News:
Upcoming shows
I will say something, and you will understand it.
Opening 27th of Marts at Hordaled Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway.
Danish artist Sif Ankergård explores scenarios for what a restless and evolving language might look and sound like.
Sif Ankergård is interested in a situation of exhibiting where the gap between theory and work is eliminated by the active use of texts. This first MA-weekend of 2015 she is showing a series of posters and a sculpture which together explore the relationship between written and uttered text.
Saying it out loud makes it real. Yelling creates an illusion that you will hear me.
The sculpture included in the exhibition echoes the form of a megaphone, with the aim of exploring the politics and gestural qualities of the act of speaking out loud. During the weekend-long exhibition this sculpture will move along the line of posters, relating directly to a new text at each interval. Thereby the work metaphorically moves between silence and the languages of shape and scale.
Ankergård likes to think of each of her works as an utterance, often but not always bounded by silence. The gesture of speaking out loud the utterance is crucial in her practice, and is part of her ongoing interest in language as a tool for subversion and change. It can be seen as a protest against the assumption that language is neutral, and ultimately perhaps even a paradoxically universal protest-utterance against linguistic uniformity.
Through a rigorous editorial process, she peels, slices and undresses the texts she works with, taking away inessential details and reducing it until what is left is a single sentence the piece cannot live without. She then builds her way up again, constructing paragraphs that overlap and loop in a non-linear fashion.
Ankergård writes: “I find that writing stories, thinking thoughts and drawing lines are much the same things. Indeed it is in the very nature of lines that they always seem to wriggle free of any classification one might seek to impose on them, trailing loose ends in every direction and isn’t this true for language as well? That the meanings of words and lines of text are unstable linguistically.»
Sif Ankergård (Copenhagen, 1984) is graduating in spring 2015 from the Masters of Fine Art at Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Bergen, Norway. Holds a BA of Fine Art (2009 - 2013) from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, Netherlands. She started developing her own artistic language at Kunsthøjskolen Thorstedlund, Frederikssund, Denmark, in 2008.
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The MA-weekend is collaboration between Hordaland Kunstsenter and Bergen Academy of Art and Design. Twice a year the MA-students at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design are invited to submit proposals for an exhibition to be realised at Hordaland Kunstsenter.
Page 1
Launching 15th of Marts 2015 at Bok cafe Krok og Krinkel, Lille øvregaten 14, Bergen, Norway
Page 1 is an art initiative looking into text-based visual art that engages in the thingness of the word, in the materiality of writing and its nonlinguistic or extra-linguistic qualities; advocating an open understanding of text as a basic material force that can be used as more than a vehicle for practical information.
Editor and initiator
Sif Ankergård
Participating artist
Patrick Coyle (UK)
Alberte H. Westergaard (DK)
Amber Ablett (UK)
Martin Harkjerr Halse (NO)
Sandra Blichert Christensen (DK)
Sif Ankergård (DK)
If on a winters night, a room
a public screening program,
by Cristian Stefanescu and Apichaya Wanthiang10th jan 2015 opening evening
10th - 16th of jan 2015 days running show
The eyes assign them names but only the hand truly knows them.
Theres a tension under my eyes, a vibration in the mussels, it feels as if theres helium balloons tied to my eyelids and they will open. The orangey shimmer of the daylight passing through the thin layer of skin that makes up the eyelids. I try to keep them closed. Out through the black-black of the pupils, through the blue-grey of my irish, I see the orangey light again filling up the air in the room.
The white celling and a halogen bulb tied to a hook with an excess amount of cord hanging in bend after bend after bend. The walls are grey, a light sky-grey colour. Heavy dark furniture in a fake mahogany look, is evenly spread out through the room. One pice in every corner, as if they were keeping the elasticity of the walls from slaking in, forcing the corners to stand up right, to keep the little distance that is left.
Behind the wardrobe hovers a light blue sink and a mirrored medicine cabinet. If feels as if the bathroom next door has some how slipped through the wall a little.
The lines of a heather that doesn’t work and the lines of one that does, is placed parallel to each other under the window which is framed by two white curtains. It seem to be exempt from the world, as if the frame were parentheses letting the text of the world flow on around them, or little fences keeping the picture from straying into the world. And somehow the multiplicity of options become evident, as a beam of light hits the prism hanging in a string.
On further inspections I take note of the single curl on the forehead of a person in my proximity, and the face becomes a little more human. I usually shift my position a little or scratch my head. And each move I make moves the image in my mind. In the end, when I have seen it enough and it’s time to move on, the image will be quite complex - a Kaleidoscope of thoughts and images that coalesce from all the individual moments that I spent thinking and looking. However I know that an image is not a piece of data in an information system. It is a corrosive, something that has the potential to tunnel into me, to melt part of what I am and re-form it in another shape.