Mal Educación illustration by Carlos Baragli and Anne Katrine Senstad after Albert Holenstein, 2023
MAL
EDUCACIÓN
Anne Katrine Senstad
Curated by Christopher Saucedo
November 11 – December 3, 2023
Opening reception November 11, 6-9 pm
Annihilation of the question compels praxis
Theodor Adorno, 1931
Capitalism is a religion that recognizes neither truce nor redemption
Walter Benjamin, 1921
Mal Educación is the second solo exhibition by Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad at Good Children Gallery as part of her ongoing research project, Capitalism in the Public Realm. The exhibition explores the intersection between light and text to address critical subjects of ethics, agency, citizenry, and allegory.
Playing on the novelty of language, Mal Educación presents a sublime critique of capitalism and our contemporary crises through text-based works in Arabic, Chinese, English, German, Russian and Spanish. Here, Senstad invokes the aesthetic value systems of various languages in deconstructing the expression La Mala Educación. In effect Senstad interprets Wittgenstein’s language game and word-meaning, whereby language is defined by the actions into which it is woven. The exhibition title is drawn from Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar's 2004 film, Bad Education, which portrays how institutions of power oppress the disenfranchised and marginalized.
Inspired by Almodóvar's acuity, Senstad’s text works are intended to motivate ethical considerations of the moral zeitgeist. They examine the alterations of our value systems wrought by financial greed and corporate power. Senstad’s work compels place in a consumerist society – as well as how to resuscitate a shared humanity in the spectre of war and posthumanism. Through light and color, art can open the discourse on the hidden value systems underlying society and the culture at large.
For the center-piece of the exhibition, Senstad returns to a poetic evocation of ethics that her work has explored in the past, Gold Guides Me — a neon text work in Arabic calligraphy transliterated in the artist's handwriting. Those familiar with Senstad’s oeuvre will identify the reference to her monumental work commissioned by the Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale in Belgium in 2015 where said phrase was presented in latin alphabet letters scaled after the Hollywood sign. Gold Guides Me capitalizes on the phrase, Hope Guides Me from the 6th century poet and statesman Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy — a valediction for Lady Philosophy of life’s vagaries and vicissitudes as conjured by the author while imprisoned and awaiting execution. In exchanging “Hope” with “Gold” Senstad’s wordplay invokes the ontological forces underlying institutions of power, oppression, and greed.
Consistent with this narrative, Senstad’s text-based video installation, Money Above All – Russian Version (2022) by the artist’s holding company-as-art-work, GGM Holdings, is part of her activistic web project issuing not-for-sale NFTs of corporate-military aesthetics and text-based art that critique the current era’s war climate and the arms industry. With the diptych text piece Liquid Assets in Chinese and English (2020-2023) in dialogue with the static neon sculpture Ascension/Descension Graph X, (2023), Senstad addresses the notion of a human being’s intrinsic value in the context of financial and corporate scaling systems. Further, the sculptural abstraction Portal for Perpetuity VII, (2023) intimates nature's perpetual cycle of regeneration and how mankind’s present grappling with notions of scarcity and of infinity through scientific progress and technological innovations continue to advance the human enterprise.
And as the ideological debates of said human enterprise continue into the twenty-first century, as alternative value systems are posited in response to class divisions wrought by an acceleration of the Anthropocene, Senstad returns to Marx with IST-MARX MARX-IST, (2023), a play on the German word “ist” invoking Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, (Act 3, Scene 1) — ”To be or not to be” —to elucidate the famous ideologues’ impact on today’s existential struggle between freedom, human rights and civil rights.
Senstad’s ongoing research project Capitalism in the Public Realm is presented in depth on the platform Capitalism in the Public Realm in dialogue with the exhibition.
The exhibition is supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Anne Katrine Senstad is a Norwegian interdisciplinary artist based between New York and Oslo. Her practice includes installation art, spatial light sculpture and site specificity, photography, video and film, - and text based art, with a focus on the phenomena of perception and the cognitive system in response to the properties of light, sound, and color. She is concerned with sensorial aesthetics and ethics - the transformative and transcendental ideas of art and philosophical practice. Senstad has exhibited widely internationally, including Kunsthal Regelbau 411, Denmark (2023), Seinajoki Kunsthall, Finland (2021), S12 Gallery, Norway (2021), Kai Art Center, Estonia (2020), Freight & Volume Gallery, New York (2020), He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen (2019), Good Children Gallery, New Orleans (2017, 2023), Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale, Belgium, (2015), 55th and 56th Venice Biennales (Collaterali Eventi), (respectively 2013 and 2015). She is the recipient of numerous artist grants including The Norwegian Governmental Grant for Artists, Arts Council Norway, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Association of Visual Artists, Norway, Fritt Ord, Norway, Rauschenberg Foundation Emergency Grant, New York, Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, New York. A monograph on her monumental light sculpture practice, Neon Guides Me was published by Praun & Guermouche in 2022, marking her third artist book. Senstad is a member of Association of Visual Artists, Norway and The Film-makers Cooperative, New York.
Posts
