Participating artists: Dave Greber (USA), Cristina Molina (USA), duo Anna Ihle (NO) & Addoley Dzegede (USA), Kjetil Detroit Kristensen (NO), Helene Duckert (NO) and Līga Spunde (LV).
Venue / Site: www.asefcc.org, IG: @structure.envisioned
Dates: 01.12.21 until 01.12.22.
“A Structure Envisioned For Changing Circumstances” embraces the unknown and considers how art workers live and produce work within / around / despite constantly shifting frameworks. It focuses on the collaborations, support, and exchange that can take place across great distances, and allows for connections between different geographical locations, while also drawing attention to the creation of sustainable and long-lasting partnerships amongst artists and institutions. The online program hosted on www.asefcc.org has been active since December 2021 and will be on display until the end of 2022. The project is addressing the following questions:
How has the pandemic offered new ways to work globally across geographic boundaries?
What have been the challenges of this dis-location?
How can we (and have we) utilized online platforms to connect during times of forced isolation?
Can this isolation provide space for new visions and spark additional creativity?
Can an online platform reach larger and more diverse audiences?
Screenshot from the recording session of A different world podcast by Ask Addoley + Anna.
Artists Addoley Dzegede and Anna Ihlecreated a new podcast entitled A different world for Ask Addoley + Anna. Through this platform, they use a personal tone to address notions of care, career, and relationships in a political context. The premise of their project additionally considers who has the authority to give advice, and highlights the very practical conditions and dilemmas of art and money.
For “A different world”, Addoley and Anna have invited art workers from the Baltics and the USA to join as guest advisors. The fourth season emerges in a changed world, and Addoley and Anna are ready to tackle new questions, bringing in new voices to shed light on your issues. In their collaboration, the artists are setting out to use the personal tone of the podcast format to address notions of care, career and relationships in a political context. Ask Addoley + Anna questions who has the authority to give advice, and highlights the very practical conditions and dilemmas of art and money. The questions are received online anonymously. Ask Addoley + Anna started in Anna’s studio at the Jan Van Eyck Academie two and a half years ago for fun, with the 2nd season at Coast Contemporary, and the 3rd with the National Museum of Norway, recorded during the beginning of the pandemic.
Dave Greber, Casebearer 1.0, 02:10, 2021.
Cristina Molina, Casebearer 1.0, 4:51, 2021.
Dave Greber and Cristina Molina created a video series titled“Casebearer 1.0”taking inspiration from the highly adaptive species commonly known as the Bagworm or CaseBearer who creates a cocoon home for itself from whatever debris it finds. As artists who live in New Orleans, a city that faces coastal erosion and is threatened by sea level rise, the Bagworm serves as a model example of a resourceful nomad that acclimates itself to any given situation To make these video series, the artists co-authored a poem from the perspective of the Bagworm. Using artificial intelligence to generate voice, imagery, and sound–each artist’s rendering of the Bagworm exists as a stuttering enigmatic sage that muses over its own lifecycle, from birth to transcendence.
As an addition, Dave Greber minted a series of 5 still renders from the Casebearer universe available on the Tezos blockchain. They have been sold out on the primary market, and at the moment none are available on the secondary: https://hicetnunc.art/dave_greber.
Dave Greber, casebearer_avatar_expo_2021, 1-4, VR sculpture / stock elements / CGI render, 1024 x 1024, 2021. Minted on hicetnunc.art.
Kjetil Detroit Kristensen, If You Do Not Love Me I Shall Not Be Loved, 37:44, 2021.
“If You Do Not Love Me I Shall Not Be Loved” by Kjetil Detroit Kristensen consists of a slideshow bearing the same title (37:44 min, loop) and several appropriated and re-mediated archival images presented as downloadable zip-files containing printable works of art; ‘Untitled (dreamed I was an eskimo)’ (2805 × 1865 pixels), ‘If You Only Knew the Darkness Of the Days Ahead #2’ (2480 × 3437 pixels), ‘Please Kill Me’ (3289 × 2252 pixels), ‘My Heart Is Closing Like A Fist’ (3336 × 2401 pixels) and ‘To the Muse (You look so good when you’re lonely)’ (3187 × 2132 pixels).
A contemporary corona response, a mental whiteout, or perhaps just one more artist slowly becoming the polar bear. A response re-mediated through a slideshow, where images from a Polar Institute stand still while the snow dances Cascando, a technical term that, in music, indicates a decrease in volume or tempo, and a word the writer Samuel Beckett titled one of his most famous poems about unrequited love, and all the incommunicability that derives from it… Because, as this unpredictable situation requires, as Samuel says: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on”. The polar bear replies: “If You Only Knew the Darkness Of the Days Ahead.”
The work by Kjetil Detroit Kristensen presents awkward images created out of anger, and energized by a drop of modern despair. Trashy, repulsive, corrupted and childlike – digital and analogue, at the same time unclear, much like society, and feelings arising. My Heart Is Closing Like A Fist. While trying to make everything painful beautiful, and failing in the attempt, ending up with all things beautiful becoming pain.
Līga Spunde, Episodes About Not Knowing How It Will Be, 2021. Source: https://notknowinghowitwillbe.cargo.site/
Līga Spunde’s project “Episodes About Not Knowing How It Will Be” takes shape as a poetic, digital artwork exhibited online. The work is divided into five episodes, where each episode represents a character. Among these are: an adventurous optimist, a tired pessimist, a data analyst, an esotericist and an artist. Each of these characters will take over the ASEFCC online platform, offering their musings and visions of the future. The irregular, ever-changing nature of the work makes it unpredictable, emphasizing the lack of stability behind the current conditions we live in. Spunde has designed the characters as very cliché, which symbolizes a collective state of mind in times of uncertainty, where we tend to lean on archetypes, often adopting thoughts and feelings that are stereotypical. The texts of characters produced by Līga Spunde and Klāvs Mellis.
Līga Spunde, Episodes About Not Knowing How It Will Be, 2021. Source: https://notknowinghowitwillbe.cargo.site/
Publicity image: Helene Duckert, Streaming, 2022.
For ASEFCC, Helene Duckert will present a live-streamed performance, titled “Streaming”, as part of her ongoing project, “The neutrality of water”. The project centers around a phenomenological approach to water, and it’s changing circumstances as a direct consequence of our contemporary living. The work will be launching beginning of March.
A Structure Envisioned for Changing Circumstances” (ASEFCC) is curated by Maija Rudovska (Blind Carbon Copy), in close partnership with Amy Mackie (PARSE NOLA) and Tina Rigby Hanssen (Vestfold Art Center and Kongsberg Art Center), bringing together artists from the United States, Latvia, and Norway. The project creates an interconnected web between the participants and addresses issues of fragility, precariousness, impermanence, and isolation.
The website and branding for ASEFCC is designed by artist Dave Greber.
Līga Spunde, Episodes About Not Knowing How It Will Be, 2021. Source: https://notknowinghowitwillbe.cargo.site/
ORGANIZERS’ BIOS:
Blind Carbon Copy (Latvia) is a non-profit platform for curators, artists, and other art practitioners from the Baltic and Nordic countries that initiates and supports exchange, connections, and education via network infrastructures and interrelations. BCC, which is run by Maija Rudovska, has organized various small-scale events and has built close co-operations not only in the Baltic-Nordic context but also internationally. The platform operates without a particular space and site, being a fluid membrane for its members and project partners.
PARSE NOLA (New Orleans, Louisiana) is a curatorial and research-based residency and art program that serves as a platform for critical dialogue about contemporary art. PARSE NOLA hosts international curators, writers, and artists and helps to support their projects. The organization was founded in 2013 and is overseen by Amy Mackie.
Vestfold Kunstsenter (Tønsberg, Norway) was established in 1982 and is a non-profit art centre and venue for Norwegian and Nordic contemporary art. The core of our activities is our exhibition program, in which commissioning new projects from Norwegian artists plays an important role. Our aim is to increase the visibility of contemporary art in and from Norway, and to create opportunities for exchange between arts professionals in different geographic and political contexts.
Kongsberg Kunstforening (Kongsberg, Norway) was founded in 1961 by a group of enthusiasts, led by ceramicist Rolf Hansen. The purpose of the association is to show visual arts and crafts by promising artists and organize public programmes, including lectures, film screenings and workshops to increase the interest in and understanding of contemporary art.
ARTISTS’ BIOS
Anna Ihle has recently been sculpting in oak with her chainsaw while thinking of time management, a recurring theme in her practice. She is involved in artist union work. Anna has a 9 month old daughter, and currently lives in Stavanger, Norway—the town where she grew up.
Addoley Dzegede is a Ghanaian-American textile enthusiast who loves sleeping in and eating ice cream year round. She learned Spanish during the pandemic and looks forward to talking people’s ears off someday in person. Addoley is a Tulsa Artist Fellow, also calling Pittsburgh and other places home.
Cristina Molina is a visual artist who hails from the subtropics of Miami and currently lives and works in New Orleans—two precarious terrains that have thematically influenced her practice. Spanning performance, video installation, photography, and textile design, Molina’s artwork is set amongst vulnerable landscapes both real and imagined. Using the language of magical realism, her artworks reshape and centralize little-known narratives to upend dominant histories.
Dave Greber is an artist, educator, and consultant from Philadelphia, based in New Orleans. He creates experiences situated for the blockchain, galleries, and wider public arenas, manifested through digital media, sculptural installation, and social/environmental interventions. His practice is enthusiastically intuitive and aided by divination and collaboration with fellow biological and artificial intelligence.
Kjetil Detroit Kristensen is a Norwegian artist from Stavanger who works in various fields, including installation, film, and performance. His long-term aim is to explore and erase the borders between art and everyday life. In his artistic practice, Kristensen works both in galleries and in public spaces, building bridges between the two and searching for intersections.
Līga Spunde is based in Riga. Līga. She often creates work as multimedia installations in which personal stories are closely entwined with consciously constructed fictions. The interpretations and use of recognizable characters serve as an extension of her personal experiences, tapping into common truths. Usually, the content of the work determines its physical form, thus a variety of media and materials are used in her installations.
Helene Duckert (b. 1988, Oslo) is an multidisciplinary artist, writer and speaker. Duckert works with discarded objects, detritus, and obsolete materials scavenged from her life and surroundings, creating assemblages and installations that function as personal comments on contemporary living.
ASEFCC is supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Latvian Culture Capital Foundation, Arts Council Norway, Viken County Municipality, and the U.S. Embassy in Latvia.
