BJARNE MELGAARD
"Let Your Mind Be Your Bed"
24.01.2019, 19:00
Welcome to the exclusive screening of Bjarne Melgaard's new film Let Your Mind Be Your Bed
The film Let Your Mind Be Your Bed takes the form of an experimental puppet show where we meet four protagonists’ dolls in conversation. Their interaction is constructed around the late New York-based author Kathy Acher and Bjarne Melgaard's parents and sister. The character´s dialogue and exchanges are inspired by Acher's pioneering literature that unites impulses from punk, postmodernism and sex-positivist feminism. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence. Acker broke any and all generic constraints and narrative conventions in her collage-like novels or, better described as literary assemblages. The iconic, radical and uncompromising writer who died twenty years ago, and whose deep and often-unacknowledged influence has been reassessed in this current work appropriately so by Bjarne Melgaard.
Bjarne Melgaard (b. 1967) is one of Norway's most regarded and controversial contemporary artists. His notoriety and distinct position in Norwegian and international art history is allied to his expressive paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations. Over the past twenty years, he has held numerous debated exhibitions, alongside Edvard Munch at Munch Museet in 2015. There are obvious parallels thematical and expressively between Munch and Melgaard. Their focus on sexuality, disease and death, but also the mental states that we find in Munch's art, such as anxiety, solitude, adultery, jealousy, rage, sensuality, perdition and deep depression, are hosted by Melgaard and again linked to Kathy Ancher.
Let Your Mind Be Your Bed was first presented live as a puppet show at Performance Space 122 in New York last year, in the group exhibition Kathy Acker: Who Wants to Be Human All the Time curated by Bjarne Melgaard and Jenny Schlenzka. That show also included artists like Celia Hempton, Diamond Stingily, Ser Brandon-Castro Serpas and Alan Sondheim, then premièring at the Astrup Fearnley Museum as film in December, 2018, before being featured at Kunsthall 3.14 January, 2019.
Free entrance