Past exhibition

TEMPO TEMPO TEMPO

26. May – 17. November 2019

The group exhibition TEMPO TEMPO TEMPO focuses on eight contemporary artists based in Norway: Ragna Bley, Marthe Ramm Fortun, Ane Graff, Yngve Holen, Sandra Mujinga, Urd J. Pedersen, Eirik Sæther, and Fredrik Værslev.

Kistefos Museet EA Yayoi Kusama 0001 30 Edit

Kistefos Museet EA Yayoi Kusama 0001 44 Edit

The exhibition borrows its name from a serial work by artist Urd J. Pedersen which is reproduced in the exhibition catalog. Used in sports coaching, parental advising, or telling-off, “tempo tempo tempo” said by pretty much any Norwegian means that someone should go faster, keep up with the group. In her print and painting series, Pedersen playfully repeats these words, again and again, ridding the phrase of its meaning. Questioning the flat remark, she gives its reprimand tonality a new rhythmic tempo of her own, almost like the words in a pop chorus getting stuck in your head.

Kistefos Jan Khur Tempo 3242 — Photo: Jan Khur

While the artistic practices in this exhibition span sculpture, print, performance, and painting, and in many ways differ more than they share, a mutual concern is the pace and specificities of Norwegian and Scandinavian communal culture. Scratching the surface of these at least ideally benevolent welfare systems - where everyone should stick to the tempo tempo tempo - egalitarian) fears of anyone alien standing out from (hetero) normativity are exposed, the (overtly) wealthy oil fund, or wrecked family issues, alluded to. You encounter no-control psychedelic mushrooming matter right where you expected ordered, composed beauty; you see suburban decay and meet the post-human chemical and technoid bodies in the wake of contemporaneity’s accelerated tempo tempo tempo.

Kistefos Jan Khur Tempo 2696 — Artist: Yngve Holen. Photo: Jan Khur.

The exhibition is cued by mostly new, large-scale works created specifically for the occasion of TEMPO TEMPO TEMPO and the site of Nybruket, a former wood pulp factory. For the show, the previously installed white cube drywall in the old factory building Nybruket has been removed and daylight let in. Highlighted in Nybruket’s novel changing (light) conditions—shifting with the seasons, weather, and time of day - the artworks in TEMPO TEMPO TEMPO propose multiple temporalities, beating out of time, diverging from, or commenting on the metronomic standards of their cultivated surroundings. Not fixed museal objects, but alive entities, each of the works in TEMPO TEMPO TEMPO are fading, shifting, and glowing, connecting the inside of the exhibition space to the surrounding Norwegian society and landscape, reflecting on its - both benevolent and violent - bedrock.