The exhibition entitled “The Creative Act” brings together several artistic projects which use different methods to create narratives based on historical material. The exhibition has come about as the result of the recognition that many artists look on archives as an actively discursive system that they can utilise to point to phenomena of the times. In this context, "history" is taken to mean the recent past. The "creative act" is the artist's use of historical material in order to throw light on contemporary phenomena and issues, but also her use of the institution as a workplace for materialising the contents of the archives.
While developing this exhibition, it soon become clear that a recurrent theme has been the postwar period, with the iron grip of the Cold War, paranoia, antagonistic confrontations and sometimes bizarre, aesthetic images of the enemy, followed by the first loosening of the grip of the Cold War around 1984. This theme still has relevance today, as changing images of the enemy and a tougher climate of international justice make it very pertinent to look back at the Cold War period.
The Creative Act focuses on history as a collection of existing material on the one hand, and the confines of the art institution as a pragmatic venue for staging this material on the other. In other words, the exhibition looks at history as a source of creating new and perhaps polemic narratives here and now. The themes of the exhibition are therefore limited to the relationship between staging, protest and participation, archives, and the legal issues related to the validity of expressions – themes that are also discussed internally in each of the works, as creative acts. The concept of staging also introduces theatricality as an important element in mediating documentary and historical material.
Between two constitutions
Maryam Jafri's on-going work Independence Day 1936-1967 consists of over 40 archive pictures from different Asian and African countries, including Indonesia, India, Ghana, Senegal, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon, Malaysia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Vietnam, Algeria and DR Congo. The pictures drawn mainly from the first independence day of the various countires show different occasions involving the signing of treaties, national celebrations and other moments when national states are ceremoniously inaugurated and celebrated. The photographs document what Jafri calls a twilight zone – the halfway stage between colonial state and independent nation.
Through Jafri's display systems, which create an irregular grid on the wall, connections and parallel stories and ritual similarities emerge. Instead of setting up a stringent grid of photographs, the montage creates its own shape on the wall, whose unfinished appearance also points to the impossibility of covering the whole story and to the fact that the artist's selection from the archives has been subjective.
Staging as a monument
Carlos Motta's Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice is based on a series of performative acts in different public spaces in Bogatá. Six actors from different social and ethnic backgrounds recite peace manifestos which have previously been delivered by important Colombian political leaders. The politicians Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (1903-1948), Luis Carlos Galán (1943-1989), Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa (1956-1990), Jaime Pardo Leal (1941-1987), Carlos Pizarro (1951-1990) and Rafael Uribe Uribe (1859-1914) were all killed because of their political beliefs. The camera follows the movements of the actors at a distance and in so doing, also portrays the place where the performance is being carried out.
By staging various political speeches written over a period of a hundred years, the possibility emerges of drawing parallels and also of examining rhetorical differences between the voices. Motta makes it more complicated for the spectator to interpret the work by having a variety of role figures play out the text, where the body language and interpretation of the actors play an important part, and whose patterns of speech and movement belong to our time. Taken together, the six acts focus on the necessity of remembering the systematic elimination of oppositional voices, but they are also presented as distinctive, individual expressions linked to a place and a body. For this reason, Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice can also be regarded as an aesthetic experiment and as a narrative monument to a fragile democracy.
A political action
The creative act may be a political act, an act necessary to bring to light contemporary or historical points, with the art institution being just one of a number of possible stages. Creative, miming or imitative methods can be strategies for opening the way to various different perspectives and discussions, rather than using antagonistic rejection or direct confrontation. Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas' many projects are examples of this – projects that often arise as a reaction to a local development based on historical or political investigations, but also function as a corrective measure in the larger context of the global narrative. When their projects encounter the art institution, the institution itself becomes a kind of discursive archive for projects and actions that have occurred in other locations in the public sphere. To influence an event while it is actually happening can be a challenging task for art, which usually depends on taking on some form of materiality or another.
Their works point to both the institutions presenting them and also to the places where the actions and political campaigns have taken place. The latter take on a different physical format when they reach the exhibition hall – here, the films and photographs turn into testimonies; documents of on-going conflicts that become subjects of discussion under the title Splitnik. Their installation reveal the institution's role as a venue for a more contemplative act whereby the summing up, discourse and debate evolve and the archives take on a material form. Urbonas' methods give the artists access to both the creativity of the political act and to the aesthetic function of the art space.
Creating a historic narrative through re-enactment
The War Song is a work created especially for this exhibition and developed in collaboration with the Ultima music festival. The work springs from Culture Club's radio hit The War Song, from their album Waking up with the House on Fire, released in 1984. This rather banal pop song has been rearranged for orchestra by Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere in collaboration with the singer and composer Jenny Hval and the composer Jon Øivind Bylund Ness. The piece will be performed at the Norwegian Opera House on Friday 10th September by the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, with Jenny Hval as the soloist. The process leading to the finished work is being documented and, together with the recordings from the performance itself, this material will form the basis of a video installation which will subsequently be presented at the Henie Onstad Art Centre as an independent work in this exhibition.
The choice of song, orchestra and venue has a specific significance for the artists and is linked to the historical context in which the song arose, where a wave of political pop songs and Live Aid campaigns emerged as a criticism of the long Reagan era and also of the development of AIDS, at a time when it was also economically viable to signalise one's political commitment.
The War Song opposes war and discrimination and Culture Club, with its ethnically diverse band, came to be a representative for multicultural alternativism at this time. But the reuse of this hit from the 80s also reflects today's political situation in Oslo and the world regarding "the difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace" (from Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech). This American-Norwegian context has been crucial for the development of the artistic concept.
The exhibition as a medium
The display and design of the catalogue and the exhibition have been developed in close collaboration with the designer Linn Eriksen in order to link the information and supplementary material of the catalogue more closely to the works and themes of the exhibition. We wanted to make the work behind the scenes, speeches, interviews, notes and working diagrams accessible to members of the public so that they could follow the argumentations and working methods themselves, if they desired such an insight into the material.
Finally, it may be appropriate to mention that any exhibition today can be regarded as a re-enactment. In the museum world, work is continually going on to retell or recreate moments, case circumstances or new aspects of individual artists' works, seen through today's eyes. But the level of awareness each art institution has when visualising these movements varies a great deal, from a strictly representative approach, to a more openly discursive one. Both models have their advantages: the first favours aesthetics as its point of departure, while the second prefers to lay weight on processes and the visualisation of problems for discussion.
The art institution has always been under pressure from, or formed by, different economic, structural and political powers. Nowadays, there is perhaps a greater need to visualise the many structures that impact on the institution, rather than presenting a perfect reflection of history.
Maryam Jafri
Independence Day 1936-1967 (2009-)
43 black and white photos, A5 size. Digital pigment prints.
American Theatre (2007)
35 mm slide installation w/synchronized audio track, 6.14 min.
Directed by Maryam Jafri
Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere
The War Song (2010)
HD video installation.
Angel Nevarez & Valerie Tevere in collaboration with Jenny Hval, Jon Øivind Bylund Ness, and The Norwegian Radio Orchestra
Carlos Motta
Six Acts: An Experiment in Narrative Justice (2010)
Two channel video installation
Nomeda og Gediminas Urbonas
Splitnik (2010)
Installation
