Konstfack – Vårutställning 2009 / Degree Exhibition 2009 » Johanne Nordby Wernø

Johanne Nordby Wernø

Johanne Nordby Wernø

Engaged encounters: fiction as art writing

What might emerge when words are acting with or through, rather than being about, art? I am interrogating the practice of art criticism seen as an engaged encounter between work and viewer, a reciprocal addressing analogous to the risky business of face-to-face human relations.

Regarding the present alleged crisis in art criticism – the once influential critic losing out to the curator – as emancipatory rather than a threat, my critical response after a one month visit at a Norwegian art centre is embodied in a fiction text. A character, a man from Oklahoma, is extracted from a chosen artwork of the then current exhibition and “cast” in the narrative opposite the history of the art institution, inaugurated in the charged year of 1968 by a Hollywood star past her fame.

Johanne Nordby Wernø works as a critic, journalist, fiction writer and curator.

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The short story can be read both as an independent piece of fiction and as part of a larger investigation of art writing, 2008

Year of birth 1980 Place of birth Oslo, Norway
wernoe@gmail.com
www.icecreamvan.blogspot.com
+ 46 (0) 707 32 69 65



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Master students Clara Terne and Christian Brandt from Konstfack’s graphic design department were commissioned to design the book, 2008


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Henie Onstad Art Centre, Norway, 2008


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After the exhibition. Henie Onstad Art Centre, 2008


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The New York Times covered the centre’s inauguration, August 26, 1968

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