Acanthus, 2025

1. VIDEO DOCUMENTATION

Four-channel object video on four walls, looping with 10' pauses, 4'38'', 2025
Interactive sound piece on audio cassette player on plinth to be played by audience during 10' pauses, 1'56'', 2025
Installation for solo exhibition Acanthus Entanglements, Kristiansand Kunsthall, Norway, 2025

Note: you can also play this video as an .mp4 or download it as a .mov.

2. DESCRIPTION

Alt Går Bra produced this installation for their solo exhibition Acanthus Entanglements at Kristiansand Kunsthall, Kristiansand, Norway, January 25th - March 23rd 2025
. The installation and the video/sound work have only been shown at this venue.

TECHNICAL

A four-channel video is projected on the four walls of a room with an audio cassette player on a plinth in the center, next to a bench. The video plays in a loop with a 10-minute pause. During the pause the curious public is invited to play, rewind, and fastforward the audio piece in the cassette player.

The four-channel video is an object video. 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.

The sound for this video was made in collaboration with artificial intelligence.

The audio cassette player in the center of the room plays a song made with AI. The lyrics for this song are the AI prompt used to make the sound for the four-channel video.

This installation can be adapted to suit different spaces and contexts.

CONCEPTUAL

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.

Inspired by the thoughts of Donna Haraway and Jacques Derrida, this installation explores entanglements in the margins through the acanthus plant and its artistic expression as 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.

3. SHORT BIO

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, MAC VAL Contemporary Art Museum, 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.

A recent book surveys the 10-year practice of the collective: Alt Går Bra / Tout Va Bien, An Adage for Contemporary Art (Silvana Editoriale, 2026) edited by Nicolas Surlapierre, Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre, and Alessandra Ballotti, with a preface by Jacques Rancière.

Agnes and Branko live and work between Paris and Bergen (Norway). They do not have a solo practice and all their works are produced under the Alt Går Bra collective. Therefore, they share a unique CV and bio.

4. SELECTED EXHIBITIONS

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For further information, visit Alt Går Bra's website www.altgarbra.org