SPRING EXHIBITION 2016

SPRING EXHIBITION 40 YEARS

Opening and awarding of the BKH (Relief Fund for Visual Artists) Prize for Photographic Art Thursday 12 May 19.00 at Fotogalleriet. The exhibition will be opened by Bård Folke Fredriksen, state secretary in the Ministry of Culture.

The Spring Exhibition was established in 1976, a time when the need to advance the reputation of art photography was great. The exhibition was to take place at the end of spring and had the name Fotografisk Vårutstilling (Spring Photographic Exhibition), as a counter to Høstutstillingen (The Autumn Exhibition), where photographs were listed under “Painting” in the catalog.

The Spring Exhibition has been an important anchoring point for contemporary photography in Norway, and via its status on the cutting edge has contributed to the advancement of art photography in the Norwegian cultural debate. Today the Spring Exhibition presents Norwegian camera-based art to a broad audience. The jury selects participating artists via an open application process. The jury is chosen by the members of FFF (the Norwegian Association of Fine Art Photographers) at a general meeting. For 2016 the jury is as follows: Vibeke Tandberg (head of the jury), Mattias Josefsson and Kaia Hugin in collaboration with Stephanie von Spreter (artistic director, Fotogalleriet).

In this year that it turns 40 the Spring Exhibition is finally assured economic stability through a fixed annual grant from Kulturrådet (Arts Council Norway). After having run the exhibition on minimal resources and to a great degree a communal volunteer spirit, FFF can finally plan within secure frameworks and prioritize sufficient compensation for its own group of artists. FFF is celebrating the exhibition’s 40-year anniversary by launching the Spring Exhibition’s new logo and visual profile, along with a more extensive exhibition catalog.

In connection with the anniversary, we will also launch MUTATOR (@Mutatorfff), a single-issue magazine that will exist solely on instagram. Over a one-month period contributions by invited artists and writers will be published, including Anna-Sophie Berger (AT), Joshua Citarella (US), Casey Jane Ellison (US), Eva Klerck Gange (NO), Kamilla Langeland (NO), Gean Moreno (US), Jacob Riddle (US), Henrik Pask (NO) and Edward Shenk (US). The publication is created by Agatha Wara in collaboration with Bjørnar Pedersen.

Spring Exhibition 2016 will be opened by Bård Folke Fredriksen Thursday 12 May at 7:00 p.m. at Fotogalleriet. During the opening the annual Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond’s (Relief Fund for Visual Artists’) Prize for Photographic Art will be awarded to the artist participating in the Spring Exhibition whose work is regarded as most meaningful. The Prize for Photographic Art, established in 2010, carries an award of NOK 150,000 and is thus one of the largest art prizes awarded in Norway.

The Spring Exhibition 2016 is generously supported by: Kulturrådet (Arts Council Norway), Norsk Fotografisk Fond (Norwegian Photographic Fund), Fritt Ord (Fritt Ord Foundation), and Bildende Kunstneres Hjelpefond (Relief Fund for Visual Artists).

Katharina Barbosa Blad (b. 1962, CO) lives and works in Oslo. After several years as a theatrical costume designer she has moved toward photography and visual art in recent years and completed studies at Oslo Fotokunstskole (Oslo School for Art Photography) in 2008. She now works with installation, objects, sound, photography, and video between two extremes: on the one hand with emphasis on conceptual intellectual practice, and on the other with an approach that is more feminist, political, and impressionistic — something she thinks of as a result of her being half Belgian, half Colombian.

Grethe Irene Einarsen (b. 1972, NO) lives and works in Narvik, Norway. She has a master’s-level degree in photography from Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen (the Bergen Academy of Art and Design), and does photography-based work with images and installations. Her works typically involve territory on the border between documentary and staged photography. The northern Norwegian landscape often forms a backdrop in her images, and human alienation and marginalization are steadily recurring themes. Einarsen is concerned with the complexity of the individual person, and lets the banal and the mundane go hand in hand with universal existential questions.

Katinka Goldberg (b. 1981, SE) lives and works in Oslo. She has been educated in Sweden and France and has a BFA in photography from the art academy in Edinburgh. Her ongoing project Bristningar is the second part of a trilogy that thematically concerns relationships, intimacy, and distance. Via her collages of distorted bodies jammed together and elements of three-dimensional objects, Goldberg explores not only interpersonal relationships but also connections within and between forms of visual expression.

Marie Helgesen (b.1984, NO) lives and works in Oslo. She graduated in 2015 with an MFA from Akademin Valand (Valand Academy), formerly Högskolan för Fotografi, in Gothenburg, Sweden. Helgesen works with analog processes and emphasizes that their physicality and the photographic paper themselves play an equally large role as the photograph itself. Her work is process-driven. Helgesen uses text and sound as documentations, often as a central part of the work.

Kamilla Langeland (b. 1989, NO) lives and works in Oslo and Bergen. She has a BFA from Kunstakademiet i Oslo (Oslo National Academy of the Arts) and is now a student in the master’s program at Kunstakademiet i Bergen (the Bergen Academy of Art and Design). Langeland works in the field of photography, where analog processes and experimentation in the darkroom play an important role. She produces large-format silver gelatin prints—photographic collages in which she combines snapshots, 4×5 negatives, microscopic images, and photograms.

Madelen Isa Lindgren (b. 1990, NO) lives and works in Oslo, where she is a first-year student at Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo (Oslo National Academy of the Arts). Lindgren employs narrative text in differing media and uses research as the basis of her works. By investigating themes such as sociology, identity, and memory she looks for new ways of starting conversations. She hopes to create a setting for dialog where she can experiment with various contemporary values and forms.