Panel and audience conversation at the Screen City Biennial, Stavanger, Norway.
With Saara Ekström, Toril Johannessen and Laura Beloff. Moderated by Tanya Toft Ag.
The digital has launched both excitement and concern with art’s ecologies of making the ‘new.’ Art’s making begins not with the tool but with a sense of who we are, our origins, histories, centers, and peripheries, and it continues in our co-evolution with technics. Taking a starting point in the new book Digital Dynamics in Contemporary Nordic Art the conversation asks: What ecologies are implicated in art’s making today, and what does the pursuit of the ‘new’ promise, challenge, and feed forward?
WHEN: October 20, 14.30-16.00
WHERE: MS Sandnes, Vågen (the Harbour), 4001 Stavanger
ENTRANCE: Free
[a limited number of books will also be available for sale with a discount during the biennial opening weekend]
VISIT the Art’s New Making program.
SPEAKER PARTICIPANTS
LAURA BELOFF is an internationally acclaimed artist and researcher who functions in-between academic leadership & research with a core in the arts and in artistic methods. She is Associate Professor and Head of the PhD School at IT University of Copenhagen where she is part of the REAL-research group.
SAARA EKSTRÖM, works in film, photography, text and installation. Her work has been shown extensively in Finnish and international group and solo exhibitions in various museums and festivals in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She received the Finnish media art prize AVEK-award in 2018 and the prizes of SW Finland in 2017, Finnish Art Society in 1995 and the Aboa prize in 1994. She has been the Helsinki Festival Artist in 2005 and was nominated for both Ars Fennica and Carnegie Art Award prizes in 2010. Her works have been acquired to several public collections in Finland and abroad.
Presenting Beacon (2019) at the Screen City Biennial 2019.
TORIL JOHANNESSEN (b.1978, Norway) is an artist living in Tromsø. Perception and representation as historical and technological constructs are recurring themes in Johannessen’s artistic practice. Combining historical records with fiction and her own investigations, and with an attention to how science coexists with other systems of knowledge and belief, her works often has elements of storytelling in visual or written form. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Entrée, Bergen (2019); Munchmuseet on the Move (w/Marjolijn Dijkman), Oslo (2018); Hordaland Art Centre, Bergen (2017); ARoS, Aarhus (2017); Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2016), and group shows such as NATURvitenskap, Trondheim Art Museum (2018); the 13th Dak’Art Biennial de Dakar (2018); STAGES, Plug In ICA, Winnipeg (2017), and What Remains – The Golden Records, Fotogalleriet, Oslo (2017).
Presenting Reclaiming Vision (2018) with Marjolijn Dijkman at the Screen City Biennial 2019.
TANYA TOFT AG (moderator), Ph.D. is a curator, researcher, writer and lecturer examining urban media aesthetic phenomena and (media) art’s engagement with societal and urban change, in a global perspective. She is editor of the new book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) and co-editor of What Urban Media Art Can Do – Why, When, Where, and How? (av edition, 2016). She was curator and led the artistic research program at the Screen City Biennial 2016-2018 (Stavanger) and has curated exhibitions and given key-notes on six continents. From 2018-2020 she is a research fellow at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.
Image: Saara Ekström, Beacon, 2019; director and cinematography: Saara Ekström; editing assistant: Eero Tammi; 8mm film converted to 2K digital format; expanded cinema event
