Image above: Installation view from Sveinung Rudjord Unneland's exhibition "Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy" in Joy Forum in 2023.

Bergen Academy of Art and Design (Kunst- og designhøgskolen i Bergen, KHiB) moved into brand new premises in Møllendalsveien in 2017, and at the same time changed its name and organizational affiliation to Kunstakademiet – Institutt for samtidskunst (The Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art), now a department at Fakultet for kunst musikk og design, Universitetet i Bergen (Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, UiB). At the same time, Sveinung Unneland began his work on the doctoral project Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy. In the project, Unneland examines these structural and architectural changes, in parallel with exploring how we can establish different autonomous spaces and practices within the institutional context as such.

Only by insisting on a radical openness about what art is or can be, is it possible, in his opinion, to maintain a meaningful relationship with the concept of art. An important question then becomes how we (as artists, researchers, and teachers) best cultivate and safeguard this openness, in our own practice and within the institutional framework many of us find ourselves in.

Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy places itself in an institutional tradition that in Bergen goes back to the self-organized Vestlandets Kunstakademi (1973). Through practical collaborative projects, Unneland explores how this legacy can be continued within today's institutional framework. Parallel to this, he has worked with painting as an integral part of the research project; a personal practice where he can set up models for possible relationships between the fictional and the real, the personal and the common, the inside and the outside.

Bio

Sveinung Rudjord Unneland (1981, Farsund) is a visual artist and PhD research fellow at the Art Academy – Deparment of Contemporary Art at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen. He was educated at Kunsthøgskolen i Bergen and Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2007). Sveinung Rudjord Unneland has worked with Urgent Affairs, Strange Empathy since 2018 under supervision of Eamon O'Kane and Ane Hjort Guttu.