Capitalism in the Public Realm

TROLLDAYS & TROLLNIGHTS – NEKROLOG

Trolldays & Trollnights is an artist organized exhibition space located in a former storefront at the Sætre biscuit factory’s workers housing complex. The environment acts as an inverted ekphrasis of the line YOU CAN NOT SEE ME, but I am the one who decides, by Norwegian poet Tor Ulven (1953-1995). Could it also be a retrocausal ekphrasis—one in which Tor Ulven somehow wrote about this room in advance? 

The room consists of remnants of its own history. Its only fixed source of light is a flickering light bulb. To view the works, visitors must climb ladders, use a flashlight, and the shelving structures serve as a form of spatial hierarchy, reminiscent of the board game Snakes and Ladders, or a dolls house. 

Set within the temporality of its narrative space, Trolldays & Trollnights presents a new exhibition entitled NEKROLOG, a site-specific environment with sound, text, and neon work by Bjørn Hatterud, Runa Sandnes, and Anne Katrine Senstad.

Bjørn Hatterud‘s sound installation entitled Industrimuseum (53:16 min), is intended to remind us of industry, factory workers, and of the perishable nature of man-made things. Inherently all things are lost over time as human nature is restless in search of the new and for gain. What remains is our sense of emptiness left behind.

Runa Sandnes‘ installation within the notion of retrocausal ekphrasis encompasses a mirror installation entitled The Goblin, a stoarage space with a single flickering light bulb entitled You don’t see me, but I am the one who decides, an inverted ekphrasis. Retrocausality in quantum physics is a theoretical interpretation where future events can affect the past, and turns the usual cause-effect principle upside down. An ekphrasis is a literary description of something visual. Tor Ulven’s poetry is typically ekphrastic.
 
Anne Katrine Senstad‘s neon text work Securities (2022) derives from her ongoing project Capitalism in the Public Realm, established in 2014 that examines ethics and value systems. Securities exist as both a critical text work and a light sculpture, here contextualized as the omnipotent corporate power that glares into the social environment, realms of privacy and autonomy. Securities plays with finance lingo and the advertising of commerce. Red being a color of power and state, is also a color of capitalist critique, the color of labor and unity. Sensorially stimulating and seductive, ruby red neon suggests aesthetics of corporate iconography, the mechanisms of capital, and the blind devotion to forces of omnipresent power.

Exhibition review in KUNSTAVISEN by Yngve Sikko (Norwegian)