Nine Lives

Architecture often works as a tool of rhetoric. Establishes discourses based on specific assumptions and concepts appropriate for different styles, their origins and their initiators. These discourses are available to everyone, not just for the elite. Most people, after all - consciously or unconsciously - thoughts and comments on architecture.

APT artist Øystein Aasan, Norwegian artist, for many years has been, in its practice, the ideas developed by modernism. His latest exhibition "Nine Lives" is dedicated to the Italian fascist architecture. Unlike other European countries, Modernism in Italy was closely associated with the activities of Mussolini and his National Fascist Party (PNF). Utopian promises of modernism mingled here with violent and exclusionary attitude of fascism. It is a paradox connection ideal generated by the modernism of the function which performs these buildings as an integral part of the fascist, became the starting point for imaging studies conducted by Aasana.

A series of images created on the basis of research carried out by the artist can be understood both as an analysis of the structural elements of buildings as well as their "reflection" through which you can better understand the system, and decode it. Based on these studies, Aasan created two wooden grid - structure of the site-specific, which have been placed in one of the rooms Zone of Current Art in a way that prevents the observer to watch any of the images in full. These structures operate at both the symbolic and practical as a tool for directing visitors to a specific location in space. They co-create value with one of the statues - lamps and platforms - the presented at the entrance to the gallery, forming as it were the beginning of the exhibition "Nine Lives."

Øystein Aasana work consisting of sculptures, installations, paintings, handmade books, archives, collages and architectural elements take the threads related to the memory, the role of the observer and his relationship with a work of art in the context of the exhibition. Since 2006 Aasan working on his archive "Never Ending Memory."