MOSS.- As part of MOMENTUM 11 - House of Commons, Marianne Heske will present the installation, House of Commons, in the Cylinder Pavilion. The Norwegian artist responded to a call for projects to be presented in the Pavilion, one of three temporary installations designed by the Mexico-based architecture practice, S-AR for the biennale.

Marianne Heske says: “The opportunity to present photo documentation in the Cylinder Pavilion of the process of moving the house from the rural countryside to the centre of Oslo in front of the Parliament building opens an opportunity for me to talk about my project, House of Commons, in another context, a Norwegian one."

The presentation of House of Commons in the Cylinder Pavilion relates to an earlier eponymous work by Heske. In 2014, the artist came across a small red house beside the road in the municipality of Hobøl, a rural part of Norway, close to Moss. Although no one had lived in the house since 1964, its interior was evocatively marked with the signs of its previous inhabitants: worn floorboards, torn curtains, peeling paint. When she investigated further, she discovered the house had been built in the same year as Stortingsbygningen, the Storting Building, which is the seat of the Storting, the house of parliament of Norway.




In 2015, in an intervention titled House of Commons, Heske (dis)placed this house to situate it directly in front of the Stortingsbygningen, creating a dialogue between the ordinary citizens who once occupied the house and those who occupy a central position in Norway’s seat of power. House of Commons invited passersby to consider the impact of social and cultural differences that exist within a democratic political system.

“We were delighted when Marianne Heske approached the MOMENTUM team to present her work in the Cylinder Pavilion,” says Dag Aak Sveinar, director of MOMENTUM and Galleri F 15. “Her installation not only resonates with the biennale’s theme, House of Commons, it also encourages alternative ways of thinking about art, history and political power within a Norwegian context.”

S-AR’s Cylinder Pavilion is located in front of Galleri F 15 and will host local projects, mediation, outreach and education activities over the course of the biennale. The first installation to activate the Pavilion was the exhibition, Peter Pan, which was prepared by participants from the Blikkåpner (“Eyeopener”) programme. Blikkåpner are young people from Moss and its surrounding municipalities who work with Galleri F 15 to convey and communicate its projects to their own age group and a more general audience.

Marianne Heske (b. Ålesund, 1946) lives and works in Oslo. A conceptual artist, she is considered a pioneer of video art in Norway, best known for her video paintings and installations that explore the interaction between humanity and nature. Notable works include Project Gjerdeløa (1980–1981/2011), which involved the relocation of a 250-year-old barn from Tafjord to Centre George Pompidou, and is one of the first conceptual artworks in Norway; Istårn (Ice Towers,1992), which was created for the 1994 Winter Olympics, and House of Commons (2015), which was initially installed outside of the Houses of Parliament in Oslo. Her work is included in numerous international art institutions, including the National Gallery of Norway and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, both in Oslo, Bonnefanten in Maastricht, Netherlands, Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul, Korea. Henske studied at Bergen National Academy of the Arts (1967–71), École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (1971–75), Royal College of Art in London (1975–76), and Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1976–79).

S-AR is an award-winning architectural design studio based in Monterrey and Mexico City, Mexico. Founded in 2006, it is led by César Guerrero and Ana Cecilia Garza. The studio’s practice is defined by an attempt to value the natural resources of a place as opposed to dominating or destroying them. Its designs are informed by a consideration of the best use of resources, not only those that have an energetic impact on a project, but also the cultural, climatic and human implications, which can have an intrinsic impact.