Halvor Rønning at Hordaland Kunstsenter

Artist: Halvor Rønning

Exhibition title: Avgang

Curated by: Mathijs van Geest

With contributions by: Attilia Fattori Franchini, Philipp Kleinmichel, Per-Oskar Leu, Tiffany Sia, Sabrina Tarasoff and Nikhil Vettukattil

Venue: Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway

Date: November 27, 2021 – January 9, 2022

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Hordaland Kunstsenter

Hordaland Kunstsenter ends its 2021 program with Avgang – a multifaceted exhibition including new works by Halvor Rønning as well as a film program and publication curated and developed by the artist.

With painting, collage and drawing as his core practice, Halvor Rønning is a studio-based artist. Within the syntax of painting he moves between abstraction, figuration, pictorial illustrations and appropriated visual elements from advertisements, fashion, gossip and lifestyle magazines.

The paintings in Avgang are scarcely occupied compositions – deconstructed, resembling failed figurations. They appear erased or abandoned, as if the viewer is too late or too early to witness what might have taken place. What remains are residual elements of washed out traces, smudged lines, an empty chair.

There is a fluctuant quality to these images that speaks of Rønning’s practice: how he makes use of a commercial language that he is both affected by and critical of, and an ambiguity towards the strategies of modernistic painting – as he alternately utilises and rejects them. His work does not propose any solutions, it rather states the impossibility of solutions as such.

Avgang sets the stage to look at painting through the genre of tragedy. The structure of a tragedy rejects a linear understanding of time. Events from both past, present and future are interconnected, building a conflict within the narrative – resulting in a protagonist’s suffering, destruction, and distress. The tragedy requires that we remain in the unresolved. While we are perhaps more familiar with tragedy as genre in film and literature than in painting, Avgang investigates the concept of a tragic mode and how it can be applied within an artistic practice.

Death of Closeness

In order to expand the thematics he works with, and to express the collaborative aspect of his practice, Halvor Rønning invited the writers Attilia Fattori Franchini, Philipp Kleinmichel and Sabrina Tarasoff, as well as artists and film makers Per-Oskar Leu, Tiffany Sia and Nikhil Vettukattil to contribute to the exhibition.

The artists’s book Death of Closeness contains a compilation of texts especially written for this exhibition. They accompany a series of new, overpainted magazine cutouts combined with examples of Rønning’s works from the past 7 years. Each text sets apart Avgang in the subjects of tragedy, painting, death and comics. Attilia Fattori Franchini brings us into the inner workings of the tragic genre, and suggests a link to Halvor Rønning’s practice through a dialectic exchange between oppositional forces – inner and outer. Sabrina Tarasoff dives into what she calls the near emptiness of Halvor Rønning’s partially concealed images. She taps into a progressive malady, a slow degradation of perception and how pictures exhaust and are exhausted. Taking into consideration the social, political, and technological forces at work around painting, Philipp Kleinmichel’s text explores the cultural value of the medium after its declared death and apparent devaluation.

Film program

In the project room on the second floor of Hordaland Kunstsenter, Per-Oskar Leu revisits the real life drama of German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Nikhil Vettukattil presents a deconstructed photo collage of images of industrial labour set to the repetitive rhythm of a hard techno soundtrack and Tiffany Sia’s essay film unravels a media trail around a single event from Hong Kong during the protests in 2019. Paced by a relentless voiceover, Sia’s work reckons with rumor, disinformation, and disappearance, drawing out ghostly forces and the occult. By curating this film program under the umbrella of tragic storytelling, Halvor Rønning provides examples of how this methodology is adapted in our own time.

Halvor Rønning (b. 1984, Bergen), lives and works in Oslo. He is a graduate of the Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien and The Art Academy in Oslo. Recent solo exhibitions include Knep og kunstgrep, at Lucas Hirsch, Düsseldorf (2020); Hell, Recline, at Felix Gaudlitz, Wien (2019); and Stopwatch, Mayonnaise, Bible at Tag Team Studio, Bergen (2016). His works have been included in group exhibitions and events at Saksumdal Tempel, Saksumdal; Standard (Oslo), Oslo; CCA Andratx, Mallorca; Schloss, Oslo; Destiny’s Atelier, Oslo; Rogaland Kunstsenter, Stavanger; Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo; and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo. Rønning is currently realising a public commission for Bjørgvin Fengsel, Bergen, to be inaugurated in 2022.

Tiffany Sia (b. 1988, Hong Kong) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. She is the author of 咸濕 Salty Wet, a chapbook published by Inpatient Press in 2019, and the artist book sequel, Too Salty Too Wet 更咸更濕, published through Speculative Place Press in 2021. Sia is the director of the short films Never Rest/Unrest (2020), Do Not Circulate (2021), among others. Sia’s films have been screened at the New York Film Festival, MoMA Documentary Fortnight, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Prismatic Ground (co-presented by Maysles Documentary Center and Screen Slate), San Diego Asian Film Festival, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the George C. Lin Emerging Filmmaker Award. Sia’s artwork has been exhibited at Artists Space (New York), the Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin, Ireland), Manchester International Festival (Manchester, UK), Chen’s (New York), Blindspot Gallery (Hong Kong), and more. She is the founder of Speculative Place, an experimental project space established on Lamma Island in Hong Kong, hosting residents in film, art, and writing. Invested in challenging the politics of placehood and the boundaries of print/media distribution, Sia obtained a degree in Film Studies and Asian Studies from Bard College and has been the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays scholarship.

Sabrina Tarasoff (b. 1991, Finland) is a writer and critic based in Paris. Her writing dwells on the mysterious movement between popular culture, poetry, and art, with a particularly keen eye on entertainment architectures, scripted spaces, and ideas of animation. She is a contributing editor at Mousse Magazine and writes regularly for Artforum, Flash Art, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly.

Per-Oskar Leu (b.1980) lives and works in Oslo. In his multidisciplinary practice, which includes sculpture, installation, video and performance, Leu often makes use of archival material in order to reexamine historical events, and to reinterpret works of film and literature. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Art, Oslo, the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, and the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. Solo exhibitions include: 1/9 Unosunove, Rome; Triple Canopy, New York; and Johan Berggren Gallery, Malmö. Selected group exhibitions: Tensta konsthall, Stockholm; Munch Museum, Oslo; Ludlow 38, New York; Philipp von Rosen Galerie, Cologne; and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden. Leu is a member of the collective artistic persona Rose Hammer.

Nikhil Vettukattil (b. 1990, Bengaluru, India) is an artist and a writer based in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, his practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences. He has previously exhibited at venues such as CAPC, Bordeaux (2021) K4 Galleri, Oslo (2021), Louise Dany, Oslo (2020), EKA Gallery, Tallinn (2020), Kristiansand Kunsthall (2020) and Le Bourgeois, London (2019). Forthcoming exhibitions include K-U-K, Trondheim (2021), Kunsthall Oslo (2022), and the

Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2022). He is an associate artist at Black Box Teater and part of the art collectives Tenthaus and Carrie, as well as a studio artist at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo.

Philipp Kleinmichel studied philosophy, art and media theory in Freiburg, Karlsruhe and New York. He is a graduate of the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art and was a fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Since January 2018, he has been a research assistant at Zeppelin University and was previously a lecturer at the University of Gießen, the University of Hamburg and the UDK Berlin, among others. His research focuses on the transformation of art and mass culture in the digital age. Main Publications include Im Namen der Kunst. Eine Genealogie der politischen Ästhetik, Wien 2014 og The Art of Direct Action. Social Sculpture and Beyond, with Karen van den Berg and Cara Jordon, Berlin 2019.

Attilia Fattori Franchini (1983, Pesaro, Italy) is an independent curator and writer based in Vienna. Working on the creation of experimental contexts for the production and display of contemporary practices, her work deals with technology and power structures, moving image and the cinematic, late-capitalism and the creation of alternative forms of subjectivity and representation. She is director of KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS, Vienna, curator of BMW Open Work by Frieze; Curva Blu, a residency project on the island of Favignana, Sicily; and the Emergent section of miart Milan. Fattori Franchini contributes essays and reviews to international catalogs and publications such as Mousse, CURA., Flash Art International, Camera Austria, Spike Magazine and has authored catalog essays for monographs on the work of Hervé Guibert, Diego Marcon, Tatjana Dannenberg, Rosa Rendl, Anaïs Horn and Superflex. She is currently working as a researcher at the Institut für Kunst und Kulturwissenschaften at the Academy for Fine Arts, Vienna.