www.700.is Experimental Art festival with focus on Video, Sound and Experimental films.

Atopia is an artist initiative dedicated to the development of experimental film & video art in Norway. It is a research center and a Gallery focusing on artists film and video works

Text by Atopia.no

“In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Susan Sontag’s most challenging slogan is the ending note of her ten commandments: Against Interpretation.

On this note Atopia wishes to invite you to an exhibition of video installations by three Oslo based artists whose works indicate intense engagement and exploration of various aspects of the moving image.

The exhibition and its treatment of art works aim at highlighting “erotics of art” and pick up where Sontag left behind 50 years ago. In other words to rescue art from the grip of interpretation, or at least make an attempt.

We live at a time when art works are aggressively instrumentalised in every possible direction and they are commodified in every imaginable position. It has become more than a challenge to speak against interpretation. What we call art today is buried under tones of linguistic debris and commercial interests.

But the irony of the situation is that we are all involved in this process; all of us admirers who speak on behalf of art. Whether it is a philosopher, an art critic, an art historian or someone from another interpretive discipline does not matter. All contribute as much as they can to increase the heavy load of interpretation.

And we often forget to ask whose challenge is this to set up a barrier to slow down or counter this flow? Who is going to take the risk of speaking against interpretation today? Is this the task of art institutions, the museums and commercial galleries and such? Is it the job of another philosopher? Or is this the responsibility of the independent artist and artist initiatives? The answer is clear. But they say our wings are clipped away!

The works in this exhibition belong to a group of artists who have been working primarily with the moving image for more than a decade. Departing from the everyday images their works are highly manipulated and transformed into abstractions that defy interpretations.

These are three of Oslo’s most resilient artists, highly specialized in moulding their own images of duration.