Synesthesia Gallery, Brooklyn, New York
SYNESTHESIA GALLERY – 43 Porter Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11237
ANNE KATRINE SENSTAD – VEIEJA ESCUELERA
July 4 – August 16, 2026
Curated by Clayton Harley
The exhibition is accompanied by a performance and sound art program with: Laura Wolfe, Maysun, and more
Capitalism is a religion that recognizes neither truce nor redemption
Walter Benjamin, 1921
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern
William Blake, 1793
Synesthesia is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Anne Katrine Senstad – VEIEJA ESCUELERA. The exhibition brings together neon sculpture and text based works in a new iteration of the artists ongoing project Capitalism in the Public Realm established in 2014 that examines contemporaneous conditions through the optics of perception, spatiality, value systems, and language. Central to the exhibition is Senstad’s word-game aesthetics where she facilitates meanings ensconed in luminous neon environments. The title, VEIEJA ESCUELERA, misspells the term Old School, creating multiple new associative meanings determined by the onlookers own language and culture. Simultaneously, stimulated by misalignment, the title is a reminder of the old ways of handling business or seeking justice. In a technocratic, post-human multi-plutocratic world, these enterprises have normalized, concealed, and integrated into our everyday, resulting in dehumanized systems of state and nations. The old familiar capitalist society has transformed, mutated, Frankensteined.
Senstad’s platform Capitalism in the Public Realm draws on Joseph Beuys’s seminal work The Capital Space 1970–1977, created for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980. As a symbol of his constant search for liveable alternatives, Beuys developed a new definition of capital: released from its relation to money, his conception put the creative potential of human beings at the centre of economic thought: “Art = Capital”. While Beuys’ environments question capital and the potentiality of a moneyless society with no central power, Senstad’s version of the concept looks at what lies beneath and how that can be reconsidered from within, rather than what can replace it. Through the conjunctural, her word-play, and the lyrical, she considers the essence of value systems, societal and philosophical conditions of citizenry, and importantly; conditions for ethical consciousness.
In Senstad’s text based practice she brings forth meanings, languages, and semiotic narration as a system for aesthetic values. Her Arabic neon text sculpture, an Arabic version of Gold Guides Me (2015), was first exhibited at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans in 2023, supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway. Gold Guides Me is a word-play on the extraction of Hope Guides Me from the 6th century Roman poet Boethius’ prison book The Consolation of Philosophy, stirring reflections onto our contemporaneous hunger for the accumulation of commodity, wealth, land, and power. The realms of ethical and human value systems is replaced by a wholesale, allinclusive Captial State. The Arabic Gold Guides Me transmits its meaning by permeating languages to surpass sentiments of “the other”. The performative notion of hand writing Calligraphy and glassblowers handcraft, serves as a gestural action between systems of understanding, stepping into domains of absolution.
With the neon text work MAL EDUCACIÓN, (2023), her first misspelled Spanish text work, she utilizes the novelty of languages and interplay of cultural effect. Inspired by Pedro Almodovars’s film Bad Education / La Mala Educación (2004), the film itself is the subliminal reference. Pedro Almodóvar’s commentary on marginalization, abuse of power, addiction, and violence exemplifies human nature in a society ruled by inequality and dogmatic control. The term itself is a playful expression of a streetwise badass, pointing towards new meanings of empathy and solidarity through endearing humor.
The neon sculpture Ascension/Descension Graph no 11 (2026), employs finance and marketplace lingo, as well as religiosity, as method for a lyrical contemplation on humanvalue in a capitalist society. The largest sculpture to date in the Ascension/Descension Graph series the artist started in 2020, initially derived from a response to the pandemic and its weekly measurements of life and death displayed as a corporate graph system of growth and losses, today continued in the spectre of war and re-organization of societal structures. The series is simultaneously an aesthetic nod to Dan Flavin’s diagonal fluorescent sculptures, an early influence on Senstad’s practice. This latest iteration covers over 18’/ 6 m of the gallery wall space in a green, blue and copper ascension to the empyrean, or descension to what lies beyond, and loss.
Two sculptural works from the Portal for Perpetuity series started in 2019, conjures the desire for harnessing infinity, here captured in a box, offering a meditation on energy as infinite emission, consumption, and dependency. The neon and mirror sculptures are placed on exposed cinderblocks, suggesting structure and interior building-blocks of space and autonomy, the human enterprise and its regeneration.
Anne Katrine Senstad is a Norwegian interdisciplinary artist based between New York and Oslo. Her practice includes installation art, light art, photography, film, and text based art, with a focus on the phenomena of perception and the properties of light, sound, and color. She is concerned with sensorial aesthetics and ethics, the transformative and transcendental ideas of art and philosophical practice. Senstad has exhibited widely internationally, including MELK, Oslo (2026), Galerie Floss & Schultz, Cologne (2025), Kunsthal Regelbau 411, Denmark (2023), Seinajoki Kunsthall, Finland (2021), Kai Art Center, Tallinn (2020), Freight & Volume Gallery, New York (2020), He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen (2019), ATHR Gallery, Jeddah, alongside James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Carlos Cruz-Diez (2018), Museum of Modern Art Kiev, Ukraine (2011), the 55th and 56th Venice Biennales (Collaterali Eventi), (respectively 2013 and 2015). She has published three artist books, most recently a monograph on her monumental light sculpture practice, Neon Guides Me, 2022, (Praun & Guermouche).
Synesthesia is a contemporary art gallery located in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Synesthesia presents exhibitions across installation and media art, and has presented an extensive experimental music, sound art and film program for over 10 years. Our mission is to build a local community through the performative and experimental arts in Brooklyn and to provide a platform for expanded discourse by amplifying the breadth of cultural practices.
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