New exhibition series: Rameau’s Nephews. Sofie Berntsen and Karl Holmqvist

Sofie Berntsen and Karl Holmqvist will kick off the new exhibition series Rameau’s Nephews at the Museum of Contemporary Art. The series will showcase a young Norwegian contemporary artist in dialogue with a conversation partner.

“The dialogue does not necessarily have to happen with another artist,” explains exhibition curator Stina Høgkvist. “It might just as well be with a collection, a film, or an archive. Each of the exhibitions in the series will therefore differ in form. It is the dialogue with the young Norwegian artists that is the core premise.”

The first nephews: Sofie Berntsen and Karl Holmqvist
In the series’ inaugural exhibition, the floor will be given to two artists and “nephews” who have not previously worked together, but who share an interest in how language, text, symmetry, and classification systems can be adapted and instilled with meaning as art. Both artists have created a number of new works for the exhibition.

Sofie Berntsen (b. 1968). Several of Berntsen’s new paintings are based on carefully selected art and science books that she managed to unearth in antiquarian bookshops. She uses the covers as canvasses for oil and pastel paintings, where only the small, unpainted areas testify to the true nature of the underlying book. In several of her works, Berntsen explores spiritualism’s connections to art and art history and teases out parallels between the justification for alternative science and the demands for artistic autonomy.

Karl Holmqvist (b. 1964) employs a wide array of media in his artistic production, including performance, books, posters, installation, and sculpture. Visually, his black-and-white imagery brings to mind the concrete poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, where the poem’s typographical arrangement is just as important to the overall experience as its phonetic sound effects and the actual meaning of the words. Holmqvist has published dozens of books, but emphasizes that he is not a poet – rather, he is an artist who writes poetry.

Holmqvist has also created several new works for the exhibition. One of these is a collaboration with the American guitarist, musician, and experimental composer Arto Lindsay (b. 1953). Holmqvist and Lindsay have created twelve new pieces of sound art together, and on 21 January the pair will have a performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Sofie Berntsen and Karl Holmqvist both use appropriation as an inclusive strategy. For Berntsen, appropriation can be used to investigate the parallels between how alternative science justifies its existence and how artists demand autonomy for their art. For Holmqvist, borrowed fragments of well-known pop songs or political slogans enable us to ask exactly who it is who is speaking, and thus who is in charge.

The exhibition series Rameau’s Nephews
Rameau’s Nephews continues and expands the museum’s series of solo exhibitions of leading Norwegian contemporary artists, including Matias Faldbakken (2009), Marte Aaas (2010), Snorre Ytterstad (2011), Camilla Løw (2012), and Ida Ekblad (2013). During their exhibitions, the artists had the entire ground floor of the museum at their disposal, and we will continue this setup for Rameau’s Nephews.

The series’ title refers to the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot’s (1713–84) manuscript Le Neveu de Rameau, ou La Satire seconde(Rameau’s Nephew, or the Second Satire), which was published posthumously. Diderot’s at times contradictory satire focuses on the figure of Rameau’s nephew and his fictitious conversation with a narrative voice representing philosophy. Diderot portrays Rameau’s nephew as an ironic and at times self-contradictory rabble-rouser.

Side project: I’m Your Telephone, and I Love You!
The exhibition will also feature the side project I’m Your Telephone, and I Love You! Twelve artists or artist pairs who work with text (Sofie Berntsen & Nils Bech, Caroline Bergvall, Lars Mørch Finborud, Marthe Ramm Fortun, Iselin Linstad Hauge, Ebba Moi & Anna Carin Hedberg, Karl Holmqvist, Kristian Skylstad, Vibeke Tandberg, and Arne Vinnem) have made answering machine messages in both audio and video format. During the exhibition period, people throughout Norway can call the phone number 800 400 50 free of charge to listen to art and poetry. The project’s physical component – a classical red phone booth – can be experienced at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

The project is an homage to the American poet and performance artist John Giorno’s (b. 1936) piece Dial-a-Poem from 1969, which you can listen to at the museum café. Giorno wanted to help poetry reach a wider audience, and so he set up a toll-free number that allowed people throughout the entire United States to call and listen to poems by for example John Ashbury, Bobby Seale, Ed Sanders, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, John Cage, and Jim Carroll.

I’m Your Telephone, and I Love You! is produced in collaboration with Telenor’s Cultural Heritage programme.

The curator of the exhibition is Stina Høgkvist. The exhibition will be accompanied by a special edition catalogue box that will only be available during the exhibition period. The artists will be presented in each their own catalogue, which will feature texts from among others curator Stina Høgkvist, artist and writer Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, and art critic and editor Line Ulekleiv. Rameau’s Nephews. Sofie Berntsen and Karl Holmqvist is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art from 7 November 2014 to 8 March 2015.

Press contact: Eva Engeset / eva.engeset@nasjonalmuseet.no / tel.: +0047 469 50 102.