Meshes of the Afternoon

Participating artists: Meriç Algün Ringborg, Maya Deren, Marianne Heske, Alevtina Kakhidsze, Lada Nakonechna, Karianne Stensland

Kunsthall Trondheim participates in Kyiv Biennale 2015: The School of Kyiv as a satellite venue and will dedicate the fall 2015 to one of the biennale’s schools: The School of Landscape.

The project title takes its name from the emblematic film Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Ukrainian-American filmmaker Maya Deren. In Deren’s surrealistic and feminist films, which will be included in the presentation, the inner self and the external reality are floating entities — the female protagonist mirrors the world around her at the same time as the outer world takes on her inner reality. At the end the mirror image is finally broken and the pieces are swallowed by the ocean waves. In her film At Land (1944) the relation between female identity and nature is even stronger, as the open seaside landscape — in the film closely linked to the female body — is set against a restricted, talkative and predominantly male society. Deren points to the fact that identity is linked to and created in a two-way relation to context and that context is not only political, economical or historical circumstances. Context is also body and landscape.

There is nothing self-evident or innocent about landscape. Landscape is formed by society in various degrees and the landscape forms us. It plays an important part in creating personal and national identity. Thus the image of landscape is also a strong holder of values, history, hope and dreams, and is used for various ideological purposes. It can be the image of tradition and stability as well as of freedom and new possibilities.

Meshes of the Afternoon will reflect on different aspects of the notion of landscape. The project will be on-going during the fall with artistic presentations, evening programmes and screenings, and a workshop for students at Trondheim Art Academy. A research project on landscape, art and nationalism at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology will start in connection to the project.

Ukrainian artist Lada Nakonechna will present her wall drawing Three points of view on common field and three possibilities to own it (first presented in 2009) where the three different levels of horizons point to the relation between the personal view and the ownership to the landscape — a territory of ideas, society and future.

Turkish–Swedish artist Meriç Algün Ringborg, shares her first name with the river that constitutes the border between Turkey and Greece. The river’s three different names — one for each country that surrounds it — place the landscape within a societal and political structure. Her work Untitled (Evros, Maritsa, Meriç) (2013) points to the landscape as a zone of conflict, as this river is also a main migration route.

For the Norwegian artist Marianne Heske the landscape has always been at the core of her oeuvre. Landscape 1,2,3 (1979) is among her early video works with links to the landscape, the body and the family history. Similar starting points can also be found in the work of the Norwegian artist Karianne Stensland, who has been invited to work on a reformulation of a work from 2014, a film in which the artist rows a boat over a fjord in Lofoten, where she was born. The work will form a kind of open-ended research into her practice and themes.

Ukrainian artist Alevtina Kakhidze will also produce a new body of work during a time of residency in Trondheim. It will build on a series of drawings of important events, taking place in her personal surroundings, during the last years of civil protest and war in Ukraine — events that will be redrawn and replanted in metaphorical gardens, and form another kind of personal landscape.

Curated by Helena Holmberg. With support from OCA. Kyiv Biennale 2015: The School of Kyiv is curated by Hedwig Saxenhuber and Georg Schöllhammer and co-organized by Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv. http://theschoolofkyiv.org
The School of Landscape logo. Design: Till Gathmann.