On May 12, 2016, the graduating students from Kunstskolen i Rogaland opened their final exhibition. Titled Brutal Taco, the show includes 16 artists and is on view at the Ølhallene at Tou Scene through June 3. Broad in scope and ambitious in scale, the student artwork presented here invites closer inspection on the individual practices of each of the emerging artists. Below is a photo tour of the illustrating the unique and varied artworks included in the exhibition.
Brutal Taco is curated and supervised by Crispin Gurholt, and includes artists Benjamin Drews, Natalie Seifert Eliassen, Benjamin Thomas Harbakk, Tilda Lene Bratsberg, Irene Gellein, Hèlene V. Grimstad Larsen, Vibeke Andersen, Tuva O. Pedersen, Håvard Sagen, Vilde Hage Aune, Andrea Sødal Aasmoe, Millard Paulsé, Cinthiya Elanzen, Kari Ann Lending, Kristin Nordås Skårdal, and Guro Rex.
Brutal Taco is on view at Tou Scene through June 3, 2016. For opening hours, visit Tou Scene’s website, here.
Martha Cooper is best known for vigilantly documenting the New York graffiti scene. In between her daily assignments for the New York Post from 1977 to 1980, Martha Cooper began to photograph kids playing around in different neighbourhoods. This interest in children’s creative play without supervision by adults led her to document graffiti and eventually hip-hop culture.
The now ubiquitous Stavanger-based street art initiative Nuart, in partnership with Stavanger Aftenbladet, has recently branched out to include yet another platform for public art: a large-scale billboard located in the heart of Stavanger that presents a rotation of short-term installations by commissioned local and international artists. Jordan Seiler is a New York-based artist and activist working with issues of advertising and collective agency in public space, and the second artist invited to present work on the Aftenbladet Billboard. Since the early 2000s, Seiler has coopted billboards and advertising spaces to display his own work, and has notoriously orchestrated large-scale 'takeovers' to draw attention to the overwhelming amount of advertising in public space as well as bring into question the ownership of that space. I conversed with Seiler in the Nuart headquarters late Friday night, amid a flurry of activity: stacking cans of spray paint, brewing coffee, and discussions about the choice of wall for another artist to paint. The basic philosophy behind Nuart, I was told by the organization's founder and directory Martyn Reed, is to "simply take art out of museums and institutions and put it in front of people using a language that people understand – an art billboard to me is an obvious way of doing that. In the context of Nuart, it means people will stand and look at it and try and understand it in a way that they wouldn't with a normal billboard. But its a really basic ideology. A billboard seems to be a really logical next step."
Earlier this autumn, Coast Contemporary welcomed national and international art practitioners to the 8th edition of the nomadic platform for art, meetings, food and discourse which annually travels around the Norwegian coast. Coast Contemporary partnered with Independent Curators International (ICI) to invite curators from ICI's network to participate in the week-long program of performances, presentations, studio visits, and events together with other artists, researchers and cultural workers – this year's meeting highlighted the work of Stavanger-based artists Hans Edward Hammonds and Helle Mellemstrand, among many others. Curator and researcher Viviana Checchia was among the ICI researchers chosen to participate, and in the below text she summarizes and reflects on her time there.