Alt Går Bra

Contemporary art collective duo

Acanthus

Acanthus

In the Acanthus Project, we trace the diasporic movements of a plant deemed a weed. We explore the acanthus germinating in ornaments and paintings—from Corinthian columns in Ancient Greece to Middle Eastern arabesques and Norwegian rosemaling—unfolding into the hybridity of grotesques, where plants, animals, and humans intertwine and metamorphose into each other.

ACANTHUS ENTANGLEMENTS

Kristiansand Kunsthall, Kristiansand, January 25th - March 23rd 2025

Our upcoming solo exhibition Acanthus Entanglements at Kristiansand Kunsthall focuses on the acanthus in the form of grotesques.

The acanthus weed bends, folds, copulates, and morphs into phantasmagoric beings, part human, part animal, part thing. At once plant, scroll, critter, machine, the acanthus arises as a holobiont, a versatile host for a multiplicity of species, turning its living, moving forms into a testimony to kinship across earthly and wondrous beings. Echoing its ancient origins, Gilles Deleuze once asked what a weed was doing in the Greek temples.

Out of the grottoes, dug out from the ancestral soil of antiquity, the acanthus weed crept onto walls in hallucinatory contortions, as renaissance grotesques. Decentering and polymorphic, acanthus grotesques swirl along those edges that Jacques Derrida framed as parerga, thriving in the folds of the margins.

With care, terrific resilience and in profound understanding of the mutual entanglement of all species, the acanthus engulfs our uncertainty and apprehension for the future, emerging as a vehicle for transformative world-picturing. In our exhibition we critically explore grotesques as entities unfolding with the more-than-human world, aiming to intervene with dominant discourses.

The paintings for this exhibition were produced with the support of the MAC VAL Museum . Public event in conversation with MAC VAL's director Nicolas Surlapierre.

Sound piece Acanthus par Deleuze (2024) in collaboration with artifical intelligence, with the voice of Gilles Deleuze from his Lecture 5, Painting and the Question of Concepts.

MAPPING ACANTHUS

Instantiations of our Acanthus Project have taken the shape of exhibitions, city walks, talks, and our ongoing online database, mapping acanthus ornaments on the facades of over 400 buildings in the city of Bergen. The Bergen City Archive Byarkiv has permanently archived our database with its nearly 4,000 photographs documenting the ornaments in their architectural settings.

EXHIBITIONS:

OTHER INSTANTIATIONS (SELECTED):

SUPPORT:

Project supported by the Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd (Heritage and Visual Arts programs), Vestland County, Bergen City Council, Production Funds from Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond (BKH), and the City of Bergen 400-year Anniversary Fund.

Strandamalerne

Popular Paintings

UPCOMING: STRANDMALERNE BOOK

Alt Går Bra published the first book dedicated to the Strandamalere, Strandamalerne, Norges mest populære malerier, with the publishing house Museumsforlaget in December 2024. A 300 page volume edited by Alt Går Bra, the book sheds light on the Strandamalere phenomenon and Alt Går Bra's journey of discovery. The publication features newly produced research by scholars, curators, and writers, together with photographs and material from Alt Går Bra's Strandamalere Archive. Book contributors include University of Bergen Tonje Haugland Sørensen and Hans Marius Hansteen, Sorbonne University Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre and Alessandra Ballotti, curators Geir Haraldseth (Nasjonalmuseet the National Museum of Norway) and Frode Sandvik (KODE Bergen Art Museum), art critic Susanne Christensen (Kunstkritikk), fiction writer Sandra Lillebø, Rutgers University Emeritus Professor Charles Russell (re-print of his article "Finding a Place for the Self-Taught in the Art World(s)"), and an introduction and article by Alt Går Bra.

The book can be found at several bookshops in Norway or ordered online from Museumsforlaget website.

Book launches in Bergen on December 11th 2024, 16:00-18:00 at KODE Museum and in Oslo on December 14th 2024, 16:00-18:00 at Kunstnernes Hus.

STRANDAMALERE, RURAL AND SELF-TAUGHT PAINTERS FROM NORWAY

Worldwide, Norway is known for its landscapes; less familiar is the Norwegian people’s relationship to nature. Rather than focusing on museal depictions of the landscape, our project Strandamalerne, Self-taught Painters from Norway looks at visions from the margins. During the Postwar period until the 1970s, a dozen families of farmers in the rural site of Stranda in western Norway produced half a million paintings in two decades (1950-60s)--an unstudied phenomenon without ready-available sources. These self-declared artists gave a visual form to the nature that surrounded them. In their depictions, nature is home and inhabiting it is an act of balance: mountains, fjords, trees, little cabins, small fishing boats. Their iconic canvases decorated nearly every Norwegian home. We disassemble these paintings, overlooked by art and academic institutions, to investigate how those inside the landscape and outside the artworld depicted nature as home.

Since 2019, we have carried out research on the Strandamalere through oral history interviews, exhibitions, discursive events, performances, writing, and an embroidery contest, among others.

For our 2024 solo exhibition Kunst i dei tusen heimar: Strandamalerne at Sogn og Fjordane Art Museum in Førde, we produced over 50 new artworks for a space of nearly 500 sqm. on three floors of the museum. Artworks included two large installations, Mona Lisa 1952, a 4x6x2m free reconstruction of a Louvre Museum display for Mona Lisa, and Heng på, an installation of growing size, showing some 200 Strandamalere paintings lent by the public.

We have also produced performances in the public space, including Strandaparade, with 12 large faner (banners). Inspired by Augusto Boal's "Invisible Theater," we developed a series of performances through landscapes and cityscapes, and a Strandabroderi contest, inviting the public to embroider a Strandamalere motif--further information about Strandabroderi in Norwegian: www.altgarbra.org/broderi.

Co-organized with the Contemporary Aesthetics Research Group at the University of Bergen, a 3-day scholartistic seminar with professors and curators discussed Alt Går Bra's artistic practice with the Strandamalere Project as a case study.

EXHIBITIONS AND EVENTS (SELECTED):

RADIO AND TELEVISION COVERAGE:

Alt Går Bra's Strandamalare Project was featured on the legendary national television program "Norge Rundt" in 2023 and 2024, as well as on the regional radio and television news on the national network NRK. The online television art channel KUNZT dedicated an episode to Alt Går Bra's exhibition at SFKM.

DOCUMENTATION

Raw images from 2024 can be found on Flickr

Video works for this project can be viewed on Youtube:

SUPPORT:

The regional body Vestland Fylkeskommune funded research for this project with a three-year grant. The Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd supported this project with grants from both the Visual Arts and the Cultural Heritage programs in 2023. Two KORO Public Art Norway grants sponsored Invisible Theater performance, the Strandabroderi project, and the Strandaparade. The Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd, Fritt Ord Foundation, the regional body Vestland Fylkeskommune, the Bergen Municipality Bergen Kommune, and Sogn og Fjordane Kunst Museum provided support for the Strandamalere book.

Nobody lives everywhere

Vessels

Our project Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere focuses on the feral and researches new modes of attention, emerging amidst planetary crises and the digitalization of life. As anthropologist Anna Tsing puts it, “The term “feral” forces attention to what was once hidden in the gap between “wild” and “domestic.”... Without the concept of the feral, it is too easy to fall into a dichotomy that only includes the wild and the domestic.”

Our interest in this material departs from our own experiences with the feral in our daily interactions with feral pigeons in urban contexts and with “wild” boars in the forest. Perceived as plagues in most environments, both species have been increasingly demonized, namely due to their interactions with humans and their infrastructures.

Our theoretical framework for this project brings together recent works by Anna Tsing (Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene) and art historian Claire Bishop (Disordered Attention).

Paraphrasing Donna Haraway, Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere aims to deepen our understanding of fragmented forms of attention to both confront environmental issues and make art relevant to the contemporary moment. We seek to engage scholars and the public to generate new insights into contemporary art’s evolving discourse, with the ambition of contributing to the ongoing decolonization of both art and attention.

IMPLEMENTATION:

The project is produced by North Norwegian Art Centre in collaboration with the Academy of Arts at the University of Tromsø The Artic University. The exhibition is curated by Adriana Alves from the North Norwegian Art Centre and the seminar is organized in collaboration with Professor Hanne Hammer Stien from the University of Tromsø.

EXHIBITION AND EVENTS:

SUPPORT:

Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond

Den Norske Idealstaten

Den Norske Idealstaten

Alt Går Bra produced Den Norske Idealstaten through 2017-2022 across Norway. Thirty-one artworks resulting from this project are in the permanent collection of Nasjonalmuseet, the National Museum of Norway.

In conversation with communities, Den Norske Idealstaten produced collective reflections on our shared future. In collaboration with art centers and institutions, we engaged individuals and organizations at libraries, community centers, folkets hus, youth clubs, elderly cafes, unions, bars, factories, schools, gyms, universities, and so forth. Conversations took the shape of tête-à-tête exchanges, individual and group surveys, round table discussions, workshops, assemblies, and theatrical or performative actions.

Undoing the traditional principle of commissions, we produced material artwork rendering the ideas of the anonymous individuals and groups who participated in the conversations. We gave them form by deploying the communal formats and symbols of coats of arms and fane or banners.

We are currently working on the book, Den Norske Idealstaten, The Voice of a Collective, which recaptures some of the moments and processes of this project. .

EXHIBITIONS (SELECTED):

For further information and documentation, see Final Report.

INSTANTIATIONS (SELECTED):

For further information and documentation, see Final Report.

SUPPORT:

This project began with funding from KORO Public Art Norway. Funding was later granted by the Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd (Visual Arts and Performing Arts programs). The library tour was funded by the Fritt Ord Foundation. Events in Bergen were funded by the Bergen City Council Open Doors Program. Work in the Vestland Region was funded by Vestland County. Financial support for the events in Levanger was provided by LevArt/PARK/Levanger City Council and for the performances at Kunsthall 3.14 by BIT Teatergarasjen.

Mimeograph

Mimeograph

Ubiquitous throughout the 20th century, the mimeograph enabled countless poets, writers, and artists to print experimental works and publish radical literature—closely associated with political activism and clandestine publishing.

Since 2014, we have been reinventing mimeograph printing and publishing in the 21st century. We scrutinized mimeograph practices in our The Mimeograph, A Tool for Radical Art and Political Contestation, the first book devoted to this revolutionary printing technology. At an international conference we convened at the University of Westminster, we sketched out some of the core theoretical elements of mimeograph printing.

We use the mimeograph to make experimental prints and installations, and also run a mimeograph printing and publishing studio (see Writing and Publishing).

INSTANTIATIONS (SELECTED):

BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS:

All the publications below were conceived, designed, handbound, printed on two-drum Gestetner mimeograph machines, and published by Alt Går Bra Publishing.

SUPPORT:

Project funded by Arts Council England, National Lottery Heritage Fund, OCA Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Fritt Ord Foundation, Norwegian Visual Artists Fund (BKV), the Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd (Visual Arts and Manuscript Development programs), the Bergen City Council Theory and Critique, Open Doors, and International programs.

Tout Va Bien

Tout Va Bien

Since the inception of our collective in 2015, we have been convening the series of talks Tout Va Bien with international guests in Bergen to discuss art and politics. From 2015 until 2018, we held the events at Bergen Kunsthall. We have also regularly organized study groups in connection with the series.

In 2018, we published the book Tout Va Bien with articles by our guests to mark the third anniversary of the series.

In 2023, we will be launching a new online edition of the series.

EVENTS (SELECTED):

SUPPORT:

Project funded by the Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd (Visual Art program), Fritt Ord Foundation, and Bergen City Council.

Writing & Publishing

Writing and Publishing

Much of our work fluctuates around our non-fictional writing in multiple formats, from thought maps to essays and experimental pieces.

Our need to print and publish our own texts led us to discover mimeograph printing and to establish the Alt Går Bra publishing house, where we produce our own books and publications. We also write for journals, newspapers, and other outlets. Since 2021, we have been regular contributors to the Norwegian quarterly journal for the visual arts, Billedkunst, where we have our own column "Art & Society."

We have been exhibitors and speakers at book fairs, including Miss Read in Berlin, Ent'revues Salon de la Revue in Paris, and Frankfurter Buchmesse.

ARTICLES (SELECTED):

BOOKS AND PUBLICATIONS:

Alt Går Bra will publish the first book dedicated to the Strandamalere, Strandamalerne, Norges mest populære malerier, with the publishing house Museumsforlaget in December 2024. A 300 page volume edited by Alt Går Bra, the book sheds light on the Strandamalere phenomenon and Alt Går Bra's journey of discovery. The publication features newly produced research by scholars, curators, and writers, together with photographs and material from Alt Går Bra's Strandamalere Archive. Book contributors include University of Bergen Tonje Haugland Sørensen and Hans Marius Hansteen, Sorbonne University Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre and Alessandra Ballotti, curators Geir Haraldseth (Nasjonalmuseet the National Museum of Norway) and Frode Sandvik (KODE Bergen Art Museum), art critic Susanne Christensen (Kunstkritikk), fiction writer Sandra Lillebø, Rutgers University Emeritus Professor Charles Russell (re-print of his article "Finding a Place for the Self-Taught in the Art World(s)"), and an introduction and article by Alt Går Bra.

Please visit Museumsforlaget website for a book preview and pre-orders.

All the publications below were conceived, designed, handbound, printed on two-drum Gestetner mimeograph machines, and published by Alt Går Bra Publishing.

Experimental Sound & Video

Acanthus

Alt Går Bra creates experimental videos and sound pieces entangling the analog and the performative with artificial intelligence and digital technologies.

OBJECT VIDEOS

In 2023, we envisioned a dispositif to produce videos performatively without post-production nor editing. These Object Videos result from a combination of analog, performative, and digital procedures, exploring questions of technology.

Below, two of these video pieces from 2024, premiered at our Kunst i dei tusen heimar: Strandamalerne exhibition at Sogn og Fjordane Kunst Museum.

CARMINA FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

In the sound project Carmina for the Anthropocene, we intertwine ecopoetry and myths with generative artificial intelligence through a critical, decentering lens. By juxtaposing these elements, we attempt to dismantle archaic narratives of human mastery, reimagining voices in speculative, post-technological fabulations.

Below, two test pieces from 2024:

ARTIFICIAL ASPEN

We are currently researching and planning a reenactment of the groundbreaking multimedia Aspen Magazine (1965-1971). Exploring technological means from their time, Aspen invited artists and theorists to edit, design, and contribute to their issues, which incorporated a range of media including vinyl records and Super-8mm films. We explore what an Aspen Magazine could be today, after half a century of intense technological developments, including the recent burst of generative artificial intelligence. Our reenacment will keep true to its model, producing the magazine as an actual object, combining analog with digital technologies. We aim to produce our Aspen reenactment in 2025.

Alt Går Bra Lokale

Alt Går Bra Lokale

In September 2019, we moved into Alt Går Bra Lokale, which we officially opened in March 2020.

The space hosts our studio in Bergen, opening onto the street through large windows. At Alt Går Bra Lokale, we have a program of exhibitions, talks, and other events, including Kunst og Kaffe around waffles and coffee.

With the ambition of opening to the community, we conceived Alt Går Bra Lokale in conversation with urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg, known for having coined the concept of “third place.”

Alt Går Bra Lokale is located in the scenic and residential neighborhood of Nordnes, stretching over a small peninsula off central Bergen. This is a 100 sq.m. space with an exhibition room in the front and a flexible area upstairs.

SUPPORT:

We have been running Alt Går Bra Lokale with partial financial support from the Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd (Visual Arts program), Vestland County, and Bergen City Council.

Reviews/Press

Reviews/Press

Our work has been written about primarily in Norwegian newspapers and art publications, and featured on Norwegian national radio and television. An in-depth interview about our mimeograph practice has been published in Perspective, the French National Institute of Art History INHA—conducted by senior researcher Zanna Gilbert from the Getty Research Institute. The Norwegian Arts Council commissioned a sociological study about our dissemination practice engaging new and diverse audiences.

TEXTS/PRESS ABOUT ALT GÅR BRA’S SOLO WORK (SELECTED):

About


Alt Går Bra was founded by Agnes Nedregård and Branko Boero Imwinkelried in 2015. Run by the duo, Alt Går Bra is conceived as an art collective with an infrastructural practice--exploring ways of organizing and working with others while transgressing borders between artist-run and institutional, art production and dissemination, artistic practice and art theory.

With roots in the opposite poles of the earth, South America and Scandinavia, Alt Går Bra interweaves situated latitudes into long-term and process-based projects.

Alt Går Bra has presented its work at over 200 spaces, ranging from small venues and community spaces to large institutions, including the National Museum of Norway Nasjonalmuseet, KODE Bergen Art Museum, Bergen Kunsthall, the University of Westminster, Palais de Tokyo, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Alt Går Bra’s work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the National Museum of Norway Nasjonalmuseet, KODE Bergen Art Museum, Sogn og Fjordane Kunst Museum, KORO Public Art Norway, Trondheim Kommune, Tate Archives and Library, and John Flaxman Library School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Alt Går Bra has received support from funding bodies including the Norwegian Arts Council Kulturråd, KORO Public Art Norway, OCA Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Vestland County, Bergen City Council, Fritt Ord, Billedkunstnernes Hjelpefond, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond, Barents Secretariat, Arts Council England, UK National Heritage Fund, and Pro Helvetia.

The collective is based in Bergen and Paris. You can find us at our gallery and studio space Alt Går Bra Lokale in Bergen at Strandgaten 208 in the neighborhood of Nordnes. You can also make an appointment to visit our atelier in the second arrondissement of Paris.

Online, you can learn more about our work by visiting our Acanthus Project portal akantus.no, viewing photo and video documentation and research on Flickr, watching our videos on Youtube and Vimeo, and reading our texts in Academia. You can get our updates and exchange with us on Instagram, Alt Går Bra Facebook, and Alt Går Bra Lokale Facebook.

E-mail: altgarbra (at) gmail (dot) com

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