Underskog

14th – 29th of June 2014
Sat – Sun 14 – 18 and by appointment
Opening with live-performances Friday 13th of June 8pm


Wyse + Gabriely’s intriguing practices are deeply interwoven. Together they dissects the complex role of the artist in photography today, yet in two distinct voices: Wyse developing her analogue images in darkroom, while Gabriely employs a laborious digital technique. Over the past years Wyse has built a huge photo-collection of bodies and souls – strangers she approaches in the street. Presented together as a wall of images they can be read as a disturbing obsession, but the process is all about one to one trust. Through the amount of naked nameless females Wyse offers an ultimately self-reflecting vision of the artist-photographer, who never appears but is always present in the image.

Gabriely meanwhile appears herself as the most frequent subject in her glossy color photographs, often in abandoned places. Her images are appealing as advertisement at first gaze, but using her skin as a canvas, adding body-hair or putting stones in her costumes, she inhabits manipulated, sometimes repulsive forms. The exhibition includes an immersive showcase of Wyse + Gabriely’s photographic works. They also present a collaborative video-work and a performance-installation produced especially for PINK CUBE. A unique limited edition book with the artists’ work and text by Philippa Snow is also available (Publisher: Identity Print, GF Smith, Design: Johanna Bonnevier).

Aviya Wyse and Yaeli Gabriely are graduates of the WIZO Academy, Israel and are the recipients of the 2013 America Israel Foundation Scholarship Award. In 2014 they also present their work at the Inga Gallery, Tel Aviv and Neu Gallery, London. This is the first exhibition by the duo in Norway.


Birkeland + Kleiva works with self-staging (Birkeland) and the naked skin as a mutable surface (Kleiva) in a different way. Birkeland takes the role of historical, yet fictional female explorers in her big-scale analogue color-photographs. As Wyse + Gabriely she plays with the camera (in combination with text) as a weapon of power: What is the object – who is the viewer and who writes our history? She is a collector, but in another sense than Wyse: Collecting historical props and clothing she embodies her alter egos and travels to desolated landscapes – territories where no names are yet mapped – to capture moments, separated from time.

Time is also a key element in Kleiva’s latest video-work, but here as a source of slow transformation. She zoomes in on the skin and the lips – the (sometimes pink, sometimes red) border between the internal body and the external world. Kleiva explores changing surfaces and closeness to the landscape through repetitive movements. Through the close-up view, where the subject gets closer and closer, the camera somehow embodies the desire of the gaze. The installing of the video highlights a connection between the body in the work and PINK CUBE, which has bodyfluids in the wall-paint. As the other duo Birkeland + Kleiva presents their individual works as a team in combination with a live-performance produced especially for this battle. In the performance their works melt together, as image and literally as material transforming into liquid.

Tonje Birkeland and Iselin Kleiva graduated from Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2012. They recently exhibited together at Trygve Lie Gallery in NYC, where Birkeland was part of the artist in residence program at ISCP 2012 – 13. Both artists have exhibited widely in Norway and abroad.


NO WAY is an independent art label based in East London with pop-ups elsewhere, which creates a platform for emerging artists, through exhibitions, events, texts and books.

PINK CUBE is an intimate non-profit art space with a pink wall-paint containing body fluids from a private ritual. Run by artist Anja Carr since 2011, it is a non-neutral alternative to the sterile white cube and its inherent power structures.

Battle 15 is the 15th exhibition in PINK CUBE, where all the shows are art-battles between two artists or artist-groups. The intention of these duels is to trigger the instincts and take advantage of the fusion between solo- and group-show in terms of focus and new, fruitful dialogue in relation to the pink space and between the artistries.

PINK CUBE
Grønland 18, Oslo (GPS: Grønland 12)
Entrance in the backyard by McDonald’s, past Goethe Institut to the right
pinkcube.no
contact: [email protected] / +47 45220797