Exhibition program 2022

Paulina Olowska

Her Hauntology

30th April – 16th October

The Twist

Her Hauntology will be the first major survey in Scandinavia of artist Paulina Olowska (b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland), showcasing a multi-disciplinary practice that includes painting, installation, sculpture, film and performance. Spanning both her earlier and recent works, the exhibition will showcase key works from the Christen Sveaas Art Collection and the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation, transitioning from a more traditional display in the closed gallery through to a dynamic installation-based presentation in the Panorama gallery.

Within Olowska’s practice, industry, leisure, and socialist symbolism occupy the same visual and cultural space. Her realist paintings, drawings, and collages borrow imagery from Eastern European and American popular culture creating a cross-cultural reference whilst engaging with the concepts of consumerism, feminism, and design.

The selection of works in this exhibition explore the female gaze and the concept of Hauntology—a range of ideas referring to the recurrence of elements from the social or cultural past— set within a feminist context. In addition to over 30 large-scale paintings, Olowska will also create a site-specific performance that will appear as a series of film works within the exhibition together with several performance events throughout the season.

Do Ho Suh

Homes

30th April – 16th October

Nybruket Gallery

Nybruket Gallery will show an installation of Korean sculptor and installation artist Do Ho Suh comprising several works from the artist's Hub series together with a film installation.

Inspired by his Nomadic life, Do Ho Suh has long explored the idea of home as both a physical structure and a lived experience, the boundaries of identity and the connection between the individual groups across global cultures.

Meticulously replicating the architecture of the places in which he has lived and worked, such as his childhood home and Western apartments and studios, Suh’s lifesize scale translucent fabric structures give form to ideas about migration, transience and shifting identities.

These ideas are conveyed in his Hub works, where transitory, connecting spaces between rooms, such as vestibules and corridors, speak metaphorically about movement between cultures and the blurring of public and private, as well as reflecting on the passage of the artist’s own life.

Pierre Huyghe

12th June

Sculpture park

A site-specific new commission by French artist Pierre Huyghe (b. 1962, Paris) will be unveiled on 12th June. The vast permanent work will be the artist's largest site-specific work to date and the most ambitious to ever be conceived for Kistefos.

As the 50th artwork to be included in the park, the artwork will inaugurate a previously inaccessible area of the park extending the visitor landscape. The site, chosen by the artist, is in a regularly flooded area of the park next to the working power plant, linking Kistefos’ industrial heritage with what it has become today.

Huyghe is known for his immersive artworks and continues to expand our notion of what sculptural art can be. Responding to Kistefos’ environment, the artwork is an entity, a milieu, both physical and digital, permeable, continuously shaped by the surrounding floodwaters and modified by what it perceives. The work is simultaneously an island and the possibility of what this island could be under alternate conditions of reality.

The forest's entire site has been scanned, down to its details, and digitalized. In a simulated environment, unbound from physical limitations, algorithmic and biological agent intelligences cooperate. A fiction-based set of rules is played out by learning machines that continually generate mutations of existing features, such as trees, trash, animals, or humans. The mutations change behaviours in real-time according to external factors, accelerating their growth with the floodwater, and transforming over the years. At times they randomly exit the simulation to manifest themselves physically on the actual island. They sustain or decompose, modifying the island’s appearance and progressively contaminate the existing reality with another possibility of itself.

At the far end of the forest stands a screen where an autonomous eye navigates the simulated environment, witnessing its ever-changing nature.

Tone Vigeland

17th August

Sculpture park

As the second commission for the sculpture park in 2022, Norwegian artist Tone Vigeland will unveil a new work as part of the permanent sculpture collection at Kistefos. The sculpture, a large and unique site-specific sculpture made out of steel, will be unveiled on the 17th of August.