AIR CONDITIONS 2024: AN EXHIBITION
In November 2024, Air Conditions will take the shape of an exhibition in collaboration with Skaftfell Art Center in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. The group exhibition, with contributions from eight different artists working with sound, video, drawing and sculpture, will be showing various works that take their point of departure from the expanded topic of air and its current conditions: A swan singing a crown of sonnets, the sounds of words as they move in air, tidal rhythms, clarinets and organs, fragments of airconditioning structures. But the exhibition will also be using the radio as exhibition space. By letting the works be transmitted on the radio, both in the gallery space and in a series of broadcasts, the exhibition will literally take place in air.
The exhibition is curated by Ceilia Harrison.
Contributing artists:
SIGNE LIDÉN is an artist based in Oslo. Her work explores relations between place, sensing and sound. Through field recording, instrument-building and conversations, she approaches place as a dynamic becoming produced by geological, biological and atmospheric processes, as well as social and economic relations. Her work spans sound installations, video and performance to more documentary forms such as sound essays and archives. For Air Conditions, Lidén has created an audio essay that imagines and investigates rhythms of the earth; the rhythm of earth tides, global waves; rhythmical relations between the local and the global, the earth and the body.
INGER WOLD LUND is an artists and writer based in Berlin. She has written two full length books and several chapbooks in her native Norwegian published by Cappelen Damm, Flamme Forlag and H//O//F. A collection of her stories in English has been published by Ugly Duckling Presse. Lund is educated at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts; Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm; and Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt am Main. For the exhibition, she has written a series of breathing exercises taking the point of departure from the material imagination of words and the shape they take in, and between, bodies.
JENNY BERGER MYHRE is a multidisciplinary artist working with sound, video and photography. Her work explores and exposes the personal in an honest and curious manner. Her music is created from field recordings, fragments of melodies, computer generated sequences, modular synths and lo-fi electronics — resulting in soundscapes with references to both the electro-acoustic tradition as well as experimental pop music. She seeks to remove the expectations of virtuous musical gestures by focusing on the sounds in themselves, and the mental images they produce in us, inspired by listening as a relational act — a way to connect to the world and to other beings. Bergers music piece, composed for this exhibition, is a slow, sonic wandering through various formations of clouds, a slow falling and a soft landing in and out of immaterial conditions.
VILHJÁLMUR YNGVI HJÁLMARSSONs main emphasis is on his own creative process, which is largely characterised by experimentation. Ideas need time and space to flourish, so Vilhjalmur prefers not to stick to one specific medium. The works themselves are created based on various triggers; something noteworthy in a walk, or a conversation. The triggers spring from Vilhjalm's curiosity and interest in his surroundings, for something he doesn't quite understand himself or wants to understand better. For this exhibition Vilhjálmur is showing traces and fragments from a series of attempts to capture, hold and contain sounds. Entertained by the failure and tension of the inflatable object and the notion of sound captivation, Vilhjálmur has contaminated both the physical and aerial exhibition space with objects, documentation and performative elements.
MARIANA MURCIA is an artist and a swimmer. Assuming a performative attitude she often works in collaboration with water, temperature and other people. Based on her experience dealing with the limits and superpositions between her body and the environments she inhabits, she's constantly wondering, if what's in front of me is unfamiliar from my standing perspective, how can I reverse this relation by being unfamiliar to the presence of what there is? Her video is anticipating a sound correspondence with any listener. A beginning of a telematic movement that aims conversation without verbal language. In collaboration with Alphorn players, the text that goes with the images tells the story of a deep sound made to communicate at long distances. Out of sight, but in touch. To make a call to the non human. To breath empathy out and into the other.
ANNA EGLITE is an architect working with mapping and drawing as a means to explore cities and cultural landscapes in a state of constant transformation. She is interested in the history of places in connection to ecologies and new understandings of nature. Anna Eglite is educated from the Royal Danish Academy. Her drawings in the exhibition show a study of ‘air ducts’ in a 1:1 scale; conduits or passages used in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning to deliver and remove air in buildings. Looking both familiar and alien at the same time, the study dives into structures of something both hidden and obvious.
OCEANFLOOR GROUP is a collaboration between Aoife Coleman, Ellem Skovhøj, Lasse Høgenhof. A sentient artistic ecology working through correspondence, gatherings, communal archiving and gifting - within the fields of composition, installation, writing, radio, performance, film and collaborative image production. Their contribution for Air Conditions mimics and fabulates a somatic and magical transition towards entering a swan(s) world. Through a crown of audio sonnets, holding the narration of a wooden sculpture, they move through layers of ontology and the aerial exchanges swirling through these layers, morphing and moulding the elasticity of seperation.
WILLIAM KUDAHL is an artist and writer working mainly in sound. His work often explores the peripheries and margins of everyday life, influenced by what George Perec would call the Infra-ordinary; things that might pass by unnoticed, things that are not events in themselves, but rather before, after or beside. For Air Conditions he has composed a sound piece with recordings from the organ in Seyðisfjarðarkirkja, the local church, investigating the organ as an instrument and the simplicity of single notes; their wordless messages and their impact on the body; the organs seemingly endless breath, the resonances and waves it emits.
In December 2024, the exhibition will move to Aerial in Bergen, presented as a series of listening events.
