JOURNALS

Now all has been revealed! The exhibition outcome from the collaborations and exchanges has opened at Galleri F15. On April 4th, at the end of an exhausting installation week, the Japanese Ambassador to Norway, His Excellency Yamaguchi, officially Opened the exhibition, and the public finally had the opportunity to engage with the works in real time and space.

Preparing the ground for Kiyonori Shimada's outdoor installation.

I arrived together with all the artists, apart from Eva, at Galleri F15 in the morning of Monday March 29th. It had been snowing over the weekend and our first task, together with the technicians and F15 curator Siv Hofsvang, was to dig the trenches for Kyonori Shimada’s outside work. This proved a very ‘bonding’ experience as we all took our turn in pushing the spades through the soft snow to the ice below. Installing the work in a fierce wind blowing off the sea we realised would test the work to see how it stood up to extreme weather conditions. Throughout the day we watched as the fabric responded to the wind and next morning, when the weather had become much quieter, we were all very relieved to see the work still standing. Since then we have seen it used by all generations of visitors – children who want to play, young people who want a special place and older people who can sit and quietly look at the sea and the horizon. I was told by a member of F15 staff that some years earlier her brother and his wife had been married on that exact spot, which seemed a wonderful validation of Kyonori Shimada’s positioning of his work.

The weather provided the second outstanding installation moment for me. This occurred late on the evening of Thursday April 2nd as Gabriella began to install her outside work in a tree. The installation required a lift platform for the technicians and by this time in the week the snow and ice had begun to melt and the ground had become soft mud in places. However the lift was carefully put in place, just as the weather came down. The fog rolled in from the sea, the wind cut across with ice and sleet and night began to fall. For three or four hours the technicians in the tree and Gabriella on the ground battled to place the work – with the rest of us taking turns to stand alongside providing ‘moral support’. And by 10pm they had succeeded in creating an incredibly successful intervention in the natural environment. Gabriella’s returning ‘eggs’ (see her journal) have taken on an ambiguity of identity that is totally appropriate to the setting.

The collaboration works of all the partnerships have been a great success, and more than that, the ‘conversations’ between the works of each pairing has extended to the works from other pairings, creating an extraordinary visual flow throughout the building and outside. The collaborations of Anniken and Machiko, and that of Eva and Yuka have both been based in environmental concerns – Yuka and Eva’s as an observation, and Machiko and Anniken’s as a comment. F15 had been able to provide a glass greenhouse for Anniken and Machiko outside and in fact it is the first work to be encountered by the visitor. And such a strange encounter. Anniken’s green sculptures sitting amongst Machiko’s green columns of images and mirror reflections of vegetation. At night, as the installation is lit from within the greenhouse, the links between science, agriculture and art are at their most disturbing.

Inside the F15 the first room contains Kiyonori Shimada’s breathtakingly beautiful white room within a room, the cloth moving and rustling as people pass through, the ‘windows’ in his walls allowing glimpses of Gabriella’s dark skeletal forms climbing the walls. His work leads on one side to the larger installation of Gabriella’s work and on the other to the collaborative work of Eva and Yuka. Their work is made up of swirls of white, translucent fabric, each containing a vicious pink centre, which gently glows through the fabric. The whole effect of the downstairs rooms is one of black and white with whispers of colour.

Upstairs the first sight is of crazy, technicolour and reflecting mirrors. Machiko’s installation of fourteen of her columns, each printed with images of mass consumption and excess is a complete contrast to the work in the rooms below. On either side are rooms containing almost monochromatic works – Anniken’s three-dimensional collages on one side and Yuka’s silent, meditative, almost transparent woven columns on the other, allowing glimpses in certain lights of both an interior and exterior form. In the final room more of Anniken’s creatures, this time emerging from perspex containers of soil, unnaturally coloured shapes that seem to glow from within – a radioactive nightmare.

We also had the opportunity to speak about the project to an audience in Oslo at the Kunstnernes Hus on Wednesday April 1st and I would like to thank Janicke Iversen, Director of Soft Gallery, for her generous organisation of this event. And thanks so much to Dag Hensten who has produced a wonderful catalogue – which, at the moment, you can buy through F15 and eventually it will be available at all venues.

It was a very intense time, and we were greatly aided by the amazing technical support at Galleri F15 and that of Keiko Kawashima, project co-ordinator in Japan. I am hugely relieved and thrilled by the ways in which all the works reflect the collaborations, both the individuals and their connection through their work. We can now begin to plan for the showing of the work in the UK, but that is in the future, for now, those who can visit the exhibition at Galleri F15, I totally recommend that you do so. The exhibition is fabulous, thank you all artists.