiapp (2015), which allows anonymous biennial visitors to find you by sharing your location with other users, and vice-versa. Group-related control and surveillance was also the theme of a performance by Brody Condon, who arranged a group therapy session in a private building in Moss, not far from the Kunsthall. Visitors could watch the session being streamed live in the exhibition space during the opening, and can watch a recording for the duration of the show.
Although it brings together several artists from different countries, one of the aims of the Momentum Biennale has always been to address ‘Nordicness’. The question of Nordic identity in the arts has been a subject of recent debate: Last spring, in Stockholm, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, worried about the recent development of the Royal Institute of Art, wrote a letter of protest to the Ministry of Education and cancelled approximately 50% of the year-end student grants a few weeks before the students’ graduation. Amongst the main concerns of the Royal Academy was the ‘total break with the Swedish tradition’. According to their protest, ‘the internationalization’ of schools and professors might establish linguistic barriers between teachers and students. In May, the Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was shut by police for ‘security reasons’ after the intervention of Swiss Iceland-based artist Christoph Büchel, who brought the first mosque in the historic city of Venice to a deconsecrated church. In an art world that demands cultural diversity, does geographical or national identification still make sense today? Momentum 8 addresses such issues, asking, above all, should we question ourselves and the consequences of our own tunnel vision?
Valentina Sansone is a contemporary art writer and curator based in Stockholm, Sweden and Palermo, Italy.
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