Rolling dustballs over muffled spaghetti western soundtracks. A cast of needy objects that might cry when left alone. Passive-aggressive lemons that spit if you come too close to their personal space. Objects as interns and cheap labor assistants. Sticks and berries as quite profound lead performers, even when stepped on or in an exploded state. Sensitive flags waving with me posing in a bikini in front of a wood stack. An imagery sequence of giving birth to a dog. Shrimps being tricked into signing really bad exploitative performance contracts, caught on camera. Sensitive bin-bags blowing. An attempt to control the Mediterranean Sea with finger-activating guitar chords. A passage for ants to potentially march through. A place where everything comes from, a blinking twig and potatoes tickling the walls.
The exhibition Double Bridges is a collection of independent worlds and narratives from Kaja Haven’s artistic practice. The show features recent works displayed as mixed media installations where elements are scattered across the ground floor of the art centre’s exhibition space, like objects washed up on a reversed beach; anchored in the basement is the video work Controlling the Medeterranean Sea, an underwater recording of Kaja while holidaying in Crete. The video captures her efforts in orchestrating cinematic soundtracks and moods, resulting in a confused performance with often odd instructions nearly impossible to interpret or play.
An arrangement of pieces – including video, photography, water and sound, together with locally sourced and personal elements such as food from the fridge, found objects picked up from the street, dust, insects, herself – are all part of a cast. They are stand-ins for friends, lovers, certain emotional states, collaborators, assistants, interns and free labor that are exploitable and replaceable.
In Double Bridges objects are presented as temporary performers – they could also be seen as objects playing art objects. Implications of hierarchies are made, alongside reflections on the construction of an artistic practice; how it so often is dependent on and built upon the bodies of ‘others’. In the gallery space, self-critical, humorous observations meet personificated and sometimes action-based roleplays, all of which bridges and bridges back over real and imagined hormonal landscapes.
KAJA HAVEN (b. 1989, Mandal) is currently studying a Master of Fine Arts at the Art Academy in Bergen. Her interdisciplinary practice ranges over various of mediums such as vocal, sound, video, sculpture; installations and performances that often involves collected objects, water, live duets, kinetic objects and pyrotechnics.
She holds a previous MAA from The Royal Danish Art Academy’s school of Architecture in Copenhagen and exchanged during her MFA at The Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.
Recent exhibitions and productions are NON, Bucharest (2024), Entré and Listening Room at The Royal Institute of Art Stockholm (2024), Putting out the Twenty-Third Bowl at Nonneseter, Bergen (2023), Young Danish Contemporary Art in Vrå (2022), Shuffle Play and Us and Everything Else for Corpus, The Royal Danish Theatre and Ballet, Copenhagen (2020, 2021) and Laser Cat at Distortion Festival, Copenhagen (2019).
The MA WEEK is a collaboration between Hordaland Kunstsenter and the Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art, UiB. Through an open call, MFA students are invited to submit proposals for an exhibition to be realised at Hordaland Kunstsenter.
Guest jury-member this year was artist, KMD alumni and former MA Week exhibitor Sara Larsen Stiansen.
SARA LARSEN STIANSEN is also the curator of the exhibition.
