Meet the upcoming exhibitors!
Carriers of Meaning – Nanna K. Hougaard
21.08 – 06.09.2020
“I took to the streets when it shut down… [I wanted to] look at the world as alien, trying to rethink everything.”
The pandemic measures put an abrupt stop to planned filming for Hougaard’s upcoming exhibition Carriers of Meaning at Babel visningsrom for kunst. With a practice often involving direct communication with experts within other disciplines, namely scientists, the new situation called for a different approach. What arose were questions about communication: between humans, insects, chemical interaction, and electrical signals.
@nanna_k_hougaard
www.nannahougaard.net
PaterNoster_2020 – Martinus Suijkerbuijk
02 – 21.10.2020
“If you are so entangled in the system, you have the potential to alter it. This is also kind of a force.”
PaterNoster_2020 by Martinus Suijkerbuijk opens at Babel as part of Meta.Morf 2020, Trondheim’s art and technology biennale, which suddenly closed in the midst of its program in March. The exhibition dissolves and constructs boundaries of categorization through a mix of different sensorial and technological formats, both as infrastructure and generated on the spot. It uses technology to weave a narrative between you, them, and everything else.
Vilde Blom
06. – 22.11.2020
“There is food on the inside – food on the outside. Food as another person.”
Vilde Blom explores shapes, material, context, and colour through abstract forms that echo across sculpture, performance, installation, artist books, and painting. At Babel, the meeting between the viewer and the art will take center stage. Blom explores how industrial food processes are changed, thought of, and provoked by shifts of intention: to regard something as a body, something with which to come into contact, a meeting of terms across the organic and inorganic. Blom’s work exemplifies our contact with the world as a responsive practice of finding mutual balance, constructing situations that defamiliarize the familiar by confronting our expectations.
Veslemøy Lilleengen
05. – 21.02.2021
“If you move in landscape in a certain way, it’s because you belong there.”
Driven by obsession, Veslemøy Lilleengen carefully shapes balls from samples of earth collected from different areas around the city of Trondheim. Called Hikaru Dorodango, the spheres become a portrait of inhabitants and their stories, those who have treaded this soil now and throughout history, leaving their traces in the layers of residue in the earth. As Babel Atelier’s first resident this winter, Lilleengen connects the earth to the stories of the people who tread upon it, drawing on her past growing up on a farm in Ørlandet before moving to Trondheim some twenty years ago.
@veslemoy_lilleengen
www.veslemoylilleengen.com
En giftig ömsar skinn – Hans Egede Scherer
12 – 27.03.2021
“I think it’s just a way of measuring things around me. It’s about keeping it like a spark. A little bit unspoken, vaguely present. Almost that you have to look for it, in a way.”
Hans Egede Scherer has an intuitive feeling aimed towards the inside. Sourcing material from his immediate environment, Scherer uses production as a tool for reflection, weaving through time, deep connections with others, and a keen interest in the material of the world around him; both in physical form and as information. Aesthetics function as articulation, a language of objecthood that makes room for dialogue of amplifying and contrasting expression between the artwork, the audience, and the world.
Growing potential for horrific behaviour – Pia Antonsen Rognesn
09 – 25.04.2021
“You can’t really create a monster without loving it somehow.”
Children’s toys and nightclubs share the same aesthetic, objects of desire and spaces for longing. Pia Antonsen Rognes’ textile sculptures turn Babel into a lush sensorial environment, growing into a direct tactile and emotional sensory experience. They belong. They grow. They become. As dynamic corporeal growths of bodily desire, out of sight, where their development becomes uncontrollable and demands enter into presence.
@pia_antonsen_rognes
www.piaarognes.com
Jon Vogt Engeland
07 – 23.05.2021
“What do you do for a living? If I were personally asked that question, it would be difficult to answer.”
The layers of meaning reflect the tedium of repetitive labour that portrays the wear and tear of the actions of the body at work. By focusing on selected patterns of wear, specifically in denim, Jon Vogt Engeland reflects on the links of protestant ideological approaches to life, the means of production in relation to the body, and the advance of technology within contemporary life. These works intersect at the junction of contemporary thought to the status of work and how its manifests across society and in artistic practice.
@jonvogtengeland
jonvogtengeland.no
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2020/2021 2021/2022
ATELIER BABEL
Babel visningsrom for kunst is excited to present the 3-year project Atelier Babel, where a Trondheim based artist is offered the opportunity and challenge to use Babel as their studio for two months (December/January), followed by an exhibition in February. The selected artist will receive a total fee of 100 000 NOK, meant to cover the artist’s salary for these two months of work. Atelier Babel is an initiative that aims to address questions regarding the politics of artist’s conditions by providing healthy and good working conditions.
We have now finished processing several highly qualified applications for the two first editions of Atelier Babel. The Babel Committee has collaborated with Kalle Eriksson, leader of Trøndelag Visual Artists, in reviewing the applications and it is with great pleasure that we announce Veslemøy Lilleengen and Yanir Shani as the selected artists to use Babel as their workspace in 2020/2021 and 2021/2022 respectively.
The practices of the two artists, although different, represent a shared interest in developing a clear dialogue with their audiences. Even if the methodologies vary, the intention of both artists is to do so by creating socially engaging moments and settings.
Veslemøy Lilleengen has applied for a strong and refreshing project, which represents a pressing and different approach to issues such as place and identity. With a practice where audience participation is fully integrated into the artistic process, Lilleengen becomes the right candidate to enter the gallery at the start of Atelier Babel.
Yanir Shani, with a body of work that deals with a pertinent contemporary topic, challenges not only the exhibition space, but also his own artistic practice. He has applied with a well balanced, humorous yet serious, and ambitious project. We are very much looking forward to seeing the further development of his project over the next two years.
Congratulations to the two artists!
The third round of the project (2022/2023) will be announced at the beginning of 2021. Read the previous announcement here.
Thanks to Trondheim Municipality’s Kulturfondet for making this project possible, and thanks to all the artists who applied to participate.
