Unfinished Journeys

Never-ending journeys is the theme of the National Museum's latest group exhibition. The works are about travel in the figurative sense - the ongoing quest for one's own identity and place in the world.

Unfinished Journeys is inspired by a number of the National Museum’s most recent acquisitions, the impressive nine-channel video installation Ten Thousand Waves by British artist Isaac Julien which poetically interweaves a range of stories that link China’s past and present, Knut Åsdam’s haunting video-installation Abyss confronting us with contemporary displacement in a situation of drastic urban change, Marine Hugonnier’s Travelling Amazonia exploring the never quite finished thoroughfare cut from East to West through Amazonia as well as Runo Lagomarsino’s We all laughed at Christopher Columbus alluding to an even earlier pioneer route. Presenting fourteen internationally renowned artists, the exhibition is dedicated to ‘unfinished journeys’ +of various kinds: The unremitting quest for one’s own identity and place in the world, travel for the sake of the search, the ever unfulfilled craving for an ‘object of desire’ or moments gone past, migration and the wish to belong but also the restless urge for discoveries and explorations also addressing the downsides of these, exploitation and colonization.

It has been argued that in the 21st century we are all chimeras, hybrids, “illegitimate bastards” who can no longer draw upon an original comprehensive history. We are marked by different languages and incompatible patterns of socialization. Thus the idea of a rooted identity, of an essentialist concept of identity as essence and origin of the subject, has to be substituted with an image of the subject as constituted by the routes it has traveled. So the question “Where are you from?” should be replaced by “Where have you traveled?” or even “Where are you traveling?” Identity is a journey that is unfinished. The title of the exhibition “Unfinished Journeys” can be seen as an extended metaphor for the problem of identity formation. Many artists in the exhibition deal with the questions of identity as explicitly geographical spatial expeditions. Their journeys to real and imagined places show us life as a restless voyage of discovery, both literally and metaphorically.

A bilingual catalogue has been published with texts by Morten Strøksnes, Andrea Krosknes, and others. The exhibition is curated by Sabrina van der Ley and Andrea Kroksnes.

16 March – 20 May 2012 

Contact:

Elise Lund, Media and Press Manager, Phone +47 21 98 22 12, elise.lund@nasjonalmuseet.no

Andrea Kroksnes, Phone +47 93 48 97 93, andrea.kroksnes@nasjonalmuseet.no

For images and further information please view http://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/