UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society), Norway’s one of core institutions for supporting new productions and exhibiting the practices of young, contemporary artists, presents spring 2023 program.
UKS reopens in spectacular new settings after a year of refurbishment with the group show Open Systems, followed by a solo exhibition by Martin White.
In Norway, it is said that one may live on air and love alone. We all know that isn’t the case. UKS is seeking assistance with the fundraiser Air & Love in order to complete our major makeover. Your contribution helps to create a safe haven for young artists and art enthusiasts.
Close Readings, a monthly, casual reading circle open to everybody, will be held this spring by UKS and art historian Sara Yazdani to explore how to read and think together with and through texts, artworks, and objects. The season continues with the exhibition series Young Dumb & Broke, which features a single early piece by a once young and unknown artist who is now mature and respected. UKS maintains its Minibar evenings and the walk-in workshop How to Practice?, where rotating local and international practitioners—such as Jules Fisher, Tai Shani, and Admir Batlak—serve up their techniques, tools, anxieties, and wishes for artistic survival over a bowl of hot soup.
Air & Love
Fundraiser
UKS has moved to a new location in central Oslo, but we need your support to acquire an enhanced ventilation system that will provide a consistent stream of fresh air to our guests. In exchange, UKS provides a home rich with art and the finest environment for appreciating it—together. In exchange for your support, you can obtain wonderful and cheap paintings from painters A K Dolven and Damla Kilickiran. If you like what we do and have a few dollars to spare, please consider sponsoring the campaign.
Alice Slyngstad, Anna Andersson, Danae Io, Miriam Hansen, Yujin Jung: Open Systems
January 14–February 26
An open system’s boundaries are permeable to energy and matter. It is constantly exchanging information with its surrounds; information, myths, capital, ideas, scent, debris, and people flow inexhaustibly through and through open systems that are completely dependent on input, process, and output. Five young artists take over the building for the debut show at UKS, displaying bits from online dating, the story surrounding the city of Thebes, sculptural repetition, the lunchbreaks of Korean factory workers, and a space coated in a miasma of ancient flora. They each work their own system, and they inhabit UKS’ new headquarters as we open our doors to begin the flow of energy.
Martin White: Big Science: Volume 1
Opening: March 24
March 25–May 7
Dr. Carl Wilhelm Sem-Jacobsen, a freewheeling Norwegian psychiatrist, experimented on patients at Oslo’s Gaustad Hospital from 1956 to 1977 by implanting electrodes into their brains without their consent. Martin White (b. 1978, AU) has combed through the doctor’s archives for the past six years, forensically building a story that bears witness to the dense entanglement of Gaustad Psychiatric Hospital, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the US Military, Airforce and Navy, NASA, and the Psycho Pirate, a comic book character. With Big Science: Volume 1, White leads us into a complicated web: a gigantic, underground, dispersed, and unlawful print endeavor that uncovers the chaotic, interdependent, and haphazard structures of power, psychiatry, propaganda, influence, and ideology.
UKS (Unge Kunstneres Samfund / Young Artists’ Society)
Keysers gate 1
0165 Oslo
Norway
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 12–5pm,
Thursday 12–7pm
T +47 22 19 50 50
[email protected]
