An exciting exhibition titled " Gjenfortryllet" (Re-enchanted) opens in Trondheim! I am happy to be represented with a piece that is a portrait of Viktoria, which the National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design purchased to their collection a couple of years ago.
From the website to the museum:
https://nkim.no/gjenfortryllet
About Re-Enchanted
The exhibition Gjenfortryllet (= re-enchantment in English) is based on the period of time when the museum was established (1893) and when Art Nouveau with its organic forms and references to nature was the modern style. In the exhibition, the concept of re-enchantment is used to create a dialogue between historical works from the collection and contemporary works of art.
The museum building in Munkegata is still closed for the audience, but we are very happy to welcome you again to an exhibition with works from the collection at TKM Gråmølna.
The exhibition title Reenchanted is inspired by the work of the feminist and activist Silvia Federici and her book Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2018). Federici describes a re-enchantment of the world as a process of creating connections to that from which capitalism has separated us: our relationships to nature, to each other, and to our bodies.
‘Reenchantment’ refers to texts by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920). He used the concept of ‘disenchantment’ to describe something lost in modern Western society. In The Vocation Lectures (1919), he explains how a scientific view of reality was valued more than a religious and magical understanding of humanity’s place in the world. Religious faith and traditions that had previously ensured historical continuity were abandoned in favour of rational goals and economic growth as represented by capitalism and science. This situation of logical and forward-oriented development is often referred to as modernity. The disenchanted modernity fostered new cultural and artistic expressions in pictorial art and literature categorised under the more general term ‘modernism’. Art forms such as abstract painting and sculpture were then seen as cutting-edge cultural expressions.
The paired concepts ‘disenchantment / re-enchantment’ relate to certain currents from around 1900 and in our own times, and these time-oriented axes are starting points for the exhibition. Here in Gråmølna’s small pavilion, we cannot present extensive chronologies or the entire breadth of our collection. Our exhibition, therefore, shows a small selection of the stories the museum’s collection could tell. The art reflects currents in society at the same time as it can also influence those currents. In today’s art, we once again see wonderment over the ambiguous and the irrational, which is a kind of re-enchantment of the world!
