18:00, 12 April 2022
Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
Tickets via Kunstnernes Hus website
In the 1960s, the Norwegian filmmaker Erik Borge argued the need for more “free artistic short films” in Norway, which he defined as “the deviant product – the strange, the difficult, the angry”.
The Deviant Product is a new screening series that investigates the ambiguous space between fine art and film, and asks what might count as “deviant products” of the moving image today. Guests from the art field are invited to nominate works they consider important, in some way, for renewing a conversation about alternative and experimental moving images in a Norwegian context.
The first guest is artist and critic Nora Joung. Joung will show her video Windows, together with short films by two other artists who have been important to her: Ane Kvåle, Joung’s contemporary from Oslo, and Joyce Wieland (1939-1998), a legendary Canadian artist whose films are rarely screened in Norway.
The screening is supported by Norway’s Cultural Council.
Program
Nora Joung, Windows (Norway, 2018, digital video, 6 min)
The Austrian architect Adolf Loos famously attacked tattoos as ‘primitive’ in his essay Ornament and Crime – so why does his Josephine Baker house seem to have tattoos across its facade? Windows is a short video essay speculating about bodies, buildings and why – according to Loos – “a cultivated man does not look out of his windows”.
Ane Kvåle, Untitled, (Norway, 2014, HD video, 1.5 min)
A bathroom sink serves as a scene for a short loop. A dangling plug hits a stream of water from the faucet, as faithfully as a metronome. Pushed back by the water’s movement, the plug swings back and forth percussively. Robbed of other stimuli, the sounds and movements in the basin become engulfing, turning a mundane occurrence into a hypnotic choreography.
Ane Kvåle, Rosy-fingered, (Norway, 2018, HD video, 4.5 min)
In Homer’s The Odyssey, the dawning day is presented, always with the same line: #but when early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared” (“emos d’erigeneia phane rhododaktulos eos”). In Kvåle’s video, we watch the clouds from a god-like vantage point: from above, as a thespian voice welcomes dawn some twenty times, offering small variations over Homer’s original. Kvåle’s work is an unexpected epic, collapsing time while depicting perpetual beginnings.
Joyce Wieland, Sailboat (Canada, 1967, 16mm transferred to digital video, 3 min)
“Sailboat has the simplicity of a child’s drawing. A toy-like image of a sailboat sails without interruption on the water, to the sound of roaring waves, which seems to underline the image to the point of exaggeration, somewhat in the way a child might draw a picture of water and write word sounds on it to make it as emphatic as possible. The little image is interrupted at one point by a huge shoulder appearing briefly in the left-hand corner.” – Robert Cowan, Take One
Joyce Wieland, Rat Life and Diet in North America (Canada, 1968, 16mm transferred to digital video, 16 min)
“I can tell you that Wieland’s film holds. It may be about the best (or richest) political movie around. It’s all about rebels (enacted by real rats) and police (enacted by real cats). After long suffering under the cats, the rats break out of prison and escape to Canada. There they take up organic gardening, with no DDT in the grass. It is a parable, a satire, an adventure movie, or you can call it pop art or any art you want – I find it one of the most original films made recently.” – Jonas Mekas
About the contributors
Nora Joung (b. 1989 in Bergen, Norway) is a graduate of the Bergen Academy of Art (BA), Akademin Valand and the Oslo Academy of Art (MA). A prolific critic and writer, Joung’s artistic practice is mainly focused on installations and text. She works on the editorial board of the small publishing house H//O//F and is one of four people organizing the artist-run exhibition venue Destiny’s in Oslo. Recent projects include Game of Life IV – Prospektkabinettet in Kristiansand Kunsthall, and the performance Grini and Norway’s Futures at OsloBiennalen. Nora Joung lives and works in Oslo.