Unni Gjertsen was born in Sjøvegan, Norway, and lives and works in Oslo. She studied at the Trondheim Academy of Arts and University of Oslo. Her previous group exhibitions include ‘Correct me if I’m critical’, Nordische Botschaften, Berlin; ‘Headlines and Footnotes’, Henie-Onstad Art Centre, Bærum, Norway; ‘The last Marquise’, Kasteel van Gaasbeek, Belgium; ‘If I can’t dance I will not be part of your Revolution’, MUHKA, Antwerp; as well as others at UKS, Oslo, Göteborgs Konsthall, Liljevalchs Konsthall and IASPIS in Stockholm (2005-10).
1 Shanthiroad is an artist-led initiative in Bangalore, which supports the production and presentation of experimental contemporary art practices with artists’ studios, a gallery and a discursive programme.
The gallery walls will have painted texts, distilled from notes Gjertsen made from seven interviews during her residency at Platform China, Beijing in April–May 2009. The people interviewed were born in different parts of China between 1940 and 1979 and had different professions. They include a philosopher teaching theory at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, a dancer and choreographer working within conceptual dance and others working within architecture, art criticism and visual art.
The interview questions were designed to elicit personal memories of the topography of each individual’s birthplace, as well as recollections of major socio-political events in China’s history (such as World War II, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protest), which have helped forge the collective consciousness of Chinese identity today. The texts will be organized in correlation with Chinese geography, with each story representing a position on the conceptual ‘map’ formed by the exhibition space.
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