Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg

In this exhibition, the first organized by new Kunstnernes Hus artistic director Maaretta Jaukkuri, artists Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg productively focus on a single motif: the Duchampian suitcase. Suitcases for Marcel, 2006–2008, is not a singular valise, like Duchamp’s masterpiece, but rather a group of them. Each contains a short video that documents part of the container’s trajectory, from one person to another, as it makes its way to Oslo.

The objects seem, at first glance, to lack a real connection with the other works included in the show. The artists’ photographs and videos about themselves, in the series “The House” and “The Garden,” try to map the interface between private life and public, mythic persona. Another video, Juksa, 2006, documents a group of inhabitants of the north of Norway and how they gradually have become economically and culturally marginalized. In this work, and in a video that juxtaposes footage of rough, sexualized dance rituals in Brazil with images from a book by sixteenth-century European explorer (and onetime captive in Brazil) Hans Staden, the artists expose unresolved situations and deliberately do not propose specific “solutions.”

The exhibition’s poignancy and direction derive from how the Suitcases for Marcel tie these works together. Dias and Riedweg reverse the Duchampian logic: Rather than simply being containers for canonized works of art, the cases carry evidence of where they have been, reminding viewers that it is not what is inside that is important, but rather what is outside: everyday life and its tensions. Art should not, the artists imply, lock itself up inside the white cube. The show is as an exemplary exercise in social poetics, and the suitcases at its center are a rare instance of a masterful metaphor.