Galleri Brandstrup is delighted to announce our remote participation at CHART. Represented artists Anna Daniell and Apichaya Wanthiang will present their collaborative project, 2in1, at our satellite booth on Tjuvholmen, Oslo.
Prior to CHART the two artists, Apichaya Wanthiang and Anna Daniell will spend time in the satellie booth. During this period, they will make new artworks together, out of leftover parts of their earlier paintings and sculptures.
Although they have participated in two group exhibitions together before, the two artists have never previously directly collaborated. During their first conversation discussing their collaboration for Chart Art Fair, they discovered a joint curiosity; what is an art fair? Who and what does it represent? How can we, as artists, explore this trough our art practices? Artists collaborations are not new, but within the frame of an art fair, it suddenly felt more intriguing; “Making art together can represent many different qualities, but in our case, I think the thrill of not knowing what we are going to make, how it will end up looking, smelling and sounding was a key motivation. Somehow these questions seemed, at least, if not more relevant than the making of the artwork themselves!”
Daniell and Wanthiang decided on a conceptual frame, made decisions regarding working time, location and materials. As the very act of making joint artworks laid at the core of this project, they have decided to limit the process to the given location and work within a short timeframe, in order to generate high energy. “We decided that all the works should be made inside the fair booth during the five days leading up to the fair. The artworks we will show at CHART will not be ready until the very day of the opening.”
“Questions that occupy us are plentiful, for example; are artworks that is ‘quickly’ made, under playful and improvisational conditions perceived as less valuable? Is it lesser in value then work that is made through year-long collaborations? We will also give away information that you seldom get as a spectator; under other circumstances, the spectator would not get a precise idea about how an artwork came about, how long it took to make and so on. There’s still a mysticism that set art labour apart from other labour. From where we stand, there’s a lot to explore here. Maybe it is our way of understanding and building a relationship with the market.”
The two artists individually decided on their own material but agreed to bring in bits and pieces from earlier sculptures and paintings, as well as other left-over materials. The artistic theme and visual outcome will not be decided on prior to the 5 days of their collaborative workshop. These decisions were made to enhance chance, to work with what is at hand in an unplanned way.
Apichaya Wanthiang
Lately I've started to become interested in the ‘lifespan’ of materials and work. I have looked closely at how I have been producing thing: often producing new work for every exhibition, constructing large scale installations within a certain budget, and tearing it down one month or two months after it has been constructed. I’m very torn about this, as I greatly enjoy making spaces for people to move in on an architectural scale. But this becomes more and more problematic when museums are getting bigger and bigger, when we lose the human scale and instead have to compete with the institutional scale.
This year I have finished my first permanent public work for KORO Public-Art Norway, at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. Going through this process has raised a lot of questions regarding the things you loose and gain when you make things that should last a few decades, a few months and so on. Although I’m concerned with the amount of trash that I produce through my studio practice and exhibiting, it’s not only the environmental and ethical that occupies me. I wonder if making work with rest/leftover materials, having a more playful and improvisational approach will result in a distinctive logic and aesthetic.
Maybe I also fear at the moment that this kind of logic and aesthetic sensibility which I appreciate and search for, might start to fade or even disappear slowly from our field. We cannot institutionalize everything, especially not our sensibility. I think it’s very important to harvest a counter position, one that would advance the intimate, the fragile, the haphazard, … and so on. At the moment of writing I’m installing an exhibition at Kristiansand Kunsthall, attempting to address some of these interests and concerns.
I believe that the 2in1 collaboration with Anna will allow further investigation in similar questions. The infrastructure of art fairs is after all also a kind of institution, one that plays by certain rules. As young artist I think it’s necessary to try to understand the logic of these unwritten rules, that we all too often accept without questioning.
Anna Daniell
I make sculptures. However, the most important thing is what I do with them. The sculptures have been in peoples’ houses, they have been lectured to, they have been in conversation with authors, been privy to secrets, interviewed and much more besides.
My artistic oeuvre explores what kind of significance art and objects can have for us in contemporary life. I create staged situations between audience and art, in order to turn on its head the usual perspective of objects merely being something of our creation and use, and not something which affects, helps and shapes us. I am currently working on a permanent commission for the City hall in Oslo where I am making 15 new sculptures, each representing one of the 15 districts in the city. Before the unveiling ceremony in 2021 I have invited one person from each of the 15 districts to whisper a secret to each their district sculpture.
For the project The Flock of Problems (2016), I exhibited six unsolved scientific problems, the audience entered a theatre like situation and where they could contemplate on the sculptures for four and a half minutes, before a curtain was drawn across. This project is an example of how I stage situations, wherein the audience is given the opportunity to step out of the usual role of contemplative gaze, in order for them to rather be in the company of the sculptures as equal actors. You are given the opportunity to listen to the objects, consider where they might hail from and what their stories are. For the exhibition SCULPTURE CLUB (2017), at Podium in Oslo, I invited guests to do things for the sculptures during the exhibition period. For instance, I invited the anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen to give a lecture for the sculptures. The audience were in this case on an equal footing with the sculptures, since, in reality, the lecture was meant for the sculptures, even though an audience was permitted to attend.
Where as in my earlier projects I have invited in other people to interact with my sculptures, I was always the one who physically made them, deciding the shape, size and total visual result. This time at CHART when cooperating with Piya. Merging my work with hers, I have to bare in mind that my personal visual language might be compromised and might not represent the visual language I have spent years of developing, and this is a bit scary. Basically I am presenting for the world artworks that I am unsure if will represent me and my artistic visual, as I know it. But at this point I am ok with that. I think the tendency of individual realisation has gotten a too strong posission in our times and that is why I think it is important to advocate for cooperations and enhace unity and trust in each other. This is my main motivation for doing “2 in 1” at CHART with Piya.
