Arkiv - Arne Vinnem
Arne Vinnem
Life Never Works In Retrospect
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06.11.2009 - 06.12.2009 // Opening Friday: 06.11.2009 // 19.00
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Oops!… I Made You Believe, videostill.
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Arne Vinnem’s exhibition Life Never Works In Retrospect consists of a series of works revolving round the themes romanticism, death, identity and mythologization. Vinnem activates references from a variety of cultural spheres by re-using fragments from popular culture, literary characters, rock-icons and the well known Norwegian actress Eva von Hanno. The works in the exhibition use a diverse visual rhetoric that refers to a seamless modernistic exhibition history that in Vinnems version frames a more unruly and dirty version of a western cultural canon. The exhibition reveals the materiality of the arts, and that all the cultural myths we are surrounded by mirror the darker sides of the human condition, as well as the pleasant ones. There is a profound solemnity, but also a equally profound humoristic impulse at the heart of Arne Vinnems work.
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The title of the monumental video Oops!… I made you believe is a collage of two lines from Britney Spears’ megahit from 2000. I the video we meet three different characters in their own intimate sphere. Each of the characters acts out private, intimate actions that can also be representations of staged stereotypes: the teenage girl, the young man and the old woman.
The sculpture ”- Do you think you’ll go to hell? – Yes, I certainly fucking hope so!” is a humoristic joke aimed at the Norwegian Black-metal scene. Two heavy metal-wigs mounted on pedestals are leaning against each other as if engaged in conversation.
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In the photo series ”Folded Note To Self I-III”, three personas from our reservoir of cultural myths emerge. The series depicts three pieces of paper onto which names of well known mythical characters are written are written. The notes are discarded fragments of mythologies referred to the dark corners of what can be an artist’s studio or a squalid apartment.
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The mural ”Untitled” is a reproduction of a small drawing Vinnem made this fall depicting the last execution site used in Bergen after WWII in 1945. The exact location of the execution has not been publically known, only a few remaining people still know where the actual site is.
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Arne Vinnem is educated at the Art Academy of Bergen, and is currently based in Oslo. He has participated in several exhibitions in Norway and abroad. Life Never Works In Retrospect is his first solo exhibition. For more info about the artist, see: http://www.arnevinnem.com
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