BERGEN.- The eight-story tall former grain silo, now housing the Bergen School of Architecture, frames an exhibition of ceramic works by Lynda Benglis. Consisting of sculptures from the early 1990s through to today, Glacier Burger probes Benglis’s unique method of collapsing, bending, and beating machine-shaped rectangular pieces of clay into energetic forms, resonating with her previous engagement with folds and knots.

The exhibition at the Bergen School of Architecture concludes with a one-day conference titled Slithering Green, loosely inspired by Benglis’s ceramic oeuvre and other vibrant materials. Slithering Green is organized in collaboration with Bergen Academy of Art and Design.

Timed to coincide with the conference, Bergen Assembly opened Double Albatross at Kunstgarasjen. This exhibition debuts a new series of paper sculptures, fresh from Lynda Benglis’s studio in Santa Fe. Created with handmade paper and wire, the painted, glittering pieces draw on several topics of investigation conducted by the artist over the last fifty years: shapes drawn from clay; the shimmering, bright materials of her Louisiana upbringing and Mardi Gras memories (recalling her 1970s series of Sparkle Knots); an unapologetic use of knick-knacks (as seen in her work produced in India); and the synthetic painterly experiments of her early pours.

MARVIN GAYE CHETWYND
As part of PRAXES’s year-long enquiry into Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s practice, Bergen Assembly invites audiences to participate in the unfolding of performances, and to experience paintings, props, inspirational sources, and the numerous other facets that combine to make up her work.

Following the participatory Iron Age Pasta Necklace Workshop (2004–) in February, the exhibition … Are u Bats? 1 focuses on Chetwynd’s Bat Opera paintings. The ongoing series of small-scale works spans over almost two decades. Cute and horrendous, cheeky and ferocious, the Bat Opera paintings repeatedly depict the same nightmarish (or innocent) motif—bats, in a range of environments, from turbulent skies to architectural follies. Currently on show in the lobby of the brutalist Bergen City Hall, the exhibition will expand and outgrow its current location, spreading to other parts of the city during 2016.

Thriving on the artist’s initial encounters in Bergen, as well as choreographic experiments with rehearsal and repetition, Chetwynd creates a new episodic commission for Bergen Assembly, invented and reconfigured in three stages. The inaugural act—premiering at Visningsrommet USF with a live performance on April 29—is created in collaboration with a troupe of participants summoned around elderly members of the local community. Imagining the future channeled through an aged wisdom, The Elixia App (Episode One) introduces hand-printed slogans, a medieval hellmouth, circular collective paintings, and moving sculptures. Influenced by business magazine advice and perceived Norwegian norms of collectivity, the tandem performance and exhibition seek to both empower and extract the wealth of experience of the city's mature citizens.