Reception: Saturday, May 4, 2019 | 17:30 - 20:30

Full press release: English | Italian

Georgie Friedman is currently based in Boston, MA and has lived, worked and exhibited nationally and internationally. She has been commissioned to create site-specific video-based public art pieces and has exhibited in national and international venues. She is an interdisciplinary artist whose projects include large-scale video installations, single and multi-channel videos and several photographic series. She is interested in our psychological and societal relationships to mild and severe natural phenomena. She investigates a wide range of powerful atmospheric and oceanic conditions, and is fascinated by the power of these natural elements in relationship to human fragility. She utilizes photography, video, sound, installation, engineering and the physics of light, all in order to create new experiences for viewers. 

In Rising Tide (2017), the water from the Antarctic Sound digitally rises above Antarctica's icy mountains. The video progresses through three landscapes with decreasing  snowpacks. The water slowly rises, turning valleys into bays, mountains into islands, and the Antarctic Sound into open ocean.

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Kristina Kvalvik is a Norwegian artist based in Oslo, Norway. She studied film and fine art in Norway, Sweden and Canada, and completed her MFA at Malmö Art Academy (SE) in 2008. Her work deals with matters relating to surveillance, the inexplicable and the threatening. She examines the limitations of sight and our ability to interpret what we see. Kvalvik has exhibited her work internationally.

In the video installation Uplands, three different, transient landscape images are juxtaposed with each other to form an imaginary, ever-shifting terrain. The project explores the Arctic landscape and envisages a future dystopian universe. The tundra itself is a completely flat area without trees, and the footprints you make will endure for centuries. Little can survive in this highland, where distance, scale, and perspective dissolve. What is life like in this immensity, and who can live there?

In this rhythmic video installation, where we see traces of human existence, we perceive a mysticism and poetry. The soundtrack by Pål H. Lillevold combines fictive landscape noises with an intermittently melodic undertone. The soundscape is heavy and hypnotic, like feeling your heart beating while inhaling and exhaling. The pictures seem almost corporeal: you catch a glimpse of faces in the mountainside; nature gets a personality. And when these pictures begin to vibrate, viewers get the sense that something is about to happen.

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Born 1985 in Omsk in Russia, Kristina  Paustian currently lives and works in Berlin. In 2003 she moved to Germany to study at the University of the Arts in Berlin. She worked as DoP and editor for several video artists before starting out as an artist herself. Today Paustian's artistic practice covers video, film and installation. In her work she tries to find and preserve a particular human constant into cinematographic forms. This constant (if there is any) goes far beyond language barriers, geographical borders, social concepts or political structures.

Towards the Zero Point (2017) deals with strategies of the human civilization progress: conquest and appropriation. The idea was to look back to the history and to find an example: the conquest of the North Pole – an area, which is highly appreciated by the countries and which seems to disappear soon from the maps. The visitors are invited to make a 3D trip and to set their flag at the geographical zero point (90°), provided they will arrive there. The work was developed for the Media Art Festival in Rome during a residency at the Fondazione Mondo Digitale. With the friendly support by the Goethe Institute Rome.

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EXHIBIT PRESS:

"Le terre polari dell'arte se si perde la bussola" [The polar lands of art if you lose your compass], Pietro Marino, Colpo D'Occhio, June 2019

"Bellezza glaciale e ambientalismo la videoarte arriva dal Nord" [Glacial beauty and environmentalism video art comes from the North], Antonella Marino Montagne, la Repubblica, Italy, June 6, 2019 | hardcopy version

POLAR LANDS

The three artists in this exhibition reflect on the dramatic topical issues such as the protection of the last natural areas not yet exploited by man, the impending danger of global warming, awareness of the issues of environmental sustainability and climate change, the dialectic between nature and civilization.

Georgie Friedman (United Sates)

Rising Tide

Kristina Kvalvik (Norway)

Uplands

Kristina Paustian (Russia/Germany)

Towards the Zero Point

all images, video and other content © georgie friedman