STAR MESSENGER
Work-in-progress; HD single-channel animated video loop; 11’53’’
Expanding the artist’s research exploring the transformative potentialities of fright encountered through traumatic and shamanist processes, Star Messenger proposes a softening of the historical western divide between the rational and the irrational, the material and the magical.

In 1610 Galileo Galilei published his accounts of discovering four of Jupiter’s moons. He titled the publication “Siderius Nuncius” – star messenger – thus naming the book after Io, the innermost of the moons. Over the course of two months Io had visually – slowly, but consistently – conveyed her message to him: That she is orbiting Jupiter. That the Earth is not the centre of the Universe.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen attributes the English translation of the title of Galileo’s opus magnum to her dreamy video work Star Messenger, whereby she questions what we know and how we know it, and suggests a collapse of scientific vision with the spiritual/mythological visionary: Both draw on sightings obtained through extraordinary set-ups that may challenge habitual world-views.

Star Messenger is a work-in-progress produced in extension of Kølbæk Iversen’s artistic research at Oslo National Academy of the Arts and Aarhus University. It is a log of dissociative visions obtained by labouring women and will evolve during the years to come. Iterations of the work have previously been shown at PS/Y and LUX (London, GB, 2017), Kunsthall Oslo (NO, 2018), and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (NO, 2018).

BIRTH OF MUSPELINA
Is a work-in-progress; unique artist’s book; artist’s writing and found imagery.

Birth of Muspelina interweaves various historical and contemporary literary and scientific sources into a first person narrative of transgression and transformation.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen
Marie Kølbæk Iversen (*1981, Herning, DK). Visual Artist MFA from the Department of Time-Based Media at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2008. Artistic research fellow at the Academy of Fine Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Aarhus with the project “Neo-worlds: the Other-directed potentialities of Fright" as of October 2017. Recent projects and exhibitions include: Soon Enough, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden, 2018; Water from the Waist Down, Kunsthall Oslo, Oslo, Norway, 2018; Star Messenger, PS/Y + LUX, London, GB, 2017, “Io/I” and Matrilineal Collapse, PARMER, New York, USA, 2017; Surfacing Earth, Röda Sten, Göteborg, Sweden, 2016; The Eight Climate (What Does Art Do?), The 11th Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea, 2016; Spin and the Wolf, Overgaden, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016; Transformer (solo), Brandts, Odense, Denmark, 2015; Mirror Therapy (solo), Fotografisk Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2015; Biennale de l’image en mouvement, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland, and MONA, Hobart, Australia, 2014-15; Consciousness, ARTEFACT ‘14, STUK Kunstencentrum, Leuven, Belgium, 2014; Dexter Bang Sinister, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2012; Execution – into decapital (solo), IMO, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2012.

The exhibition is part of Marie Kølbæk Iversen's artistic research project Neo-worlds: The Transformative Potentialities of Fright at The Academy of Fine Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation and NARP.

The exhibition is realised with the kind support of the Danish Arts Foundation.

Additionally, the exhibition will feature a selection of works by Felix Salut which places themselves in the conceptual periphery of the Galapagos game, including the script turned book for Shut Up I’m Counting. These items will be for sale during the period of the exhibition.

Felix Salut (formely known as Felix Weigand) is a German graphic designer based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2014 he founded Studio Felix Salut with the idea of a studio practice that embraces study and experiment. With typography as a core, works find form in graphic design but also in fashion, film and objects. Felix Salut teaches on a regular basis at ENSBA Lyon and Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

The Galapagos game has been redeveloped into a typeface in collaboration with Swiss typefoundry Dinamo. For the Galapagos Typeface, Felix Salut and Dinamo composed the same 9 modules into 7 alphabets of different styles: Rounded, Straight, Angular and their crossings Rounded-Straight, Straight-Angular, Rounded Angular and Rounded-Straight-Angular. The result is a total of 70 individual typefaces: each style comes in 5 weights, with Grid and No-Grid versions. Using Stylistic Sets, all characters can be moved up and down along the vertical grid.

Just as the Galapagos Islands are home to a vast number of unique species, the Galapagos Typeface encompasses a range of characters whose forms evolve from one another.

This release is accompanied by the launch of the App, which allows for a playful entrance into the modular Galapagos cosmos. Users can take pictures and compose layouts on top of them, switch between Galapagos type variations by hand or by shaking the phone before sharing the design on social media channels.

The title of the talk Microbes I Have Known and Loved refers to self-exploration through embodied substances and concerns the bacteria that make us who we are. It also evokes the protagonist of Sutela’s ongoing research, Physarum polycephalum: the single-celled yet ‘many-headed’ slime mold that is considered a natural computer and ingested as a form of artificial intelligence in Sutela’s recent performances. The talk will move through the human microbiome into various, exceedingly complex biological and computational systems, ultimately unknowable and always in a state of becoming. It will explore an understanding of oneself as interconnected with the wider environment, marking a profound shift in subjectivity as something non-anthropocentric and beyond the individual.

Nam-Gut (the microbial breakdown of language), 2017:
The video installation presents a homebrew computer operated by a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast and producing a new kind of language. A text about code laws and the gut brain, inspired by an ancient Sumerian incantation, or nam-shub*, is processed by tea, sugar, acetobacter, saccharomyces, brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus, gluconacetobacter kombuchae, zygosaccharomyces kombuchaensis, and Jumbo**. The work is based on Gut-Machine Poetry (2017), an online commission by Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art realized in collaboration with Vincent de Belleval and Johanna Lundberg.
Voice: Jessica Edwards

*See also Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992).
**A program that cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter developed to solve anagrams based on the actions inside a biological cell.

From relational aesthetics, over social sculpture or “situations”, contemporary art practices have been addressing the production of subjectivity in the realm of experience economy, using life as means and ends. A conversation, a behaviour, a movement, or a mood has become the brush, but also the painting. What are the relations between the objectification and the production of life in art and society? What happens to art when life is capitalized into new forms of production?

Throughout its presentations Group Show will include works by Adriana Lara, Alex Bailey, Audrey Cottin, D D Dorvillier, Dora Garcia, Hana Lee Erdman, Jan Ritsema, Jennifer Lacey, Jonathan Burrows, Krõõt Juurak, Mårten Spångberg, Nina Kurtela, Valentina Desideri and Diego Tonus.

Galerie is an immaterial art gallery dealing exclusively with immaterial artworks. Galerie represents artistic practices that mainly manifest through performative formats. The mission of Galerie is to support and promote immaterial objecthood: works that cannot be reduced to material objects or to the documentation of an action. Galerie circulates artworks by representing them as well as offering them for sale. In collaboration with the artists, economical formats and “representations” are tailored to each artwork, offering unique opportunities for the artwork to extend and disseminate on its own terms.

On one hand, Galerie seeks to build a business providing economical sustainability for the artists it represents, on the other hand Galerie is thought as a platform for conversation between different partners of the art field, from performing arts to visual arts: curators, critics, artists, collectors, gallery owners. As an immaterial gallery, Galerie does not have a location, it occurs in existing contexts and venues, such as art fairs, festivals, galleries, and institutions.