Helping to realise Telephone at 1857

^{Property of 1857}

Artists Steffen Håndlykken and Stian Eide Kluge run a special and brilliant gallery in Grønland, Oslo called 1857. It consists of a run down, little green house in Tøyenbekken that is actually quite nice on the inside. In the back of the small gallery space there is a door. Pass through it, and you are suddenly inside a enormous concrete hall. They have had very good exhibitions with a wide variety of international artists, but the winter is a difficult period for using the big hall. It is so big that it is impossible to heat. So, instead of making normal winter exibition, they decided to build a lighthouse instead. A lighthouse standing nine meters tall with a spiral stairway leading up into a tiny cinema. The light shining out of the room is not just a lightbulb, it is a videobeamer that projects seemingly random videos for 128 hours. Here you can sit as long as you like. It is heated and you look at all kinds of interesting stuff, although you never know what is coming. It can switch between a short animated film to a program directed at teaching you how to make sausages. None of the videos are ever repeated. I loved the idea and offered to help.

^{Property of 1857}

The boys were working hard on building the “Telephone”, I didn´t really have time to help them on his part, but many friends were helping out collecting videos. I also did this, bigtime, but I was also responsible for getting all of the collected video into a working system on a harddisk. It was labourous and complicated utelising different computer programs, editing video and categorising all of the TERRABYTES of video into nice folders for each day the gallery was to be open.

I am very glad to have friends like Stian and Steffen to make my life more interesting. The exhibition is a great experience and has some heavy theoretical implications. Some are discussed here, others in another article only found on paper and others not being discussed at all. Stian and Steffen have not signed the artwork in any way. I heard Steffen call the tower the exhibition architecture. What is being shown is also not from any particular sender. It seems like the whole thing is lacking an ego, even though there is a nine meter tall structure standing like a giant phallos in the room. After the exhibition period was over, they had another exhibition using the tower. This time, all the windows inside the lighthouse were painted by Allison Katz. Yes, a woman.