Torpedo Press – förlag

Edited by: Tone Hansen, Dag Erik Elgin Contributors: Clémentine Deliss, Bjarne Bare, Theodor Barth, Ina Blom, Victor Boullet, Dag Erik Elgin, Tone Hansen, Milena Hoegsberg, Henrik M. Jahnsen, Maria Lind, Mari Opsahl, Christian Norberg-Schulz.

Mai Hofstad Gunnes’ artist’s book Baby Snakes Hatching. Ruins. Ruins is produced by UKS in relation to her exhibition and published by Torpedo Press. The book refers to the film with the same title, where the life cycle of snakes are connected with architecture. The content of the book is based on research material from the exhibition project. The pictures are taken from books in the archives of, amongst others, Naturkunde Museum, Berlin, Warburg Institute, London and Baukunst archive, Akademie der Kunste, Berlin. Erlend Hammer and Emily Verla Bovino has written essays for the book. Erlend Hammer curated the exhibition at UKS. Emily Verla Bovino has written about the psychoanalytical aspect of the project and tried to write through pictures, using Aby Warburg’s atlas project as a logical system.

Selected projects by Geir Haraldseth 2005-2012. The independent curator might be independent in name only as there are always certain dependencies on funding, cohesion, sense, and hierarchies. If you want to work in this business, you have to play by the rules. If you want to eat you have to stay in line. The selected exhibitions and essays collected in this publication offer a few possible answers to whether there’s a potential agency located in the oft-discussed title of independent curator. The projects featured in Great! I’ve written something stupid have been selected from a vast pool of endeavors by curator and critic Geir Haraldseth. Most of the exhibitions have been done in project spaces or in artists run spaces, while the writing has been sampled from different sources. The earliest example is from Haraldseth’s time as a student at a curatorial training program, and other texts range from contributions to exhibition catalogs to unpublished essays. Writing proved to be one way of gaining a sense of independence for the author. That particular space on paper combined with an interest in methodologies developed by artists and his peers developed into a practice of exhibition making that offer new and exciting ways of thinking curatorially and writing exhibitions. Haraldseth has been inspired by a diverse set of voices such as Witold Gombrowicz, Peter Sloterdijk and Marcia Tucker and the resulting projects on display here in this publication is a cacophony that might not fit a singular narrative nor make much sense, but they are all attempts a staking new ground for the figure of the curator and marry convention with immaturity, spite and inquisitiveness. “Great! I’ve written something stupid…” reflects Haraldseth’s efforts to carve out a space that is critical to contemporary art and its mores. In doing so, they demonstrate how vital it can be to assume the role of an independent curator in an art world bound by its dependency on patronage, on opinion, on its shared acceptance of unspoken rules of behavior. Through the guise of an independent curator, Haraldseth’s practice illuminates new ways to perceive artists and curatorial practice, and also to understand the history, problems and potential of contemporary art as a field”. - Lauren Cornel

Over the past ten years, Bodil Furu has emerged as one of the most significant Norwegian video artists. She has developed an unmistakable visual language, embedded in documentary realism, and unites abiding humanistic questions with current concerns relating to globalisation and the increasing mediation of reality. Furu’s films touch upon social development and Norway’s changing relationship with the rest of the world – a relationship that is highlighted, for instance, by the global financial crisis, environmental issues, participation in foreign wars and the increasing use of migrant labour. Throughout her films, we meet people who reflect upon their role, identity and significance in the society of which they are a part, simultaneously linking matters of social and political complexity to personal and private issues, often in a surprisingly direct manner. This monograph contains new texts with different perspectives on the artist’s production, with a special focus on how the real – subjective conceptions of reality and fiction – is treated in her work. At the same time, this book attempts to visualise and contextualise Furu’s working methods and filmic language, who shares the visual anthropologist’s approach to the relationship between the documentarist and their objects. Texts by Thure Erik Lund, Fredrik Svensk, Tone Hansen, Madeleine Bernstorff, Svein Ingvoll Pedersen og Helga-Marie Nordby.

The artists’ book Casual Maneuver: A Step Away From It is made by the Oslo-based artists Ruben Steinum and Jon Benjamin Tallerås. The photographs in the book document almost one hundred unannounced temporary sculptures made in public space over the past three years. Steinum and Tallerås work by clandestinely reconfiguring whatever mobile materials they find on their journeys through various cities. These mostly gentle but unlikely and unexpected transient rearrangements of urban junk and street furniture recall the methods of visual poetry or musique concrète as much as they acknowledge the formal language of contemporary sculpture.