OSLO.- Fotogalleriet iannounces the largest solo presentation to date of Norwegian artist Petrine Vinje. Altering Fotogalleriet’s exhibition space into a sensorial installation, the project Depot. Depository. Rays aims at challenging traditional views on gender roles, while addressing historical paradigmatic shifts connected to personal collapse.
Through a number of projects, Vinje has explored the exercise of power within the aesthetic realm. Depot. Depository. Rays will tell the story of her encounter with the Czech photographer František Drtíkol (1883-1961), an artist internationally celebrated as a master of Modernism, and widely known for his studio work on portraits and nudes. Drtíkol had close contact with the European avant-gardes during the interwar years and held a close dialogue with the Austrian philosopher and pedagogue Rudolf Steiner. Drtíkol explored geometrical and organic forms at the interplay of light and shadow using objects and lighting to stage models, and to shape bodies into forms.
By looking at Drtíkol, Vinje’s work raises questions on how representations of historical views are still relevant today. Vinje thereby asks if we can remake a historical situation, to deconstruct a gaze that has institutionally been imposed upon us. Her exhibition points towards alterations from an external to an internal perspective, where the possibility to withdraw and dedicate ones’ life to an idea comes as a natural response to crisis and disorder within a society. When artists and intellectuals are supposed to provide strategies of survival they also take on a position with an awareness of possible failure, the outermost consequence leading to a personal collapse.
Petrine Vinje was recently awarded a three-year Artistic Research Fellowship at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO).
She holds an MA from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) and has participated in a number of group exhibitions both locally and internationally. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions in Norway at Tegnerforbundet (2017), Kunstnerforbundet (2009), Akershus Kunstsenter (2011) and SOFT galleri (2012).
Vinje conducted the interdisciplinary project AGLA HAGLA – examining the National Runic Archive's content and sources – under the Arts Council Norway’s initiative What is the Archive?, which resulted in a publication and exhibition at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo during the autumn of 2014, as well as in associate programmes such as the international conference The Power of Motifs, held at the University of Oslo during the autumn of 2017. In 2015-16, Vinje was also the recipient of a yearlong artist-in-residency at the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia in Bamberg, Germany, through a grant from the Bayerisches Staatsministerium für Wissenschaft und Kunst.
