New exhibition at Trondheim Kunstforening

A joint exhibition with Kari Dyrdal opened at Trondheim Kunstforening on October 10th., featuring several digitally woven tapestries, three video works for monitors/tv screens, two digital photographic prints and a new collaborative work combining textile and video. The exhibition runs until 3rd. November and is open each week from Thursday to Sunday.

The new, collaborative piece was woven in the digital lab at the Textiles Museum in Tilburg, The Netherlands, where Kari Dyrdal has been producing work since the early 2000's. It is a semi-translucent, free-hanging piece, viewable from both sides. Two HD video projections are combined. The woven piece is based on an abstracted image of a rippling water surface, combined with vertical stripes in a highly reflective material. The projected images are also sourced from footage focussing on water surfaces and reflections in water. Ambient sounds of water are played back in the exhibition from two of the video works shown on monitors.

Video documentation (3' 30") of the collaborative work can be seen here:  https://vimeo.com/366053476

News October 2019

Upcoming events, October and November.

Opening on 10 October at Trondheim Kunstforening, a joint show with Kari Dyrdal, professor of textiles at KMD, University of Bergen. The show will include some existing works and a completely new joint work that incorporates digitally woven textile with video projections. The textile material combines transparent/translucent and reflective materials that will combine dynamically with projected light.

On 31 October I will join Amanda Steggel for a research seminar that is part of her project Amphibious Trilogies, at KHiO, Oslo. I was part of a seminar that Amanda held during research week at KHiO eighteen months ago, and it will be interesting to see where the research has been going since then.

On 2 November, Michael Francis Duch and I will present a new iteration of our ongoing collaborative project for live and pre-recorded double bass and video. The concert will take place in Bergen at Belgin, the headquarters of Bergen Assembly, housed in KODE 2, Bergen Kunstmuseum. The most recent version of the work was performed at TEKS, Trondheim, during Trondheim Culture Night 2019 in September.

Michael Francis Duch performing at TEKS, Trondheim, 13 September, with video by Jeremy Welsh

Recent Activity, September 2019

After a pause over the summer, the early autumn has been productive and relatively hectic. The first project of the season was "Cross Cities", taking place in Sant' Agata De' Goti in Campania, Italy. I was not physically present, but showed the video work "Moving Towards, Drawing Back, Passing Through: Each Moment In Time A Point In Space". This is a single screen HD version of an earlier multi-screen installation with sound by British composer Robert Worby. 

Late August saw the opening of the latest in an ongoing series of collaborative works with Trond Lossius, The Atmospherics 9 (a blue million miles), at TEKS - Trondheim Centre for Electronic Arts. The show continues until 29 September.

Soon after the opening in Trondheim I travelled to Toscana to take part in Pasta and Pixels, an intimate and convivial meeting of film and video artists, with discussions and daily screenings in an ad-hoc cinema installed in an ancient chapel. The event was hosted by artist/film maker George Snow at his home, Castello Neve, in Poggione, near Cortona.

On 13 September, as part of Culture Night in the city of Trondheim, I hosted a concert within the installation at TEKS, featuring two musicians with solo sets. Bassist Michael Francis Duch performed a piece which was a continuation of a project we have been working on for the past two years, combining live and pre-recorded performances for solo double bass. Magdaléna Manderlová performed with field recordings, live electronics and spoken word, mixed with the installation sound by Trond Lossius. See video links below.

Coming up next, on October 10, another exhibition in Trondheim, this time at Trondhjems Kunstforening, in collaboration with textile artist Kari Dyrdal. The show features some existing works, but the main event is a new collaborative piece combining woven textile and digital video projection. The textile part was recently produced in the experimental digital weaving workshop at the Dutch Textile Museum in Tilburg. Documentation will follow in due course! Our last collaboration was in 2015, when I was artistic consultant for a commission for the new University Auditorium at the University of Bergen, and Kari was winner of the commission. Her monumental textile work, 60°23’45.96”N, 5°18’31.96”Ø,
is on permanent display.

Links to online video documentation:
A short documentation of the installation The Atmospherics 9:
https://vimeo.com/360116042

Recordings of the two performances in the concert The Atmospherics 10:
Michael Francis Duch: https://vimeo.com/360112724
Magdaléna Manderlová: https://vimeo.com/360114308

Poster for Cross Cities 

Moving Towards, Drawing Back, Passing Through: Each Moment In Time A Point In Space

Micro Cinema - Capella di Santa Lucie, Castello Neve, Toscana

Video artist Terry Flaxton introducing his work at Pasta and Pixels

Magdaléna Manderlová performing in the concert The Atmospherics 10 at TEKS

Michael Francis Duch performing in the concert The Atmospherics 10 at TEKS 

Magdaléna Manderlová performing in the concert The Atmospherics 10 at TEKS

Vårsøghelga 2019: Spring Festival in Surnadal

I am happy to be invited as festival artist for Vårsøghelga 2019, the spring festival in Surnadal. The show consists of nine digital prints from an ongoing series entitled At Any Given Moment (I Hvert Øyeblikk). Opening this evening, and followed by a concert at Surnadal Billag with Brazz Brothers and Elg. The festival continues until Sunday evening with a program of music, literature and art. The exhibition is open until 2 June at Surnadal Kulturhus.

Recent activity - Sounds and Spaces

Sounds and Spaces was a concert event held in Galleri KiT, Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, on 11th April 2019, arranged by Jeremy Welsh with invited guests. The event included the premiere of a new work, In This Green Place, by composer Ellen Lindquist, for live double bass, electronics and video projection. The piece was performed by Michael Francis Duch (bass) and Ellen Lindquist (sound files) with video projections by Jeremy Welsh.

Øyvind Brandtsegg, Professor in Music Technology, NTNU, and Phd candidates Craig Wells and Tijs Ham from the Griegakademiet in Bergen performed an improvised work for modular synthesis, self-made electronic instruments and cross-adaptive processing, with video projections by Jeremy Welsh and Tijs Ham.

Duch, Welsh and Brandtsegg performed the third version of a work entitled "Accumulator", which was first developed by Duch and Welsh with acoustic engineer Sigurd Saue during a residency & workshop at Surnadal Billag in 2018.The latest version featured video projections from the Surnadal performance, a new, live layer performed by Michael Duch and real-time audio manipulation by Øyvind Brandtsegg. The previous version of this piece was performed in January 2019 at Dokkhuset, Trondheim, as part of a research concert arranged by the Music Institute, NTNU.


Photographic documentation by Nanna Klith Hougaard

In This Green Place

In This Green Place

Øyvind Brandtsegg & Tijs Ham

Øyvind Brandtsegg, Tijs Ham & Craig Wells

Øyvind Brandtsegg

Craig Wells

Jeremy Welsh & Øyvind Brandtsegg

Michael Francis Duch:  Accumulator

Michael Francis Duch & Øyvind Brandtsegg:  Accumulator

The Atmospherics 8 (river deep, mountain high) at Entrée, Bergen

Entrée

7.2 —17.2, 2019

Markeveien 4B, 5012 Bergen, Norway

Trond Lossius

Jeremy Welsh

The Atmospherics 

—River deep, mountain high

The Atmospherics is one of the ongoing collaborative projects of Trond Lossius and Jeremy Welsh. Through field recordings they capture unique qualities from different natural landscapes and urban areas. The recorded audio and video material is then filtered, edited, modified and mixed to highlight some characters or to mute others. The intention is not to document the sites, but rather to build a database of audiovisual material that is combined in different ways in their installations, where each assembly becomes a "temporary place", constructed of impulses from different geographical areas.

Since 2014, the project has moved from Bergen, Trondheim, Arendal, Førde, Utne and Campania, Italy, where it has been presented in various installations with multi-screen video and multi-channel audio. The new video adapted to the cinema format, which premieres at Entrée, summarizes this entire project, and combines material from all the different phases and parts of the country.

Lossius and Welsh have collaborated in various situations and combinations since 2004. Together with the painter Jon Arne Mogstad, in the group LMW, they produced a series of experimental installations that combined sound, digital images and painting. Lossius and Welsh were also leading the artistic research project "Re: place" at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design in 2012-2013.

Jeremy Welsh (b. 1954, Gateshead, UK) lives between Trondheim and Bergen. He works within video, installation, photography, audio and performance. He is a professor of visual arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Trondheim, NTNU. He was a former professor, master coordinator and dean at the Bergen Academy of Art and Design (2001-2013), and founder and curator at The Film & Video Umbrella, London (1988-1990). His education is from Nottingham Trent University (1977) Goldsmith’s College, University of London (1982). His works have been included in several national and international collections, like the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Trondheim Art Museum, Arts Council Norway, ZKM Media Center (Karlsruhe) and MacQuarie University Art Collection in Sydney.

Trond Lossius (b. 1966, Bergen) lives between Oslo and Sotra. His projects investigate sound, place and space, using sound spatialisation and multichannel audio as an invisible and temporal sculptural medium in works engaging with the site. He has collaborated on a large number of cross-disciplinary projects, amongst others with the contemporary performance group Verdensteatret.He graduated with a Master degree in Geophysics from the University of Bergen and went on to study music and composition at The Grieg Academy. From 2003-2007 he was a research fellow at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Lossius is currently Head of Artistic Research and Fellowship Programme at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. He is one of the developers of the software framework Jamoma, and he has ported Ambisonic Toolkit to a set of plugins for the Reaper DAW.

Trond Lossius and Jeremy Welsh have received support for The Atmospherics from Arts Council Norway, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, Municipality of Bergen, Municipality of Trondheim, BEK (Bergen Center for Electronic Art), Sogn and Fjordane Art Museum and NTNU / Art Academy in Trondheim.

Hardangerfjord / Odda, October 2014

Year's end 2018

That was it, 2018 is over already! It is a truism that the years seems to pass more quickly as we get older, and it is also the case that an action-packed year can seem shorter than a year in which nothing seems to happen.

So here is a brief summary of activities in 2018, with links, where appropriate, to works that are published online. It has been a year in which collaborations with musicians has been the main focus of my work, ranging from the University of Agder research project "Music Without Borders" focussing on exchanges between Norwegian and international folk musics, to a recent series of films with contrabass maestro Michael Francis Duch, performing solo works by contemporary composers.

In March I organised the workshop "e-x-p-a-n-d-e-d" at Surnadal Billag with the participation of artists and musicians Ellen Røed, Craig Wells, Nazaré Soares, Magdalena Manderlova, Jørgen Wassvik, Michael Francis Duch and Sigurd Saue. During five intensive days the group, in various configurations, developed a series of site-specific interventions, installations and performances, some of which have subsequently been further refined and exhibited or performed. Together with Craig Wells I produced the audio visual work Sun Bi Lag (video projection with four channel audio) which was later exhibited at Joy Forum, Bergen, in November.

Sun Bi Lag - installation at Joy Forum, KMD, Bergen. HD projection with four channels of digital audio

Still from Sun Bi Lag

Also in March, an installation based on an earlier live work with Michael Francis Duch was exhibited at Kunstgarasjen, Bergen, during this year's Borealis festival of experimental music. The work consists of four projections and two channels of audio

During the year three new films were made with Michael Francis Duch, each of them a solo performance on double bass, of works by three composers: Hanne Darboven (Opus 17a) Pauline Oliveros (Horse Sings from Cloud) and Michael Pisaro (Mind is Moving IV). The first in the seruies, Opus 17a, was featured in the exhibition Double Lives: Visual Artists Making Music at MUMOK, the museum of Modern & Contemporary Art, Vienna

All three films have now been published on Vimeo, links below:

https://vimeo.com/307732100

https://vimeo.com/307691951

https://vimeo.com/307722460

A long standing collaboration with Trond Lossius (sound) and Jon Arne Mogstad (painting) was revived in summer 2018 for the installation (By painting) I Can Travel Light Years at Surnadal Billag. The installation consisted of a large-scale wall painting and several canvasses, digital slide and video projections and four channels of audio. See link to documentation video below.

https://vimeo.com/308910446

Light Years, at Surnadal Billag June/July 2018

I also collaborated with Jon Arne Mogstad in another context in the summer of 2018, as curator for his solo exhibition at Trondheim Art Museum: It's Painting Today (just like any other day). The show, featuring paintings from the past five years, ran from mid June until late September.

Jon Arne Mogstad paintings at Trondheim Art Museum, Gråmølna, June 2018

Next up, in February 2019, is a show at Entrée, Bergen, of the latest, and perhaps final, instalment of The Atmospherics, the collaborative project with Trond Lossius that has been ongoing since 2014. The previous work in the series, The Atmospherics 7: Terra Nova, was produced during Liminaria, an international sound art workshop and festival in Campania, Italy in September 2017. The work was shown again in Southern Italy as part of Happy Earth Day in summer 2018. When first shown, as a live performance, the work consisted of an outdoor video projection with four channels of audio. It was subsequently re-edited for stereo sound and is published in this form on Vimeo. The work for Entrée, The Atmospherics 8 (river deep, mountain high) will be a single screen 4K projection featuring material generated throughout the three year duration of the project.

https://vimeo.com/263295832

Terra Nova, Arpaise, location of the Liminaria festival, 2017