VENTURE COLLECTIVE by Annett Busch

Trondheim Academy of Fine Art invites students to take part in the KUNO Biennial 2025 in Trondheim. This nomadic biennial continues its journey from the Vilnius edition Shared imaginations in 2023, and now proposes to embark on a Venture Collective. By deliberately playing with associations to the start-up term Venture Capital, which evokes economic playgrounds of risk investment and speculation, we want to twist the understanding of the capitalist value system and instead emphasize a value creation fostered through social cooperations. To frame a space that faces the economic realities we are living in, including the art world, while imagining alternative and collaborative ways of venturing. We call for proposals that take the risk of being open, complex and sensible to a place, an environment, uncertainty and collective processes. That are seeking for an artistic and transformative responsivity towards the worldly challenges of our time. This can and should take multiple forms.

Denis Kudrjašov
Estonian Academy of Arts

Currents
2025
Cable, wood

This work explores boundaries of managed water and power flows. A cable that embodies a constructed riverbed. A stream affected by a wire carrier.

‘Powered by nature’ is a message that welcomes travelers in Trondheim airport. 99% of the electricity generated nationally comes from renewable sources, mostly hydropower. Being a part of Nordpool energy market Norway is trading its natural resources and though it is not reflected in price, the buyers of the energy are also importing the environmental impacts that come along with renewables. Transition from fossil fuel to green energy would require building even more extensive power generation facilities and transmission lines. The art installation ‘currents’ explores collectivity as a network of energy users/producers that are dependent on neighbouring lands and respective ecological trade-offs. One of the two locations of the work is Leangenbekken, a partially canalised stream in the east of Trondheim. The site is an example of an artificially transformed body of water with a reduced shoreline. A wooden object placed in the water serves as an artificial island, adding to the amount of space in direct contact with water which is available to birds, amphibia and others. The installation continues inside the gallery KiT. An electricity cable is added to the existing communications. Instead of following the shortest route this line has an excess length allowing the cable to make a loop in space. The line is labelled as Langenbekken. Similarly to the steam it is an obstacle and at the same time an object of manipulation. It questions the need for fragmentation of both habitats and the infrastructure. Originally being an issue, fragmentation can also serve as a necessary tool that may be applied to systems themselves. It promotes awareness of the fragmentation caused by infratructure The way it is installed turns it into an obstacle leading to fragmentation of the exhibition space. It creates fragments of space that call for rearrangement or reconnection.

COLLECTIVE VENTURING EXHIBITED

Sara Björg & Yi Ten Lai
Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts & The Iceland University of the Arts

We are sitting in a room...
The same room you are in now
2025
Vibration speaker, microphone, digital recording, resonating frequencies

In this shared space we build on the inescapability of constant participation.
With noise we construct an economy of agency within the dynamic frictions
of collectivity. A ripple shaped vibration, travelling to those who will absorb it
and carry it farther. Vibration has no conception of limits, it floods and inhabits
spacetime, in a transferable and reciprocal manner, shared by all who were,
are, and will be present.

This piece is an homage to Alvin Lucier’s piece “I am sitting in a room” 1969

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