Damsgård

Opening: 20th August, 2011
Kabuso, Øystese, Norway

Following a traveling residency with Hordaland Art Centre and as part of our Outside-programme, Øyvind Renberg and Miho Shimizu’s new piece Damsgård will be on display at Kabuso in Øystese from August 20th to September 20th.

Damsgård takes its starting point in the Japanese pictorial scroll, and explores the gaps between documentation and fiction. The production follows travels on the west coast of Norway, spanning from natural sanctuaries, to museums and old mansions in Hardanger, Voss and Bergen. The journey can be seen as a way to check up on Norwegian heritage, revisiting landscapes and sites of national identity, and to further relief this against a hybridised, contemporary culture. The panorama, widely applied in Renberg and Shimizu’s works, reflects their interests in editing and narrative: creating a window between tactile and pictorial worlds. The scroll stretches the panoramic format to become a visual field of travel.

Studies from the production were presented in 2010 in the exhibition Upstream at Hordaland Art Centre. At Kabuso the artists present the first in a set of a series planned pictorial scrolls. This initial scroll is designed as a silk-screened wallpaper with repetitive, floral pattern developed from drawings from the garden of the 18th century Damsgård Manor in Bergen.

Miniature Greek columns that form the structural components for the scroll have been produced in collaboration with the ceramic department of the Bergen National Academy of the Arts. A decorated box has been custom made by Buchbinder Klünder in Berlin.

The project has been supported by Statens utstillingsstipend, Vederlagsfondet and Arts Council Norway. The artists would like to thank assistants Ingeborg Blom Andersskog, Martin Woll Godal, and Anne Helen Mydland for facilitating the production, at Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Hordaland Art Centre would like to thank Kabuso for their hospitality towards the project.

————
Miho Shimizu and Øyvind Renberg (born in Tokyo and Oslo in 1976) graduated from Goldsmiths College, London in 2000 respectively 2001. Their collaborative work is inspired from travels, and explores cultural translations and discrepancies. Works have developed in response to museum collections, the art institution, and more loosely defined social scenes. Their practice embraces collages, tableaux, and furniture, as well as music releases and design pieces. From 2001 to 2009 they worked under the collective name Danger Museum. Shimizu and Renberg have exhibited at inIVA (London), Sparwasser HQ (Berlin), Art Space Hue (Seoul), Art in General (New York), Galeria Arsenal (Bialystok), and Preus Museum, Oslo Kunstforening, Stenersen Museum and UKS (Norway). Residencies include Ssamziespace (Seoul) and Peacock Visual Arts (Aberdeen).