Opening: Thu, 05.09.2024, 7pm
Duration: Fri, 06.09. – Sat, 09.11.2024
Artist: Alice Slyngstad
Curator: Frederike Sperling

In nocturnal darkness, our sense of direction is challenged in many ways. What may be clear and familiar during the day blurs in the diffuse shadows of night. Our body increasingly resorts to sensory perceptions such as sounds and smells in an attempt to steer us through this thicket of uncertainty. This experience of destabilization is the departure point for Alice Slyngstad’s latest work Flare demure. Commissioned by Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Flare demure is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Austria.

Scattered in the darkened Kunstraum, luminous bodies rise into the air like oversized flowers, bidding us orientation, only to expose themselves as fickle wayposts with their nervous flickering. And the sound emanating from them, perhaps a confidential voice, does little to aid our navigation, but rather hints that we are unsuspecting actors in a theatrical staging. A mise-en-scène that seems to have a script, but one that we have not been let in on. Who can we trust here? Who can we entrust ourselves and our bodies to?

Questions that Slyngstad does not resolve. On the contrary. Flare demure centers on how we experience and cope with ambiguity, how we surrender to the uncertain and mysterious. For Slyngstad, this experience has a close connection to the practice of cruising. Cruising as a balancing act between visibility and invisibility, self-concealment and exposure, but above all: as an invitation to pursue one’s own orientations. 

When and where encounters between bodies actually occur in Flare demure, however, and whether we get to see each other and how much, yet depends largely on an algorithm developed especially for the exhibition. The digital infrastructure of the show, which materializes in an interplay of light and sound, is built upon a pre-programmed sequence that controls the visitors in the space. Or so it seems. The artist in fact constantly disrupts a full sense of orientation in space…

Flare demure continually throws us back to our own sensory apparatus, prompting us to search for personal forms of navigation. And so, the show is ultimately an invitation to face up to our losses of orientation and to try to navigate in new ways. As such, Flare demure constructs a heterotopia, a counterworld of sorts to our everyday reality.

With the kind support of OCA - Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo

Alice Slyngstad lives and works in Oslo. Slyngstad’s works comprise text, sound, video, installation, and performance and have recently been on show in solo and group exhibitions at the Vleeshal Center for Contemporary Art in Middelburg (2022), Palmera in Bergen (2021), and UKS in Oslo (2023). Slyngstad’s performances and films were presented at various institutions including the Bodø Biennale (2020), the EYE Filmmuseum in Amsterdam (2020), the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo (2020), and at Les Urbaines in Lausanne (2019). Slyngstad studied at the Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam and at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.