Three-channel video on a column and three paintings; four-channel sound from speakers installed inside four pianos 9'30'', 2025
Installation for solo exhibition Acanthus Entanglements, Kristiansand Kunsthall, Norway, 2025
Based on a text by Alt Går Bra for Billedkunst
Note: you can also play this video as an .mp4 or download it as a .mov.
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.
The three-channel video plays from three different video projectors, each installed on top of a piano. One of the projectors projects a video on a column, the other two on three paintings.
The four-channel sound plays from four speakers, each installed inside four different pianos, playing an anachronistic mix of technologies, including sounds generated using musique concrète methods, found sounds, and artificial intelligence.
This installation can be adapted to suit different spaces and contexts.
This work departs from an article we wrote for the visual arts magazine Billedkunst, resulting in a sort of hybrid between an installation and a short experimental opera.
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 and parallels between the acanthus plant and artists.
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.
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.
For further information, visit Alt Går Bra's website www.altgarbra.org