'The Viewer'. A Momentum 10 Book Launch

Please join us for the launch of The Viewer, a publication documenting the artworks featured at the recent Momentum 10 Biennial – ‘The Emotional Exhibition’. Meet Momentum Director Dag Aak Sveinar, artist Saskia Holmkvist and curator Marti Manen.

This event is part of OCA’s Mezzanine Series, and is presented in collaboration with Momentum.

Tuesday 19 November
17:00–18:30

Free and open to the public while space is available.

Please RSVP to info@oca.no.

Office for Contemporary Art Norway
Nedre Gate 7
0551 Oslo

The tenth edition of Momentum has closed its doors. 29 artists shared a dialogue over this period. Some of the artists presented visited Momentum again after having participated in previous editions, reformulating past artworks and situations. New artists were also part of the Biennial, in this asynchronic dialogue unfolding through the present time. Before Momentum 10 opened, the publication titled The Reader was released, featuring interviews with previous curators of the Biennial in Moss along with some historical observations. Now we present The Viewer, a publication that documents the artworks and the Biennial.

Artist Saskia Holmkvist presented Blind Understanding at the fifth edition of Momentum in 2009. Ten years later, she presented Blind Understanding – New Commentary, a version with a new voiceover showing certain regrets and discomfort with her own piece today. For the release of The Viewer, Dag Aak Sveinar will give an introduction followed by a conversation between Saskia Holmkvist and Marti Manen on temporalities, systems of production, archive desires and the exhibition held in Moss.

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Marti Manen is a curator and an art writer. He has curated exhibitions at Museo de Historia Natural (Mexico City), Aara (Bangkok), Sala Rekalde (Bilbao), Konsthall C (Stockholm), Ca2M (Madrid), Miró Foundation (Barcelona), and was the curator of the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015. At the end of the 90s, he curated a five-year programme of exhibitions in his student room. He has recently been a curator at the Public Art Agency Sweden and Konstfack (Stockholm). Manen has published books like Salir de la exposición (‘To leave the exhibition’), published by Consonni; Contarlo todo sin saber cómo (‘Telling everything without knowing how’), published by Ca2M and When Lines Are Time, published by the Miró Foundation.

Saskia Holmkvist’s work explores issues of agency and professionalised language through fractured narratives, employing performance, orality, the moving image and improvisation. In a hybrid form of realism, Holmkvist appropriates typical scenarios to serve as both allegory and example. Many of her works use the interview as a form of storytelling to address the consequences of the translatability of subjects in relation to historical trajectories, drawing on fields such as interpretation, psychology, journalism and improvisational theatre. The protagonists are often specialists invited from various professional fields to interact through performative encounters, direction and improvisation. In the process, documentary strategies are retooled with performative interaction in order to focus on verbal speculation.

Dag Aak Sveinar has been the director of Punkt Ø – Galleri F 15 and Momentum since 2007. Sveinar graduated with a Master of Arts from the University of Oslo in 1985 and has since been working in the following art institutions in Norway: the Munch Museum (1986); the Museum of Contemporary Art (1989); Arts Council Norway (1993); KORO: Public Art Norway (1996); The National Gallery: Travel Exhibitions (1997); The National Museum (2005); and Jugendstilsenteret & KUBE (2005).