ELISABETH HAARR – The Festival Exhibition 2021

Axel Wieder, Director of Bergen Kunsthall, says: „We’re looking forward to working with Elisabeth Haarr on the Festival Exhibition 2021. She has an impressive practice that that she developed over many years. Her work feels incredibly urgent, politically sharp and complex. She has a strong connection to Bergen through her early years in the city and as a former teacher at Vestlandets Kunstakademi, and we‘re excited to show the work here again in such an extensive and prominent format.“

Haarr’s art is both anti-elitist and avant-garde, at once eminently recognizable and experimentally transgressive. She combines an interest in the materiality and history of textiles with a critical feminist approach. In this way Haarr helps to bring out “a different history”, pointing to the knowledge of textile fabrication as historically gendered, and to women’s often-overlooked contribution to cultural history. As with her predecessor in the textile field, Hannah Ryggen, the political protests were clear in many of Haarr’s early works, circling around the women’s struggle, environmental protection and a critique of power. Today the political causes feature just as strongly, but the expression is played out to a greater extent with symbolically charged, material-specific resources.

In a new series of works with the title FLYKTNINGETEPPER (Refugee Rugs) Haarr’s political commitment comes to the front through materials connoting care, warmth and protection, created as a response to the current refugee crisis and the media reports from among other places the Moria camp on Lesbos. But the works are also an expression of a more general reflection on the ongoing imbalance between our affluent part of the world and poorer regions. Like many of Haarr’s earlier works, the FLYKTNINGETEPPER express a fundamental humanism and a social commitment that urges us to face injustice with both collective anger and love.

The protest banner is an artistic format Haarr has cultivated and developed throughout her career. The exhibition will include several new banners, architectural columns and figures, as well as sculptural draperies that engage in dialogue with the architecture of Bergen Kunsthall. The new works will join a selection of older works and the exhibition will include several works that were shown for the first time in the same rooms at Bergen Kunsthall (at that time the Bergens Kunstforening) in1983. The personal and intimate also play a central role, and themes like loss, memory and grief are expressed in several of the new works, which are kept in a sober palette of white, black and earth-coloured textile.

Elisabeth Haarr

Elisabeth Haarr (b. 1945, Hamar) lives and works in Kristiansand. She graduated from the textile department at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry (1963–67) and has among other things worked at the Vestland Academy of Art in Bergen and at the University College in Sogn og Fjordane. She had her first solo show in 1973 at the Oslo Kunstforening, and her work has since then been presented at institutions such as UKS, Oslo; Bergens Kunstforening; Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, National Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Trondheim; Galleri F15, Moss; Stavanger Kunstforening; Christiansands Kunstforening and others. In recent years Haarr has participated in shows such as Krigens skygge at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2015), Forbannad vara du, Kunstnerforbundet, Olso (2015), Unwoven World: Beyond the Pliable Plane at OCA, Oslo (2014), and Hold stenhårdt fast på greia di at Kunsthall Oslo ( 2013) and Kunsthall Stavanger (2014).

In 2016 she had a major solo show, Strid, at Kunsthall Oslo, curated by Elisabeth Byre. Haarr’s work is represented in major national public collections such as the National Museum, Oslo; the Norwegian Embassy in Washington, USA; Nordenfjeldske Kunstindustrimuseum, National Museum of Decorative Arts, Trondheim; Sørlandets Kunstmuseum, Kristiansand; Kunstmuseet i Sogn og Fjordane, Førde; the University of Tromsø, and Innkjøsfondet for kunsthåndverk (The Acquisition Fund for Arts and Crafts). In 2014 she was awarded the Rune Brynestad Memorial Grant for her artistic activity and engagement.

About the Festival Exhibition 2021

The Festival Exhibition is Bergen Kunsthall‘s flagship exhibition, established in 1953. Each Summer, we present a large-scale exhibition with new work by a Norwegian artist, in connection with the Bergen International Festival (Festspillene i Bergen). The exhibition is considered the most important solo presentation fora Norwegian artist in their home country and creates a national debate about the state of the art, similarly to the Turner Prize in the UK.

Recent Festival Artists at Bergen Kunsthall include Mari Slaattelid (2019), Ane Hjort Guttu (2015), Fredrik Vaerslev (2016), Gardar Eide Einarsson (2013), Marianne Heier (2012), Børre Sæthre (2007), Elmgreen & Dragset (2005), AK Dolven (2004), Bjarne Melgaard (2003), Olav Christopher Jenssen (2000) and Marianne Heske (1993).

Last year‘s Festival Exhibition with Joar Nango (2020) was recently awarded the prestigious Art Critics Award for best exhibition in 2020 by the Norwegian Critics´ Association.