English summary
Screening of Fire Nation + conversation with artist Ina Hagen, Emma Eide Rydningen and Mari Qviller
Thursday March 30, from 7pm, in Atelier Kunstnerforbundet
Artist Ina Hagen reads aloud from the essay '17 Days' (2023) and shows the video work 'Fire Nation' (2021), both of which touch on questions of Norwegian climate colonialism and climate optics. Together with Emma Eide Rydningen (Extinction Rebellion) and Mari Qviller (Natur og Ungdom), she will discuss the energy industry's media strategies and what it does to us as individuals and as a society.
17 Days
Ina Hagen’s exhibition 17 Days offers a wide emotional content through an essay presented in three different formats – a novel, a newspaper, and a video.
Written during her residency at Atelier Kunstnerforbundet, the text’s starting point is the ancient Greek myth about Persephone and her mother Demeter, goddess of the harvest and the cycle of life. When Persephone is abducted by Hades to unwillingly become his bride in the Underworld, Demeter, in her desperation, causes famine among the humans to negotiate with the Olympian Gods for Persephone’s release. The description of Demeter’s grief that permeates this hymn has been of particular interest to Hagen, as well as how this grief works as a prism for the interpretation of experience and memory.
In the exhibition, while reading or listening to 17 Days, a constellation of references and personal reflections appears across Hagen’s writing about grief, literature, film, environmental issues, memory, and guilt.
Fire Nation
In ‘Fire Nation’ (2021), Ina Hagen engages with the rebranding of the Norwegian state-owned energy company Statoil to Equinor in 2018, and the accompanying expansion to so-called "broad energy". By changing its name at the cost of about 250 million kroner, the company sought to relaunch with a future-oriented, socially and ecologically conscious image.
This new work, produced for ‘The Ocean’, deconstructs a single promotional video made by Equinor in 2018 through conversations about climate optics, colonial exploitation, power and powerlessness, alongside a field recording from Praça Mauá, the port area in Rio de Janeiro that functioned as the main gateway for enslaved people from Angola, East and Central West Africa during the imperialist era.
Fire Nation is a single channel video, and two channel audio installation.
Duration: 37 mins
Read more about Fire Nation on Ina Hagen's website.
The event takes place Thursday March 30, from 7pm, in Atelier Kunstnerforbundet on the top floor without an elevator.
The event is part of the dissemination and mediation program at Atelier Kunstnerforbundet (AKF) - an artist collective and development program, supported by Sparebankstiftelsen, Talent Norge og Fritt Ord.
For inquiries about the event, availability or about Atelier Kunstnerforbundet, please don't hesitate to contact us.