Storyteller

Ellie Ga, The Fortunetellers, 2008, performance.

Tris Vonna-Michell, Seizure: Hahn/Huhn, 2008, performance. 

Erik Bünger, 2008, instalation.

Marcelline Delbecq, Showtime, 2007-08, performance.

How is time organized in and defined by the exhibition space? How does the temporality of the exhibition space differ from the temporality of the cinema, the theater, the lecture hall and the concert venue? When does the art piece start, and when does it end?

The exhibition Storyteller, Organizing Time and Space presents artists navigating between different temporalities and various forms of media and techniques. Reproducible media such as film, video, sound recording and slide shows are juxtaposed with live acts, playing with the formats of the academic lecture, the theater play and classical storytelling. Each artist will present their performance in the environment of their respective installations. These installations are both mis-en-scenes during the performances and independent art pieces, thus functioning both with and without the presence of the artists. Documentation and live act, representation and presentation, past and present are intertwined in the same work and in the same space.

Artist and composer Erik Bünger presents A Lecture on Schizophonia–(=That which makes dogs bark at speakers, children look for the man behind the box and savages demand their captured souls returned) (2008), an audiovisual performance with the formal qualities of a lecture. The term Schizophonia, coined by the sound theorist R. Murray Schaefer in 1977, stems from the nervous split that is created when the sound is separated by its source. Bünger invites us on a travel with clips from popular film and music, where past and present are mysteriously combined.

Marcelline Delbecq presents Showtime (2007-08), a guided tour narrated by a voice-over, accompanied by a video projection made of intertitles. The artist is present on stage – yet dimly lit – and narrates from a premiere night in a Los Angeles movie theatre. The words act like a tracking shot; slowly moving from the exterior to the interior of the theatre, depicting the crowd, the balconies, the stage and the void screen. A print titled Showtime, featuring an abstracted marquee, goes along the performance, acting like its first and final ghostly image.

Ellie Ga presents The Fortunetellers (2008), an installation with a series of chapters, connecting contemporary and ancient forms of predicting the future as a metaphor for the past and future of the Arctic landscape. After spending half a year on an expedition boat, frozen into the ice of the North Pole, Ga blurs the borders between present and past, memories and myths, using superimpositions in both sound and image to represent the dualism in the abstract notion of time: “We called polar time the amount of time it took to do things (hours to move one kerosene drum from point A to point B, a week to drag frozen parachutes onto the boat) and I guess also the eternal darkness”.

Tris Vonna-Michell presents Seizure: Hahn/Huhn (2008), a performance and installation taking postwar Germany as the point of departure. With a conspiracy story about mysterious disappearances in the tunnels beneath Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof, Vonna-Michell introduces us to three different identities; Reinhold Hahn, Reinhold Huhn, and Otto Hahn. With an egg timer breaking the narrative into chapters, he invites the audience on an energetic journey told with an immense rapidity. The installation of slide projectors and photos interacts with the layers of the presented narratives and intertwines with the parallel stories in a complex universe.

The performances on the opening night will be recorded and available for the audience during the exhibition period.

Storyteller is Ellie Ga, Marcelline Delbecq and Tris Vonna-Michell’s first exhibition in Norway. Erik Bünger participated in the inaugural show at 0047 OSLO, Come Into the Open, in 2007.

Erik Bünger, born 1976 in Vaxjø, Sweden. Lives and works in Berlin.
Marcelline Delbecq, born 1977 in Paris, France. Lives and works in Paris.
Ellie Ga, born 1976 in New York, US. Lives and works in New York and Palermo.
Tris Vonna-Michell, born 1982 in Rochford, UK. Lives and works in London and Berlin.

The exhibition is supported by The Arts Council Norway and The Freedom of Expression Foundation.