After one and a half year in permanent premises, we open another floor making space for a group exhibition featuring some of Lydgalleriet’s founders and their guests.
ZUPER KLASSIK FREAKY AVANTGARDE! showcases a range of sonic expressions, including installations with audio- and fiber optics, a new speaker installation, cassette works and glass-shattering screams. Despite sound art's long-standing presence and avantgarde nature, it remains a challenging and unconventional field, highlighted by this vibrant display of practices in Norway today.
When working with sound-based artistic expressions, the room itself becomes an integral part of the expression. The room becomes the work’s instrument, the primary resonance chamber of the art. Sound art has been a vibrant field for many decades, and for just as long it has been the 'freak' of the art world. Almost unsellable, yet very expensive, site-specific and space-demanding, but at the same time fragile, and mostly impossible to have in the living room.
Maia Urstad and Hilde Hauan Johnsen present a gallery version of their series of installations with sound and fibre optics, 01001-101. Thorolf Thuestad and Alwynne Pritchard show a brand new speaker installation in the bird room, A Cognitive Theory of Metaphor, and Steinar Sekkingstad exhibits tape works by Mágnus Pálsson in the intimate room. Bjørnar Habbestad showcases Petri Henriksson on the second floor, and in the attic there is a new work by Jørgen Larsson, The Screaming Room.
ZUPER KLASSIK FREAKY AVANTGARDE! provides an impression of sound art and sound-based works in Norway today, but it is not a curated overview or a clever selection to show a breadth or a cross-section. It is simply a display of our practice, from Urstad/Hauan Johnsen’s finely tuned poetry to Larsson’s glass-shattering screams.