Turbulens at Norske Grafikere

I am participating in the group exhibition Turbulens at Norske Grafikere, which opens 4 April at 18:00 at Tollbugata 24 in Oslo. The exhibition is on display until 11 May.

Turbulens brings together older and younger Norway-based printmakers, juxtaposing prints from the ‘60s and ‘70s with newer contemporary works. The exhibition seeks to trace printmaking’s role as a political tool - whether it is through explicit political symbolism or through more subtle and ambiguous means. Turbulens explores and questions the power of the printed medium, and what is required to make a visual impact today’s hypervisual reality. How may an image find value beyond its immediate context?

Participating artists (in alphabetical order): Cathrine Alice Liberg, Jessica Williams, Kamil Kak, Karin Augusta Nogva, Kiyoshi Yamamoto, Lars Sandås, Marte Lill Somby, Morten Krohg, Sonja Krohn, Victor Lind and Willi Storn.

Curated by: Kristin Mandt Heim, Benedicte Macé Stensrud, Stephanie Serrano Sundby and Silje Johannessen.

The exhibition is supported by Kulturrådet and Fritt Ord.

Victor Lind – Landskap (2022) and Sonja Krohn - Gaza Madonna.

ARTICA Svalbard Residency | Week 2

Easter is upon us, and while Svalbard is currently entering another cold spell (it is effectively below -30°C here), it has also offered up beautiful misty icy-covered fjords and sunshine pouring into the print studio.

Trial and error

After spending much of last week in the print studio conducting boring, but necessary aquatint step etching tests, I finally managed to produce some good printing results. Every workshop has a slightly different setup, and variations in climate, acid strengths, printing felts, papers etc. means that I cannot always operate with the same measurements, ratios and times that would render me pristine prints at home. I was getting some rather disheartening results at first - however, I managed to identify the problems after a lot of trial and error, trying to eliminate whether my issues were related to my aquatinting, etching or printing processes. Having finally cracked the code, I am excited to embark on the fun stuff next week (i.e. actually producing art). I have also spent a lot of time rocking mezzotint plates, grounding up the copper surface so that I can scrape and polish down images. All the while consuming copious amounts of audiobooks.

Gruve 3 (mine 3)

In between studio hours I have been conducting quite a bit of research on Svalbard, and to kick off Easter week I went on a guided tour around Gruve 3 (Mine 3), which is located just north of Longyearbyen. Longyearbyen, and modern human presence at Svalbard, owes its existence to the local coal mining industry. Longyearbyen (Longyear City) was named after American businessman John Munro Longyear, who started the Arctic Coal Company here in 1906. The Norwegian Store Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK) took over in 1916, and is still responsible for operating the last open mine, Gruve 7. As mentioned in my previous post, Gruve 7 will be closing next year, and thus ending an era of Svalbard history.

Before entering the mines, we were equipped with authentic coveralls and helmets with a headlight. Before the tour, we also watched a short film shot in Gruve 3 by NRK in 1985, which gave a good sense of the working conditions of the miners. The tour exceeded all expectations - the history of Svalbard’s coal industry proved incredibly interesting, and the tour guide was very engaging. I never thought I would enjoy touring dark dusty tunnels as much as I did.

What heightened the experience of Gruve 3 was how it had become a slightly eerie, but well preserved time capsule. In the middle of their shift on 1 November 1996, the miners were told to pack up, as they were being moved to work in another local mine. Everything sits exactly as they left it that day - the cheese stored in the underground pantry, the magazines in the mining carts and the pin-up ladies on the walls. (As you can imagine, this was a very male-dominated workplace, although women did find their way into the mines eventually).

Arctic World Archive (AWA)

Not just being an accidental time capsule of the 90s, Gruve 3 has also become the host of The Arctic World Archive (AWA). Cutting deep into the permafrost like its neighboring Global Seed Vault, AWA opened in 2017 as a space to store our world heritage. SNSK is responsible for the operation and maintenance of the vault, including security and access control. On their website, AWA is described as a “secure underground and unhackable data vault at the centre of the permafrost, 300 metres inside the mine and 300 metres below the top of the mountain”. Digital files are stored in a piqlFilm, which is a “migration free, future proof and passive storage technology with a very low CO2 footprint that is extremely cost efficient and sustainable over time. The technology needs no servers, no migration, no electricity to keep the data alive for centuries.” Like the Global Seed Vault protects our future food supply and gene banks, AWA safeguards our digital and cultural legacy. Once again, past and future connects at Svalbard - both physically and metaphorically.

Migrant Ecologies Project

What does Svalbard and Singapore have in common? Ever since getting this residency, I have been asking myself that very question. How can I interpret my new surroundings through the lense of my Norwegian-Singaporean heritage and artistic research on diasporic memory? How can I create a bridge between a tropical island near the equator and an icy archipelago above the arctic circle?

Turns out, there is very special grain of wheat which lies buried behind this door inside Gruve 3:

Text taken from https://migrantecologies.org/Natural-Histories-Seeding-Stories:

On 10 June 2019, a single grain of wheat from the interior of a 133-year-dead, 4.7 metres long, saltwater crocodile shot in 1887 at the mouth of the no-longer-existing Serangoon River in Singapore and kept for over a century in the Raffles Museum, migrated to the Arctic circle. Migrant Ecologies Project artist Zachary Chan was flown to Svalbard with this very special grain of wheat and a series of other artistic offerings from the Migrant Ecologies Project for a ceremony, in which the works were offered to the mountain and placed to rest in Gruve/Mine 3, next to the Svalbard Global Seed Bank.

Our proposal consisted of regarding this 133-year-dead, saltwater crocodile as a comparative seed bank to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. But equally important for us has been the discovery of what has become a feral diversity of sources all claiming in different ways that this very crocodile is believed to host the spirit of Panglima (Warrior) Ah Chong, 19th century gangster, Taoist mystic, and anti-colonial freedom fighter.

How might such disparate beings as a wheat grain, a crocodile, and a spirit being, all entangled in the legacies of colonial agro-economies and monstrous dreams of progress, speak to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a time of mass extinction and climate change?

Singapore and Svalbard are two islands situated in radically different parts of the globe.

There was, as we know, a violent scramble for natural resources by colonial powers from which Singapore emerged as entrepôt trading post in the 19th and 20th century. And the emergence and increase in attacks by saltwater crocodiles throughout our region can be seen as an ongoing result of the devastating impact of colonial and postcolonial capital on coastal ecosystems.

There is also a potential equivalent scramble for the Arctic commencing right now as China, Russia and America all compete for the precious minerals and sea routes that are being uncovered as the ice melts. Incursions by polar bears into the town of Longyearbyen are also on the rise.

Might Svalbard become the Singapore of the 21st century? And if so, what kind of worlds might this new entrepôt inherit?

Lots of food for thought.

ARTICA Svalbard Residency | Week 1

I have now spent a week in Longyearbyen, and am happily settling in at ARTICA and acquainting myself with my immediate surroundings. (As polar bears roam these islands, I am not allowed to leave the settlements without an armed guide). Everyone has been so welcoming and friendly, and it has been great being introduced to fellow residents and creatives during my first few days here. I honestly feel as if I have been here for a month already.

delving into the svalbard archives

This week, thanks to the help of residence coordinator Lisa, my fellow resident Ellen and I got to visit the archives of Svalbard Museum together with Head of Collections Ann Kristin Klausen and conservator Unn Gelting. They graciously lead us behind the scenes to share with us the many fascinating objects in their magazines, as well as telling us about their ongoing conservation work. With the permafrost rapidly thawing, a lot of graves of early 17th-18th century Dutch whale hunters are being exposed or are in danger of being washed out to sea. Several well preserved textiles and clothing items have thus been excavated from the ice, as well as items from early fur trappers’ huts. (That being said, objects from more recent excavations have deteriorated a lot more due to melting ice).

As a printmaker, I was also very interested in looking at early maps of Svalbard and early depictions of the Arctic by the first explorers. The oldest and most famous map is the Barentsz Map from 1598. It is on display in the museum’s permanent collection, and shows the first ever depiction of Svalbard, here simply indicated as "Het Nieuwe Land" (Dutch for "the New Land"). The museum archive also holds a vast collection of Svalbard watercolours from the 1930s by Austrian traveller Christiane Ritter.

coal mines and the global seed vault

It is impossible to come to Svalbard and not feel that it is going to influence you in some ways. I came here as an artist with my own artistic concepts and plans in mind, but from the first day I realised that I cannot escape incorporating Svalbard into my work in one way or another. This place possesses too much of a strong mental and physical presence for it to be avoidable. How can I tie my stories to those of Svalbard, and how might this be manifested in the artworks I produce here?

Naturally, many artists are drawn to the nature, and many also touch directly upon themes relating to climate change and its consequences. In my own work, I muse on topics surrounding family histories, diaspora and nostalgia - nostalgia for pasts we never experienced, and nostalgia for futures that never even manifested themselves. What immediately struck me about this place is that it seems to operate with a different sense of time. It is a place where past and future are constantly juggled, and they loom over the present like ghosts. Longyearbyen was built in 1906 as a consequence of the rising coal mining industry, and remnants of this past can still be found all around, like an alternative steam punk reality. However, this link to the past is a chapter about to be closed when the last mine (Gruve 7) shuts down next year. The coal reserves are being exhausted, the remaining coal is of a lesser quality, and the industry no longer aligns with contemporary visions of a greener future.

In the place of coal miners now flock scientists and researchers from all over the world, deeply concerned with how the Arctic is losing its memory, and vigorously collecting ice samples and geological specimens in a desperate measure to counteract the collective loss we are facing with the melting landscape. No place on earth are the consequences of climate change felt more strongly than here, and in a way this place is the very symbol of a dying future. Simultaneously, and ironically, Svalbard has become the place in which humanity shall depend for its survival. The Global Seed Vault outside Longyearbyen cuts 130 meters into the permafrost, and serves as a back up for 1.3 million of the worlds seeds - providing security for the world’s future food supply and gene banks from natural disasters, climate change, disease and wars. Fittingly nicknamed “The Doomsday Vault”, it is both a beautiful and terrifying concept.

Talking to people who live or have lived in Svalbard, this archipelago does not really have a shared collective history of a people who has witnessed it for generations. The Svalbard community is diasporic in many ways - people from all over the world only live here for a certain amount of time before they have to leave. You cannot be born here. You cannot die and be buried here. Scattered around the globe, the people who have lived in Svalbard are tied together by their memories and experiences of the place. However, everyone’s idea of it is set in a certain time. I see some clear parallels to the Chinese diaspora which I am familiar with in my own Chinese-Singaporean family - everyone’s idea of Singapore is stuck in the time in which it was left. And we, the ancestors, are somehow carrying the mythological idea of the “homeland” with us, even though we never experienced it ourselves. At the same time, we keep wondering what an alternative future would have been like - a future in which the homeland had never been left. Svalbard seems to me the place where futures come to live and die. Nostalgia for the past and future feel almost stronger than the present. I am hoping this might prove an interesting link and entryway for me to explore over the next three months.

ARTICA Svalbard Artist in Residence 2024

I am so honoured and excited to be welcomed as one of this year’s Artists in Residence at ARTICA Svalbard. Thank you to QSPA for nominating me and for granting me with the incredible opportunity to work in one of the world’s northernmost print studios. My residency will last for 3 months, from 17th March to 15th June.

"Familiealbum" at Arkivet, Tou trykk (Stavanger)

Åpningstider:

Torsdag 7.3: 18:00-19:30 (vernissasje)
Fredag 8.3: 13.00 – 15.00 (presentasjon kl 14.00)
Lørdag 9.3: 13.00 – 16.00
Søndag 10.3: 13.00 – 16.00
Torsdag 4.4: 17.00 – 19.00
Torsdag 2.5: 17:00 – 19.00
Fredag 31.5: 13.00 – 17.00
Lørdag 1.6: 13.00 – 17.00
Søndag 2.6: 13.00 – 17.00

Ellers åpent når verkstedet er betjent mandager og tirsdager (10.00 – 15.00) og etter avtale. Flere åpningstider annonseres fortløpende på SoMe.

Gjennom en variert bruk av grafiske teknikker, utforsker Liberg det klassiske familieportrettet, og tar hovedsakelig utgangspunkt i eget fotoarkiv.

Liberg kommer fra en norsk og kinesisk-singaporsk familie, der flere familiebilder på både mor- og farssiden har forsvunnet med årene gjennom krig og migrasjon. I tillegg klippet hennes kinesiske bestemor sin avdøde mann ut av bryllupsbildet, i påstanden om at det skapte dårlig feng shui og ulykke å ha bilder av de døde stående fremme.

Selv har kunstneren sørget over tapet av disse fotografiene og historiene. I et forsøk på å gjenerobre noe av fortiden, har Liberg blant annet konstruert fiksjonelle portretter av sine kinesiske og filippinske oldemødre - vel vitende at hun er en upålitelig historieforteller. I flere av sine portretter har hun kun latt silhuettene av slektningene stå igjen, der de opptrer i form av noe uhåndgripelig – som saltstøtter som går i oppløsning, kropper som forråtner eller som flyktige gjenferd uten fysisk substans.

Ved å konstruere og dekonstruere familieportretter, utforsker Liberg hvordan private bilder kan gjengi fragmenter av større menneskelige historier. De portretterte familiemedlemmene representerer ikke lenger kun seg selv, men en kollektiv glemsel av mennesker, tider og kulturer. De står igjen som et kompromiss mellom fravær og tilstedeværelse, og mellom glemsel og vårt behov for å huske og bevare. Menneskene avbildet er døende – både fysisk og i vårt minne, men de forsøker hele tiden å motvirke sin egen utslettelse.

Cathrine Alice Liberg (f. 1988) er en norsk-singaporsk kunstner som bor og jobber i Oslo. Hun tok sin mastergrad i Medium- og materialbasert kunst ved Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo i 2019. Samme år mottok hun den høythengende Norske Grafikeres Grafikkpris. Liberg har siden vært representert på en rekke utstillinger i inn-og utland.

I sin første utstilling i Stavanger viser Liberg eldre og nyere portretter laget i litografi og fotogravyr. Fire av de litografiske verkene som er utstilt ble laget under kunstnerens arbeidsopphold ved Tou Trykk i januar i år.