Our next event takes place on February 15, at 16:30 and we are thrilled to welcome Amber Ablett. Amber opens a solo exhibition at UKS called Rehearsal for A Change Gonna Come just a few days before the lecture, on February 12.

For this event she has invited artist William Kudahl. Together they will talk about her new work, how it relates to her practice and that precarious stage when a work begins to live its own life with the audience and away from the artist. In her practice, Amber looks at gathering, conversation and shared learning and so a conversation with a fellow artist seems like the most appropriate way to share a practice like this. Amber and William talk now and then, sometimes about art, sometimes about sound, sometimes in the studio, sometimes with wine and once as part of Kudahl's …you say, [pause] temporary radio station at HKS.

Rehearsal for A Change Gonna Come, opens at UKS (Oslo) on the 12th February. Specially conceived for the three main spaces at UKS, Ablett presents a three-channel video installation with sound, combined with a series of workshops that investigate and question her sense of multi-belonging as a bi-racial person with light skin of British and Caribbean heritage. By embodying and re-enacting and being conscious of her own white privilege and white fragility, Ablett comments on how white-passing Black people can use their position to support others in their community. In doing so, Ablett addresses people on the spectrum of blackness, stressing the necessity of claiming one’s own agency through self-determination.

Amber Ablett

Using text, video, sound and social gatherings, Amber Ablett's work looks at the importance of place and belonging to how we live and communicate together, with a focus on how our society shapes, reflects, controls and limits our multifaceted identities. She sees art as a space to connect with questions in our wider society. Whether pop music, folk tales or national anthems, Ablett often returns to look at how song is connected to communality, shared histories and storytelling. Ablett’s research has focused on gathering as an alternative exhibition space; one that is open, based on exchange and shared experience. 

Ablett (b. 1986, UK) holds an MFA from Bergen Academy of Art and Design and an MA from Camberwell College of Art, London. Recent exhibitions include solo and group exhibitions Anthems at Lydgalleriet, Bergen (2019); Høstutstillingen at Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (2019); and Archipelago at Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen (2019). 

William Kudahl

William Kudahl is an artist and writer working in a field between sonic and visual arts. His work explores topics such as ephemerality and the in-between, invisibility and the ordinary, and takes shape as sound works, radio broadcasts or written publications.

https://amberablett.cargo.site/

When: February 15, 2021 at 16:30

Where: On Zoom (Bergen Time Zone)

https://uib.zoom.us/j/66638007133?pwd=QzFPZDdpUG56T0hSWElDcjluQmdIQT09

Meeting ID: 666 3800 7133

Password: 6Zv1nBhz