Ur-Story - Inside Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate (exhibition)
Sentralen/Gymsalen hallway
13/9, 17.00
Free entrance
(Open for the duration of the festival between 11.00 and 20.00 (Sundays 11.00-16.00))
An exhibition curated by Ultima in connection with the European premiere of South African artist William Kentridge’s audiovisual performance of Kurt Schwitters’ iconic dada poem Ursonate in the opening weekend of the festival. Outside the entrance to Gymsalen on the 4thfloor of Sentralen, larger-than-life portraits of the artist will be on display. You can also wander among wooden engravings of the Ursonate score structured like a traditional four movement symphony and read the poem’s strange and primal language, while listening to recordings by various artists. Linger in to a Schwitters archive room and read up on the background to the work and Schwitters’s extraordinary life, and scroll through a digital archive of video and audio versions of this remarkable work.
You can also dig into the story about Schwitters’ brief residence in Norway, and get an insight into the Kurt Schwitters project – a collaboration between Sparebankstiftelsen, Hanover Sprengel Museum and Henie Onstad, Kunstsenter, whose permanent collection includes the largest collection of Schwitters’s work outside Germany.
Curators: Thorbjørn Reuter Christiansen, Rob Young and Thorbjørn Tønder Hansen.
In collaboration with DNO&B, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter. Supported by Sparebankstiftelsen.
(Photo: Mark Shoul)
