“Perhaps at stake has always been the murderous capacity of images: murderers of the real; murderers of their own model as the Byzantine icons could murder the divine identity. To this murderous capacity is opposed the dialectical capacity of representations as a visible and intelligible mediation of the real. All of faith was engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could exchange for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange. God, of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say, reduced to the signs which attest his existence? Then the whole system becomes weightless; not unreal, but a simulacrum, never again exchanging for what is real, but exchanging in itself, in an uninterrupted circuit, without reference or circumference.”(1)
Maria Brinch graduated from Oslo Art Academy and the School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work has previously been shown at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo; UKS, Oslo; Entrée, Bergen, and Uganda National Museum, Kampala among many other places. Eirik Bruvik is a weaver who studied at the Norwegian National Academy from 1973-76. He has had exhibitions at Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum and Lillehammer kunstmuseum, and his work is in the collection of the Norwegian National Gallery. Chloe Elgie is an artist from Canada who graduated from the KHiO MFA programme in 2022 and recently exhibited at Centralbanken, Oslo. Kjersti Johannessen graduated as a glass blower from the Royal Danish Academy in Bornholm and her work is in the collection of the Norwegian National Museum of Decorative Arts, Oslo, among others. Jim Lambie graduated from Glasgow School of Art and has exhibited widely in Europe and the USA. His work is represented in the collection of MOMA, New York and GOMA, Glasgow, among others. Camille Norment is an artist and musician based in Oslo. She graduated from New York University and the University of Michigan; in 2015 she represented Norway at the Venice Biennale. Runa Sandnes studied in Oslo and at Camberwell College in London. She works with sculpture and installation and recently participated in both the Norwegian Sculpture Triennial (2021) and the Oslo Architecture Triennial (2022). Rasmus Stride is an artist and designer working at the intersection of digital media and physical production. He studied at Prosjektskolen, Oslo and the Kaospilot school, Aarhus, and recently presented the solo project Memories of a Memory (2022) at the ‘verse Gallery, Oslo.
(1) from Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman, Semiotext(e) 1983.
