Since its inception in Norway in 1998, Momentum has presented outstanding Nordic and international artists. The biennial is the oldest and most established biennial for contemporary art in the Nordic region.
Momentum 8 explores tunnel vision as a cultural and artistic condition. Today’s networked culture not only generates hyper-connectivity, but also various disconnects. People and communities thrive in bubbles of their own. Momentum 8 focuses on artists who inhabit worlds of their own logic and follow their thoughts all the way through.
Tunnel vision has for a long time lent itself to artistic celebration as disarmingly eccentric, but is just as well prone to cultural condemnation as alarmingly asocial. Current techno-scientific developments encourage individualism at the same time as they foster segregated communities into which one can delve and disappear. The personalization of the Internet through abundant use of cookies and algorithms sparks so-called filter-bubbles and you-loops. User data is collected and deployed in a manner that determines what we find and subsequently also what we seek.
Our web search queries thus confirm the existing world-view of each and every one of us. If the Internet has been a window to the world, it is now also our own mirror image on the screen.
Immersion in self-referential loops is echoed in a renewed interest in psychotropic substances. Whereas the psychedelic movement of the 1960s was concerned with mind expansion, Momentum 8 focuses on experiences of a narrowing-down of the mind.
Such a centering might take the form of trance, meditation or obsessive claustrophobia, where insights might seem lucid since everything else is blanked out. Submerged in a constant flow of information, multitasking and directed concentration are in demand simultaneously. At present, new drugs and technologies are used in order to create a tunnel vision that narrows down this spectrum of information and our access to it.
Addressing conspiracy theories, paranoia and altered states of mind, the exhibition explores what might be called compressed consciousness, that may appear incestuous, navel-gazing or idiosyncratic.
Artists: Hrafnhildur Arnardottir a.k.a Shoplifter (Iceland/US), Brody Condon (Mexico/US), Steingrimur Eyfjord (Iceland), Valia Fetisov with Dzina Zhuk & Nicolay Spesivtsev (Russia), Johanna Heldebro (Sweden), Minna L. Henriksson (Finland), Sofia Hultén (Sweden/Germany), Ferdinand Ahm Krag (Denmark), Agnieszka Kurant (Poland/US), Cristóbal Lehyt (Chile/US), Eva Löfdahl (Sweden), Joanna Lombard (Algeria/Sweden), Lundahl & Seitl (Sweden), Fujiko Nakaya (Japan), Christine Ödlund (Sweden), Ola Pehrson (Sweden), Edward Shenk (US), Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Spain/Brazil), Bjarni H. Thorarinsson (Iceland), Sissel Tolaas (Norway/Germany), Ryan Trecartin (US), Steina (Steina Vasulka) (Iceland/US), Emanuel Vigeland (Norway), Julius von Bismarck (Germany), Zhala (Sweden)
Curators: Jonatan Habib Engqvist (Sweden), Birta Gudjonsdottir (Iceland), Stefanie Hessler (Germany/Sweden), Toke Lykkeberg (Denmark)