Calligraphies
Norwegian Artistic Research Fellowships Programme - Bergen National Academy of Arts

Calligraphies is a project that centres on artistic and reflective operations in the relationships between temporality as found in media culture, and the catastrophic as a result of our dialogue with these temporal structures. The project generates a body of work focused on notions of the ghostly as a way to comment on our relationship to disaster whilst avoiding media culture’s dynamic of shock.

A portion of the project has focused on media critique, namely how our emotional response to temporal structures modulate us affectively and are independent from the content and iconography broadcasted or screened. A starting point has been the catastrophic model of television and how this has spread to more current digital and cultural objects and platforms. Here you can see a trailer of a TV-lecture included in the research paper.

Calligraphies motivated a series of large-scale performative works and videos that explore a variety of means in order to embody a time that is related to the catastrophic without the numbing drive of shock. These pieces are suspended, seductive and eerie, and exist between the cinematic and the theatrical.

The research paper titled 15.07.2006 - 21.04.1976 - 19.01.2012 looks at terminologies and operations from media culture in tension with the artistic operations developed within the project, and emphasising the mechanical as an embodiment of time, and the ghost as a traumatised, symptomatic figure relevant in contemporary art production and culture in general. A simplified text, included in the catalogue for the project’s final exhibition can be found here.

 

Some of the works developed within the project:
The Kinetoscope of Time
Domain of Things and Other Histories
Campo de Fuerzas