Thursday, March 16, 2017

Time Beyond Place – The Cultural Bridge – Anne Senstad in Saudi Arabia







Time Beyond Place – The Cultural Bridge is a cross-cultural collaborative platform initiated by New York-based artist, Anne Senstad, for women artists that responds to the preservation of cultural and architectural heritage, domesticity and memory.

The project is part of an initiative by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, which seeks to facilitate authentic cultural exchange between the United States and Saudi Arabia through fully immersive and collaborative projects.

Senstad will be in Saudi Arabia throughout 2017 to produce artwork in collaboration with artist Jameelah Mater who works with traditional Qut wall paintings and natural materials in Abha and with internationally established Saudi contemporary artists, Ghada Da based and Dr. Zahrah Alghamdi. Together they will produce contemporary art works inspired by traditional craftsmanship. Through this project Senstad aims to raise awareness of the preservation of cultural heritage and architecture while honoring the little-known history of women artisans of the Asir region.
        
The collaboration aims to establish a new cultural production platform and to celebrate the rich history of house painting traditions from the Asir region, as well as cultural narratives and regional historic architecture. The project will culminate in an exhibition in response to the artists interpretations of the traditional Qut patterns in a contemporary context, including textile and earth sculpture; technology, light and sound art; photography and video art; paintings and painted found object installations, and performance installation art.

Time Beyond Place – The Cultural Bridge began in February 2016. This iteration of the project will culminate in a series of international exhibitions being planned in Saudi Arabia, Norway and the United States.

This is part of a multi-city Saudi artist’s tour of the United States supported by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture and CULTURUNNERS, an international platform for traveling artists.

Qut Workshop in Abha Feb 22-26 2017 The workshop was taught by artist Jameela Mater and organized by Anne Senstad and Jameela as part of Time Beyond Place. Participants from the Asiri region learnt traditional pattern making, old Asiri systems and rules of the compositions, as well as developing their personal touch and individual sense as artists. The workshop sought to create a collaborative space of togetherness for young women artists to develop their sense of artistic practice, as well as for Senstad as a western artist to learn the tradition - creating a bridge between cultural memory and practices across borders. 

Images from the workshop:




For interview requests and high res images, please contact info@culturunners.com



ABOUT ANNE SENSTAD:
Anne Senstad is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. She was educated at Parsons School of Design and The New School for Social Research, NY. Senstad works in the intersections of installation art, photography, video, site and performative specific work, text interventions and land art. She is concerned with sensorial aesthetics, perception and transformative ideas of art and philosophical practice, and social-political awareness. Anchored in her examinations of the experiential and experimental are spatial and topographic considerations of light, sound and color. Her sources lie in literature, philosophy, technology and cultural phenomena.

Senstad has exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 2015 and 2013 and the Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale in Belgium in 2015. Upcoming projects and exhibitions include a commissioned public art light sculpture for the Bruges public Library in Belgium to be unveiled August 2017, and a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale 2017 at the Centro Culturale Don Orione Artigianelli.

Her video work has been shown at Centre Pompidou, Paris, Haus Der Kultur Der Welt in Berlin, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon, The Canadian Museum of Nature, Museum of Modern Art Ukraine, Dallas Aurora, Video Arte Internacional Buenos Aires, Eva Peron Museum, Oslo Screen Festival, Views Bahrain under the patronage of H.E. Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, and ISEA Dubai 2014 amongst others.

www.annesenstad.com | @annesenstad




ABOUT GHADA DA:
Having studied Fine Arts at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, Ghada Da’s multi-disciplinary fine art practice focuses mainly on performative sculpture and video installations. Her durational work is a journey of observation on the relationship of the body to space, its disconnect and rebirth. Exploring the genderless body is at the core of her practice.

The main aim of Da’s work is an investigation of the visible landscape presented by the body and the spatial area in which the body exists as well as its invisible counter part: the psyche. This helps her create a dialogue with the body and understand its complexity. Da tends to create images that become psychological portraits of the identity of the human condition by either an intentional mutation or an intersex by design, in order to allow the sculptural body to live outside the gender system.

Da is from Saudi Arabia and is currently based in Dubai, UAE. Her works have been shown locally and internationally including: Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, Pon Ding Gallery Taiwan, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Seoul, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, Saatchi Gallery, London, Satellite Space, Dubai amongst others.

www.ghadada.com | @ghada.da




ABOUT DR ZAHRAH ALGHAMDI:
Dr. Zahrah Alghamdi gained a doctorate in Design and Visual Arts at Coventry University in Britain and is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Art and Design at the King Abdulaziz University.

Alghamdi grew up in South-Western Saudi Arabia surrounded by traditional domestic architecture. In her current work, she reaches back to the memory of these spaces along with their personal associations and wider cultural significations. By creating an echo of the past, she brings this past into contact with the present, seeking to demonstrate changes of style in architecture from traditional techniques, materials, and resources.

Even if we demolish buildings from the past, ‘home’ will not be destroyed, but will live on in tangled and complex ways, through the memories of people who have lived in these spaces. ‘Home’ for me is bound with the architecture of my memory. In the development of new architecture’s regional styles, materials and techniques have been lost. It is this loss that she aims to engage with in her work.

www.zahrahalghamdi.com | @dr.zahrah_alghamdi



ABOUT JAMEELA MATER:
Jameela was born in Tabuk and grew up in Abha. She comes from an artist family who have for generations worked with the traditions of Quat painting. The family encouraged her interest in art from a very young age, and she found herself drawn to patterns and colors which she has developed research on the relationship  between traditional and contemporary art. Her education in the field of physics with an emphasis on the science of color influenced her work from the early stages of her art practice. Jameela has developed a unique system for creating color pigment, using high-quality natural materials and pigments such as  honey, ground stones and plants. She is currently in the process of establishing an academy for the Qut practice with the vision of reviving historic techniques of traditional art by integrating Qut traditions with contemporary art practices. She has exhibited her work in numerous exhibitions and is the recipient of prizes and certificates in Saudi Arabia.

@jameelhmater


ABOUT THE KING ABDULAZIZ CENTER FOR WORLD CULTURE:
The King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, simply known as ithra, is a one-of-a-kind institution that brings together multiple offerings under one roof. From arts and culture to science and innovation, this bold initiative by Saudi Aramco promises a continuous journey of enrichment designed to energize the next knowledge economy of Saudi Arabia.

ithra aims to make a positive and tangible impact on the cultural scene by focusing on building local talents in the knowledge and creative industries. Blending iconic architectural design with advanced technology, and unique learning methods with enriching programs, ithra is an infinitely inspiring platform for explorers, learners, creators, and leaders – a thriving hub of knowledge, creativity and cross-cultural engagement.

As the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia strives to achieve its ambitious national development goals to transition to a knowledge-based economy, ithra acts as a bridge connecting cultures and cultivating a creative and innovative community and invests in the power of people and ideas to unlock new possibilities.


TIME BEYOND PLACE - THE GULF TODAY


Gulf Today page link









Thursday, December 1, 2016

UltraModerne - Good Children Gallery




ULTRAMODERNE / Anne Senstad

Good Children Gallery
4017 St Claude Avenue
New Orleans, LA 70117
www.goodchildrengallery.com

January 14 - February 5, 2017 


Opening Reception Saturday January 14th, 6-9 pm


Ultramodernism, a term which Robert Smithson used in his writings tests the limits (etymologically, “ultra-” is an equivalent for “beyond”) of the autonomy of visual arts regarding meaning.

- Yann Ricordel, The Infinite Referent


The window reminds us that we are captives of the room, by suggesting both flight and confinement... The meaning of the window makes one aware of absolute inertia or the perfect instant, when time oscillates in a circumscribed place. The window prevents movement by setting up a transparent barrier...


— Robert Smithson, Ultramoderne, 1967

The Pink Room Has No Walls 

- Anne Senstad, 2007




The exhibition UltraModerne offers a view of Anne Senstad’s discourse on perception and the phenomenology of light, color and space. These recent works consist of video installation, textile sculpture, neon sculpture and photography that seek to examine immateriality and the experiential domain of the senses through processes of re-materialization, geometry and reinterpretation of form. Circling back to the source, there is a re-conceptualization , reconsideration and reinvestigation of inhabited space and the realms of essence and origin. All of the works in the exhibition are interconnected through a shared source; projections of light and color inhabiting space through time, a total removal of object and ontological experience of the sources. The title stems from Robert Smithson’s text on the modernist city as representation of a non-objective world, pursuing what lies beyond the observable to find truths in nullification and antimatter.

Senstad’s geometric neon sculpture Soft Geometry # 011, derives from preparatory sketches for her reclaimed modernist sculpture series Universals, creating an illusion of object, volume and dimension. Soft Geometry is by way of light and color structuralizing and solidifying the inhabited corner one observes in projections and light beams. A soft geometric structure, where light expands providing contradictions of form.   


 There is a narration in the amalgamation of colors transpiring time and projected onto corners and walls in the video installation Color Synesthesia VII, where pure color fields exist between mind and matter.  The video is the seventh in the video series with a composition by electronic sound pioneer and mathematician C.C.Hennix.  In dialogue with the video installation, photographic works deriving from these very projections represent materialization of the immaterial non-object, arresting alogon and harnessing it onto the decisive moment’s celluloid surface of color film.  Similarly the very same light and color immateriality creates the substance of the sculptural walls fabrics, objectifying and materializing that which cannot be held and re organizing light and color into folds of the physical, the ephemeral into entity and a phoneme shaping of time.


The exhibition is organized by Good Children Gallery board members Generic Art Solutions. 
In the Good Children Gallery Project room Generic Art Solutions will jointly be exhibiting Our Mortal Souls consisting of ice sculpture self portraits and video installation which will be recorded as the ice melts during the length of the exhibition, disintegrating the idea of the self and our ecological future.


With Generous support from The Royal Norwegian Consulate General Houston.















Friday, October 14, 2016

OSLO + PARIS Shoot Gallery Norway

Oslo + Paris, Shoot Gallery. Opening October 28 - December 18, 2016. Inaugural exhibition opening of the new gallery space in Barcode, Oslo, Norway.

Video stills: The Vanity of Vanities All is Vanity, 2013. By Anne Senstad. Single channel video. 6.27 min. Sound by JG Thirlwell.




We have the great pleaseure of inviting you to our new space in Barcode celebrating with an opening show presenting the core of our ambition;
Presenting high quality Norwegian Fine Art Photography in combination with high quality International artists. This time represented by some of our finest Norwegian masters side by side with a french master of the ancient Ambrotype (wet plate collodion photography). We also have the pleasure of introducing video in the gallery for the first time, represented by the New York based artist Anne Katrine Senstad. 
ANNE K SENSTAD (VIDEO), N
TOM SANDBERG, N
PER MANING, N
DAG ALVENG, N
ERIC ANTOINE, F

 gallery@shootgallery.no
ANNE KATRINE SENSTAD (VIDEO), N
Anne Katrine Senstad is a Norwegian artist based in New York. She was educated at Parsons School of Design and The New School for Social Research in New York. Senstad works in the multidisciplinary intersections of installation art, photography, video, site and performative specific work, text interventions and land art. She is concerned with sensorial aesthetics, perception and the transformative, the transcendental ideas of art and philosophical practice, and social-political awareness. Spatial and topographic considerations of light, sound and color are a foundation for her explorations in the experiential and experimental. Her sources lie in literature, philosophy, technology and cultural phenomena.
Her video work has been shown at Centre Pompidou in Paris, Haus Der Kultur Der Welt, Berlin, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon, The Canadian Museum of Nature, Museum of Modern Art Ukraine in Kiev, Dallas Aurora TX, Video Arte Internacional Buenos Aires, Eva Peron Museum, Argentina, Oslo Screen Festival, Bærum Kunsthall, ATHR Gallery in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and ISEADubai2014.

The video work for this exhibition "The Vanity of Vanities All is Vanity" refers to the biblical term and is a reflection on ethics and the illusions of superiority over nature; a state of vanity. The piece was first shown in Senstad's solo exhibition during the 56th Venice Biennale 2015 at El Magazen dell'Arte, as an immersive installation. The piece is accompanied by a soundtrack by JG Thirlwell, who has composed numerous sound works for Senstad's video installations.

TOM SANDBERG, N
Tom Sandberg (1953-2014) is one of the most acknowledged Norwegian photographers today, exhibited internationally over the last three decades. His exhibition at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre/MoMA in 2007 was the first solo exhibition of work by a Norwegian artist in a New York museum for nearly twelve years. Working exclusively with large format, black-and-white film, Sandberg has produced a remarkable body of work that is consistent in its vision and imbued with a sense of mystery and great depth of feeling. Whether he depicts sublime snow-covered mountains, a car parked in the street, the head of an infant, or a spectral house shrouded in fog, his pictures are about what it means to be alive. Many of Sandberg’s pictures are aerial views—the earth seen from above, in a sense, in a state of suspension. One of his most hauntingly beautiful pictures is that of a plane seeming to hover just a few feet above a runway. Sandberg's work is about photography, about the act of seeing, and ultimately about being in the world. Focusing on a single object or person in each photograph, and steeping them in a murky, wintry light, Sandberg draws out soft tones and moody atmospheres from his subjects to create a pervasive complicity between them and the surrounding landscape. He captured the inner nature of photography with a sober technique. 

PER MANING, N
Per Maning (b. 1943) is one of the most appreciated modern artists in Norway. He is particularly known for his animal-themed photography and video works.
The key focuses of Maning’s art are human nature, identity and otherness. His works contribute to the topical discourse in modern art on the relationship between human beings and other species. According to Maning, our identity is not dependent solely on race, gender or nationality. It is also based on our ability to acknowledge ourselves as a species among other species.
Maning was the first artist to represent Norway in the Venice Biennale with Photography in 1995. 

DAG ALVENG, N
Dag Alveng was born in Oslo in 1953. His work has been shown in solo and group shows around the world. His photographs are in the permanent collections of major museums in America and abroad, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Stedeijk Museum, Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo; DNB Art Collection and Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter, Bærum.
Alveng has published several books, among them ASYLUM (1987), THE SHIPYARD AT SOLHEIMSVIKEN (1990), LAYERS OF LIGHT (1995), SUMMER LIGHT (2001) RACING (2012) and WILSE (2015). He has organized many exhibitions. Between 1986 and 1996 he commuted between Oslo and New York, and now lives in Oslo.

ÉRIC ANTOINE, F
We have the pleasure of launching the French artist Éric Antoine for the first time in Norway.
Éric Antoine was born in 1974. At the age of 21 he left France to live in New York where he found his passion, exploring the possibilities of analog photography.
His images are the product of the painstaking wet collodion process. Returning to the origins in order to create a new future is a common process. For Éric Antoine it meant focusing on nature and simple activities, but also going back to the origins of photography itself, by using one of the earliest and purest techniques. Without being too nostalgic or backward looking, the photographer has chosen a more sedentary photography in a less productive manner, ‘just a few glass plates against the endless flow of digital images’.
The artist draws attention to what we tend to neglect due to lack of time, and denounces sensationalism in all its forms. Each and every image is shot with no rush, with long exposures yet in a modern way, in a place just a little remote from the world. Éric Antoine takes a stand against modern society and its obligations.
Antoine's contemplative aesthetic has been achieved by exploring different definitions of time: historical time, exposure time, measured time. These photographs, whose large formats require careful staging, are imbued with ambiguity, suggesting that the stories hinted at in each image have yet to be completed.
Éric Antoine's photographs are now shown in several galleries in Europe and he is opening his 4th solo show in Paris November 4.

Thursday, September 8, 2016

Sonic Architecture - Museum of Transitory Art


SONICA - a sonic architecture exhibition organized by MOTA - Museum of Transitory Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia Sept 27 - Oct 1, 2016.

I will be participating in SONICA with a text based site specific installation piece Gold Guides Me, part of my ongoing research project Capitalism in The Public Realm that started in 2014, and was originally commissioned by the Bruges Art and Architecture Trienniale 2015 in Belgium as a center piece of the Trienniale. The installation on the late socialist architectural structure talks about the transformation of the former eastern block into a hybrid form of capitalist utopia merged with a state of nostalgic yearning for the past, and ideologies succumbing to materialism. Gold Guides Me is a word play on Boethius's sentence on ethics; Hope Guides Me, from The Consolation of Philosophy
Dimensions of the original piece are 22 meter x 2 meter, LED light, Aluminum and yellow plexiglas. For SONICA a new smaller version will be installed on the roof of the new MoTa Lab. The Museum of Transitory Art 





The new MoTA Lab is situated in a glass-concrete construction, which was built in the seventies, as one of the lesser-known off-springs of the architectural style known as structuralism. Similar buildings with mushroom or umbrella like roof structures include gas stations on Tivolska road, designed by the architect Edvard Ravnikar (near the railways) and Milan Mihelič.  













Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Bærum Kunsthall

Bærum Kunsthall
Odd Nansensvei 19, 1360 Fornebu, Norway
October 13 - 30, 2016
Opening Reception  October 13th 6-8 pm

Everything Else is Too Narrow: 
Anne Katrine Senstad, Christine Istad and Anna Marit Staurset 

Curated by Sarah Walko


Everything Else is too Narrow brings together the work of three contemporary Norwegian artists. The title is derived from a poem titled All Things by Hadewijch of Brabant (or sometimes called Hadewijch of Antwerp) who lived in the 13th century in what is now Belgium and she is often referred to as one of the greatest names in medieval Flemish and Dutch literature. The poem begins with the lines “All things are too small to hold me” and it was this tone that came to mind in relation to the works in this exhibition. Although the artists vary in mediums, processes and approaches there is a search, an act of uncovering the essence in form in each of the works. Each piece hovers somewhere in the process of becoming or decreation but also transcends temporal cycles of birth and decay. They instead are like suspended threshold occasions, revealing a visual process of when something moves away from one thing to become another. The ancient Greek word poïesis is the root of our modern word "poetry" however it was first a verb. It was an action. The action referred to anything that transforms and continues the world, but not in technical production or in a romantic sense. It referred to an action that reconciles thought with matter and the individual person in time. The works carry this tone of both reconciliation and awe. They seem to strive not to generate meaning, but rather to simply reveal the meanings that are already there.

Christine Istad uses the camera to pull out patterns and elemental structures from her surroundings. All pieces in this exhibition are large format printed on brushed aluminum and are in-depth studies of small fragments of reality. In her work she is striving for a sense of interconnection; how things relate to each other and how they fit together. She focuses on architectural structures, however the architecture is often only sensed and she pulls out the abstraction from the concrete forms. In her process she is interested in discovering, the discovery of a motif or something surprising or noteworthy in the surroundings. Her photographs are never manipulated; they are taken as they are seen.  Istad’s broader focus is on the relationship between humans and modern society. Franz Kafka wrote about what many have termed “modern man’s cosmic predicament”, the struggle of the individual within cities during his time. Istad’s work elicits a similar investigation with the themes of finding beauty and space for contemplation within alienation and searching for a place and transformation within present day architectures and super cities. She presents these slivers of space in a way that evokes an element of surprise and in doing so creates a perceptual shift ushering in a recognition that things, in fact, are not exactly as they seem and solid, stable structures can be windows into new narratives and new spaces.

The photographic work of Anne Senstad is a series titled Sonoptic Parallels and it is informed by an understanding of an amalgamation of sensations - sound, color, light and optical phenomena. She is parsing out how sound and color inhabit space so differently despite many scientific and experiential similarities. Senstad’s work also often has a close relationship with architectural structures but she adds a poetic element, creating a world that envelopes the subconscious and subliminal. Her photographic Universal Foldouts are extensions of this exploration however they also contain a kind of rational flattening of these concepts, similar to breaking things down to laws of physics and zero’s and one’s. But in doing so, the work presents the ideas that consciousness and emotions cannot be captured by theories at all because they are subjective experiences and even how describing what happens in your body while it experiences an emotion doesn't tell you what the subjective experience is. Senstad's video installation is the 7th in a series she began in 2009 and has been shown worldwide as various forms of immersive installations. it is titled Colour Synesthesia VII and is a 25.30 minute loop. The sound is the electric harpsicord by Catherine Christer Hennix recorded live in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art Stockholm. All of her work deals with perception — how what we see, including the colors around us, shapes how we feel. The stimuli are objective but the experiences are subjective, mirroring ourselves, our brains, and our psyches. Senstad’s work follows this complex investigation of what is physical versus what is psychological, and where these lines blur. It does so generously, seeing truth on both ends of the spectrum and at many points in between.

In the work of Anna Marit Staurset part of the search and interest is the deterioration of materials. Every piece of collage has its own history and they come together into an expanded history, like sections of a quilt. In this way the material is stripped of its original meaning and given a new life, like stories that are told and shared. There is a strong element of neutralizing the past through these physical sediments of time and layers of multiple histories. She transforms them to convey new meanings. This act creates a cultural catharsis in the pieces and an element of reclamation. The material is mainly paper but becomes sculptural with a very tactile surface. She focuses on the patterns of life, death, and decay revealing an essence of what remains after a lived life and a cyclical return to begin anew. Her use of materials contains a paradox in itself for applying the burden of history to a light material and this aspect of the work aids in the transformation from cultural weight to transcendence and release. In relation to the title in the poem, the works have a tone of solitude in their differing investigations on the relationship between self and states of being. This tone is a true solitude, solitude as a struggle against alienation, as deep witness and response.  The response seems to be an awareness of or need to break things down to their essence in a time of over complication and countless distractions.  This solitude is not the same as withdrawal, which has negative connotations. It is an awareness that does not hold the world at arms length but rather walks us right into it and is expressed by entering into the world fully through these immersive and sensorial works.


All things

by Hadewijch

English version by Jane Hirshfield

All things
are too small
to hold me,
I am so vast

In the Infinite
I reach
for the Uncreated

I have
touched it,
it undoes me
wider than wide

Everything else
is too narrow

You know this well,
you who are also there






 
Installation views, Top: Sonoptic Parallels triptych # 03, 2013-16
Centre, Anne Senstad, Anna Marit Staurseth, Christine Istad
Bottom: Fabric Wall Sculptures, 2014-16

Below: Sonoptic Parallels # 07 and # 08, 2013.




Sarah Walko is a curator, director, visual artist and writer. She is currently the Director of Arts Programing at Marble House Project, a nonprofit arts organization in New York City and Dorset, Vermont. Recent curatorial projects include Decomposing Hierarchies, Manhattan Bridge Anchorage, NY 2015, The World and its Things in the Middle of Their Intimacy, Fridman Gallery, NY and A Cage Went in Search of a Bird at Radiator Gallery, NY. She also writes for the contemporary art blogs and journals Hyperallergic, Eyes Towards the Dove and Drain Magazine Journal of Art and Culture.

Friday, July 8, 2016

Textile Topography in Norway

Textile Topography at Storhødn by Anne Senstad. A site specific fabric intervention at 1482 meters on the mountain peak of Storhødn in Hemsedal, Norway - with wind, rocks and land. The photographic c print on fabric stems from a video still from Senstad's video piece Color Synesthesia 2014 that has been included in various large scale installations and exhibitions internationally.


The fabric intervention is a continuous project integrating specific cultural topographic elements in various countries and landscapes, with Senstad's use of color, sculptural re interpretations, nature, gestural movement and placement of the artists intervention and the natural behavior of the material itself when intersected into nature, a performative approach to re interpreting nature, examining the experience of nature , and as a participatory element, resulting in documentation material such as photographic material  and video pieces.