DESERT DWELLING
(2025)
author(s): Christine Hansen
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
Desert Dwelling is a research project conducted by Associate professor Christine Hansen and Independent Artist Line Anda Dalmar. The desert is used as a site and framework to reflect on landscape, environment and time. In addition, Desert Dwelling endeavor to explore the act of observation and documentation. The project uses common documentation/observation methods such as photography, video and sound. In addition, we employ more obsolete and time-consuming observation means such as drawing, casting and watercolor painting. This is to stress that different observation methods render the world differently, and provide noninterchangeable information about the world. Much of the visual material is from a field study in deserts in California in spring 2018. The study took place mainly in Death Valley and Joshua Tree and had a processual method. We selected a place in the desert and stayed there until we found something interesting to work with. Every day, we made experiences that we built on the next day. The working method focused on the fluid relationship between process, work and documentation.
In a Place like this
(2025)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
In A place Like This sets out to investigate and expand the issues and critical discourses within Sandborg and Higgins' current collaborative research practice. The central focus for the research is concerned with how art, in this instance photographic and painted image making and text, can be used as an agent or catalyst of understanding and critical reflection.
The research methodology is constructed through photography, painting, drawing and text. This utilises the form of an artist publication as a point of critically engaged dissemination: a place for the tension between conflicting ideas and investigation to be explored through discussion.
The research question is focused on how the production of the image and the act of making images can communicate or describe moments of erasure or remembering in terms of historical and personal narratives with direct reference to moments of violence and place.
This is seen not in terms of a nostalgic remembrance of the past; instead as one that is rife with complicated layers and dynamics where recognition is denied the ability to locate a physical representation. Embedded in this is an exploration of particular questions concerning the ethics of representation: the depiction of ourselves and other? In this sense it brings into question an examination of the act of remembering as a thing in itself, through the production of the image and text, contexts of knowledge and cultural discourses explored through the form of an artists publication.
Formidling som fagfelt
(2025)
author(s): Anne Szefer Karlsen
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
The project Mediation as Discipline is an attempt to build
bridges between disciplines and make the experience-based knowledge that the contemporary art field can offer relevant to a broader academic community. At the same time, it is an investigation of needs within the field itself, which should be served by a university that prides itself on having an artistic faculty. This report, carrying the same name as the project, is based on a comprehensive survey among contemporary art mediators conducted in 2024 by the project group, and it examines the foundation for specialised education for mediators of contemporary art in Norway.
Entangled — Texts On Textiles
(2025)
author(s): Anne Szefer Karlsen
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
The collaborative process that has fostered the texts in this anthology started with two questions: What does it mean to be a curator who writes, and, more specifically, how can curators write about textiles?
Curatorial practices vary just as much as do curators’ interest in and capacity for writing. At the same time, there are prevailing opinions about, and institutional demands on, what kinds of texts curators should provide for audiences, for instance as contributions to art discourses in the form of catalogue essays and the like.
The Community of Writers was set up to create time and space to retreat from these outside opinions and demands and to let curiosity and the joy of writing be the driving forces of the writing process.
I have had the pleasure of leading this process and am indebted to the individuals who formed the Community of Writers for newfound insights into textile art and the role of textiles in society. The writing process challenged the contributors’ own writing practices, sparked their enthusiasm, playfulness and criticality pushed the project further. Our conversations have deepened and become more entangled over time, and the reader can find traces of this in the texts in this volume.
ARKADIA
(2025)
author(s): Anne Skaansar
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
Med utgangspunkt i kunstneriske framstillinger av Arkadiamotivet, og med pastoralen som optikk, vil dette prosjektet utforske «utopiske» forestillinger om fortiden, gjennom arbeid i ulike kunstneriske uttrykksformer, i tekstil, skulptur og tekst.
SYNSMASKINEN
(2022)
author(s): Frans Jacobi
published in: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
SYNSMASKINEN: an inquiry into contemporary political crises
SYNSMASKINEN is a new artist-group and an inquiry into contemporary political crises. The project will consist of art projects, each exploring a certain aspect or manifestation of contemporary crisis. Together these visions are attempts to unfold a contemporary cosmology; a new political horizon.
SYNSMASKINEN is an artist-group in the sense that each production is made in collaboration between a small group of participants. Each art project will be made by new groups of artists and thinkers. In this sense SYNSMASKINEN will probe the concept of the research-group: What kind of insights does artistic thinking provide? How can collectivity address the political issues of topics in a critical manner?
The name, SYNSMASKINEN is taken from the Danish and Norwegian translations of Paul Virilio’s seminal book on the techniques of perception, La Machine De Vision. The name SYNSMASKINEN contains the methodological program: SYN=vision / MASKIN=machine
SYNSMASKINEN is the third large-scale research-project at Bergen Academy of Art & Design. Following Re-Place and Topographies of the Obsolete the project offers a continuation of and an addition to the new tradition of kunstnerisk utvikling/artistic research at the core the Department of Art. SYNSMASKINEN is organised by professor Frans Jacobi, artistic-research leader Åse Løvgren and research assistant Benedicte Clementsen.
www.synsmaskinen.net
Tracing gravity
(2019)
author(s): Geir Harald Samuelsen
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
published in: VIS - Nordic Journal for Artistic Research
The goal of this exposition is to investigate the particular qualities of painting and mountain climbing. Do they have their own aesthetics, their own processes and patterns of movement, their own environmental structures and psychology – and do they share some of these characteristics? The texts and pictures in this exposition, four essays all together, deal with the potential of mountain climbing and painting to map out space, quietude, euphoria, fear, skill, autonomy, instrumentality and movement in an expanded field.
Matter, Gesture and Soul
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): MATTER, GESTURE AND SOUL, Eamon O`Kane, Geir Harald Samuelsen, Åsil Bøthun, Elin Tanding Sørensen, Anne-Len Thoresen, Dragos Gheorghiu, Petro Keene
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
A cross disciplinary artistic research project that departs from, and investigates several encounters and alignments between Contemporary Art and Archaeology. Its primary goal is to create a broad selection of autonomous and collaborative artistic, poetic and scientific expressions and responses to Prehistoric Art and its contemporary images. It will seek to stimulate a deeper understanding of contemporary and prehistoric artistic expression and the contemporary and prehistoric human condition. The participating artists and archaeologists will create autonomous projects, but also interact with each other in workshops, seminars and collaborative artistic projects.
The secondary goal of Matter, Gesture and Soul is to establish an international cross disciplinary research network at the University of Bergen and strengthen the expertise in cross disciplinary artistic and scientific work
with artistic research as the driving force.
The project is financed by DIKU and UiB and supported by Global Challenges (UiB)
Bridge
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Johan Sandborg
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Through a dialogue with an historical archive the project seeks to construct a fluid story of a confined landscape on the point of transformation. Through the negotiation of a multitude of images the project constructs a narrative that transcends the photographic vision as evidence, and questions whether vision can be more than comparable to the ground of an archaeological excavation. Through the use of the photographic essay as a method the intention is to try and interpret the changeability of the urban landscape.
it will be fine
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
It Will Be Fine, is engaging in the language of visual representation through the combined mediums of painting, photography and artificial intelligence (Ai) together with images held in the Special Collection picture archive in Bergen. To reflect on the ways in which meaning and memory is constructed and conveyed through visual forms and knowledge systems.
CCFT
(last edited: 2024)
author(s): Johan Sandborg, Duncan Higgins, Bente Irminger, Linda H. Lien, andy lock, Ana Souto Galvan, Susan Brind, Shauna McMullan, Yiorgos Hadjichristou, Jim Harold, DÁNIEL PÉTER BIRÓ
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
As we move towards the first quarter of the third millennium, the impermanent and shifting influence of globalisation, economic division, migratory encounters, social media, historic narrative and tourism is having a major impact in our understanding of the making, belonging and occupying of place. It is widely documented that these conditions are contributing to a growing sense of displacement and alienation in what constitutes as place making, occupying, and belonging.
CCFT is asking how interdisciplinary artistic research practices contribute and share new critical understandings to aid this evolving understanding of place making, belonging and occupying?
Dark Matter
(last edited: 2021)
author(s): Eamon O`Kane, Geir Harald Samuelsen
connected to: Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
The Irish visual artist Professor Eamon O'Kane is investigating the recent past through a ten-year project at a site in Denmark and is using the archive accumulated from this research as a comparative to the distant past of a Neolithic site, Newgrange in Ireland. O´Kane uses an observation made by Buckminster Fuller where he relates Einstein´s theory of relativity to a deeper understanding of the universe, explaining that when one looks at the night sky one is looking into a type of time machine where it is possible to see stars that have died many thousands of years ago simultaneously with stars which are being born more recently. O´Kane is developing artworks which examine the history of humankind’s relationship to mapping the night sky and the cosmos through mark making and symbols. He compares different approaches throughout the centuries including the stone carvings on passage tombs at Newgrange which date from 3200 BC right up to images of space produced by NASA.
The project Mediation as Discipline is an attempt to build bridges between disciplines and make the experience-based knowledge that the contemporary art field can offer relevant to a broader academic community. At the same time, it is an investigation of needs within the field itself, which should be served by a university that prides itself on having an artistic faculty. This report, carrying the same name as the project, is based on a comprehensive survey among contemporary art mediators conducted in 2024 by the project group, and it examines the foundation for specialised education for mediators of contemporary art in Norway.open exposition comments (0)
Med utgangspunkt i kunstneriske framstillinger av Arkadiamotivet, og med pastoralen som optikk, vil dette prosjektet utforske «utopiske» forestillinger om fortiden, gjennom arbeid i ulike kunstneriske uttrykksformer, i tekstil, skulptur og tekst.open exposition comments (0)
The goal of this exposition is to investigate the particular qualities of painting and mountain climbing. Do they have their own aesthetics, their own processes and patterns of movement, their own environmental structures and psychology – and do they share some of these characteristics? The texts and pictures in this exposition, four essays all together, deal with the potential of mountain climbing and painting to map out space, quietude, euphoria, fear, skill, autonomy, instrumentality and movement in an expanded field.open exposition comments (0)
Through a dialogue with an historical archive the project seeks to construct a fluid story of a confined landscape on the point of transformation. Through the negotiation of a multitude of images the project constructs a narrative that transcends the photographic vision as evidence, and questions whether vision can be more than comparable to the ground of an archaeological excavation. Through the use of the photographic essay as a method the intention is to try and interpret the changeability of the urban landscape.open exposition comments (0)
It Will Be Fine, is engaging in the language of visual representation through the combined mediums of painting, photography and artificial intelligence (Ai) together with images held in the Special Collection picture archive in Bergen. To reflect on the ways in which meaning and memory is constructed and conveyed through visual forms and knowledge systems.open exposition comments (0)