SOLIDS

Carte Blanche brings to life an immersive installation built and choreographed by the visual artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña and presented at KODE’s Tårnsalen as part of a large scale solo presentation by the artist. The company’s 14 dancers perform in a hybrid between performance, visual art and dance.

The exhibition as a whole includes immersive installations spanning two floors at KODE 4. SOLIDS plays with our sense of space and challenges our notions of safety and history. What happens when the structures you trust are in a state of permanent dissolution? And, what happens to time when one is sitting still while everything around is in a state of constant flux?

The collaboration between Gómez-Egaña and Carte Blanche challenges the concept of what a dance performance can be. The installation moves, peels off layers and reveals itself. Elements are mirrored, moved, stretched, knotted, and dissolved. The dancers make things happen: they move the walls, manipulate objects and give energy and presence to a dynamic space that is constantly evolving. The installation on the second floor galleries, which was recently vacated from the collection of paintings from 1400-1900, is a large scale kinetic work that questions the architecture of the museum itself as a presence and as bearer of history.

“Solids” is a meditation on the fact that everything that seems solid and lasting in actuality is fragile and temporary. The title also refers to Marshall Berman’s book “All that is Solid melts into air” (itself a quote from Karl Marx). The book is about the experience of modernity as a reality where nothing is stable and nothing is what it seems.

The last time Carte Blanche visited KODE was with the dance performance «Øy», an energetic and youthful mix of concert and dance. When Carte Blanche and Gómez-Egaña take over KODE 4, the result will be a hybrid between dance and exhibition that is both immersive and extraordinary.

Pedro Gómez-Egaña

Pedro Gómez-Egaña was born in Colombia and lives and works in Oslo, where in addition to his artistic work he is a professor of sculpture and installation at the Norwegian Academy of the Arts (KhiO). His work has been staged in Norway and internationally on prestigious platforms and renowned biennials.

His sculptures, installations and video works take a critical look at contemporary and historical technology and explore how they define our experience and understanding of time. This includes an interest in the mechanical, the intersection of the industrial and the mysterious, as well as the emotional, sexual and spiritual undertones of digital culture.

His work reflects a concern about how our networked and media-driven world reduces the diversity of attention. He focuses on this theme by producing specially built rooms that seek to transform the audience’s way of experiencing a situation or story. His work often reflects concrete stories about the place where it is shown.