Aurskog-Høland is about an hour's drive east of Oslo. The gallery is located in an old rectory from the eighteenth century. The art association had arranged for me to do nine workshops ahead of the exhibition with pupils from local junior high schools. I decided to do them in form of participatory art events. After the pupils had helped me create an artwork, I would give a tour of the exhibition. I was accompanied by Øystein Ørjasæter during this event, and he told the pupils about the rectory and adjoining buildings.
I printed a small leaflet and a card to distribute during the exhibition.
We Are Many
Participatory art event
The participants, who were pupils at Bråte, Aursmoen and Bjørkelangen junior high schools, waited outside the gallery while I explained the concept. They were instructed to stand in line and, one by one pick up a stone from a basket on the small terrace outside the building, place it in the wet filler in the panel on the floor and stand last in line again. This was repeated until all 99 stones in the basket were placed.
Here are some pictures of the pupils at work.
Afterwards, I would give a tour of the exhibition. As I did this nine times, I was quite prepared for the opening.
Four of the panels were exhibited as a work-in-progress installation.
And here are the finished works.
It was a great opening. Plenty of visitors. Sapideh and my friends Torgeir Husevaag and Cathrine Thorstensen joined me from Oslo.
Here is documentation of the exhibition. The gallery had three rooms. One grey, one blue and one pink. Even if the rooms had furniture and were a bit noisy, especially the blue and the pink ones, I think the exhibition worked surprisingly well. I learned that my work also could benefit from exhibiting outside the white cube sometimes.
I also exhibited two small works from the Sinecure series and sold one of them.
Order the poster below.