Ane Hjort Guttu

The title of Norwegian artist Ane Hjort Guttu’s exhibition of five film and installation works, “Eating or Opening a Window or Just Walking Dully Along,” refers to a line in W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts” describing artists’ portrayals of people’s busy indifference to those who suffer. Like Auden does in his poem, the characters in Guttu’s ambitious film Time Passes, 2015, reflect on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558, and its depiction of farmers and seamen oblivious to Icarus, just fallen from the sun, splashing in the sea beside them. The film’s protagonist, Damla, eventually experiences an existential crisis brought on by her performance piece of sitting with Bianca, a Roma woman, on Bergen streets. By the end of the film, Damla deeply identifies with Bianca and refuses to document her work, insisting that doing so would compromise the integrity of her acts.

In other works, the artist continues to explore individuals’ passive participation in and pathological acceptance of societal power dynamics. For example, her light-box kiosk, Jason, 2015, arrestingly contrasts splashy advertising with an e-mail correspondence between Guttu and a digital ad editor who secretly inserts subliminal imagery that works against his ads’ intended message.

This exhibition is a timely confrontation with Bergen’s current political landscape: the city has recently awarded its first contract with a major advertising agency as it weighs legislation that would outlaw street begging. By commenting directly on sanctioned infiltration of public and intellectual space, the artist speaks equally to global matters of net neutrality and the co-opting of personal data for commercial gain. Like Bruegel’s farmers, we casually ignore greater forces in our surroundings.