Ellen Vikström

Contemporary art has become an arena for political debate, and nowhere is this more evident than at the art academies. Norwegian artist Sille Storihle has designed a role-playing game to explore the issues. The rules of the game are clear: The students at the Film and Art School in Kabelvåg were given fictitious characters which they themselves developed further and act out in a group critique of each other’s work. But while the rules are clear, the game itself can easily spin out of control! And it does in ‘The Group Crit’, where the students (who are all in character) don’t hold back from criticising each other’s artworks – and each other in general – so we soon forget the performative framework of the heated debate. The collective experiment challenges not only the students’ self-perception, but also Storihle’s own authority as a director. An important, witty and wild work created with the active participation of the students.

In a small town in northern Norway, Eira tries to follow in the shadow of her brilliant and rebellious older sister Vera. Lately however, something is happening to Vera. In a bid to understand, Eira starts reading her diary. She enters Vera’s universe of intense light, glitter, mythology and hopes for a more beautiful world. Yet her diary reveals a darkness that leaves Eira confused.

A meditation, splintering emotions, a distillation of our need, here in a periphery on fire. Beneath the noise of the mundane, in the trash heap of the every day. Within media routines, the exchanges of information. In modes of day– and night-time dreaming, about the universe and decades past in industry, technology, text, image, film video. Now digitized, in knotted and decayed networks of unrequited love.