21st February
Skur 6 Stavanger

The concept for The Port Authority Show was lifted from an exhibition that took place in New York’s Times Square many years before Halvorsen was born, but which still has an appeal from today’s perspective. The Times Square show was organized in the summer of 1980 by the artist collective Colab and featured over 100 artists. The exhibition took place in an old massage parlor in the then seedy and dangerous mid-town neighborhood, home to sex clubs, cinemas and some of the city’s highest crime rates. Colab invited artists to respond to Times Square and divided the space into sections with alluring titles such as Money, love and death, Open air fashion lounge and Portrait Gallery. Among the artists that took part in the exhibition were Keith Haring, Kiki Smith, Jack Smith, Nan Goldin, Jean Michel Basquiat, Jenny Holzer, Charlie Ahearn, and Tom Otterness.

In this new iteration, Halvorsen kept some of the sections as a starting point and invited a group of artists, musicians, performers, designers and others to take part in the project which lasted for one hot night on 21st February, 2014. The end result was a chaotic and eclectic mix, unlike other gallery exhibitions and when I arrived after midnight, the exhibition was amok with dancing and partying, not unlike what I imagine took place in NYC over thirty years ago.

The participating artists in The Port Authority Show include Annette Gellein, Anastasia Serd, Christine Arctander, Espen Pedersen, Frode Schjelderup, Gjøa D. Orheim, Henriette Prytz, Irene Gellein, Inge Weatherhead Breistein, Kritine Sikveland, Mervin Will, Mateusz Wiewiorowski, Mia Hellemo, Nina Ghafari, Lene Aareskjold, Paulina Mar, Simon Serigstad, Simon Løken, Steven Hay Djup, Thomas Hay Djup, Trond Kallevåg Hansen, and Wan Ho.