BERGEN.- Bergen Kunsthall is presenting Lene Berg as Festival Artist 2022. The Festival Exhibition is considered the most important solo presentation for a Norwegian artist in the country and has been shown each summer since 1953, in parallel to the Bergen International Festival (Festspillene i Bergen). Lene Berg works as an artist and filmmaker and over the past two decades has produced outstanding works that question the way in which images create facts. In the Festival Exhibition, she presents an extensive new project titled Fra Far (From Father), which continues her investigation of current socio-political climates through autobiographical material.

Berg was nine years old when her father was arrested in Paris in 1975 and imprisoned for the murder of his wife (the artist’s stepmother) Evelyne Zammit. This dramatic childhood experience is the starting point of the project, which unfolds in a series of film and audio works, shown together with scenographic elements, in the main galleries of Bergen Kunsthall. Berg reconstructs her memory of the events and the gaps that exist in her recollection through archival as well as staged film scenes and documents. Letters between her father and his children, drawings, objects, and smells feature as elements that constitute and create remembrance. Confronting harsh autobiographical experiences, the exhibition investigates fundamental questions of guilt, memory, and the collective production of truth. Apart from her own experiences, the works give voice to other perspectives, to her family but also to outside observers, to friends, and to objects that both had belonged to her father and her stepmother. In one of the videos, actors invited to audition for the role of the father share their thoughts on how to shape the role. In an audio work situated in the most intimate exhibition space and placed next to an installation of textile works dedicated to Evelyne Zammit, Berg remembers her own questions as a child and her mother’s answers.

Berg’s father–the film director and author Arnljot Berg–took his own life a few years after his release from jail and return to Norway. An influential figure in the Norwegian cultural scene during his lifetime, he left behind an almost forgotten legacy of movies and short films, novels, stage plays, photographs, and vinyl records. In examining her father’s life and work, Berg creates an encounter between a living and a dead artist, a father and a daughter, a woman and a man, and contemporary Norway and the country of the 1960s and 1970s in which Arnljot Berg lived and worked.

“I believed, for many years, that it was all behind me and that, even though it had shaped me, it was not something I needed to think about anymore. But then, suddenly, my long since deceased father stood before me. My dear beloved father, what the hell are you doing here? I have an awful lot to do, I can’t think about you now, maybe later, but now I don’t have time!

But this time there was no way to avoid him. Just like when he was alive, he demanded my full attention. He insisted it had to happen now, because soon you will also die, he said, you don’t think that you’re the only one who is going to get out of this alive?”

The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book that includes material and notes. A novel by the same title will be published in autumn 2022 by the renown Norwegian publisher Kolon.

Lene Berg, born 1965, is a film director and visual artist based in Berlin and Oslo. She studied film at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm and has directed four feature-length films in addition to a large number of video works and short films. Berg’s latest production, the autobiographical film False Belief, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 and was nominated for the Amnesty and Teddy Awards. She represented Norway in the 55th Venice Biennale with the film Dirty Young Loose (2013).

“We are very happy to have this opportunity to work with the outstanding artist and filmmaker Lene Berg on her new project for the Festival Exhibition in 2022. Her earlier works have taken up social themes, with great insight and a special awareness for the complexity of what we experience as lived reality. Her new project is not only her most personal but also her most investigative work. In the galleries of Bergen Kunsthall she translates a filmic experience into an exhibition format.” --Axel Wieder, Director f Bergen Kunsthall