OSLO, NO
Oslo Kunsthall ︎︎︎ 22. mars, 2002
Oslo Kunsthall ︎︎︎ 23. mars, 2002

Henriette Pedersen works with an artform, which in Great Britain would pass under the label of Live Art.  In Norway you could call her art performance, dance or even theatre.  However her work exceeds all those genre descriptions. What characterises Pedersen’s work is the use of live presence and staged reality that takes absurd forms. She reveals the madness of reality as well as commenting on the absurdity of the art business. The performance and the physical context of the performance space, including the audience, becomes the art piece.

In her earlier work Pedersen has questioned if it is the art piece itself that becomes the subject of interest within a western discourse, or if it is the words and the theory created around it that becomes the main focus of interest. Her staging of reality, where the situation itself is the artpiece, questions our concept of reality as well as the authenticity of the experience.

Pedersen trained as a choreographer at the Norwegian State Ballet School, and her final work in 2000 "Utidig Innsyn" got a lot of attention. «Utidig Innsyn» took place in an empty apartment in the city centre of Oslo, where the audience was presented to a selection of Cato Nartman jr’s collection of the fictional artist Bebe Rabin’s "autonomous human installations". Works that are living art pieces, or installations, focused on «bodily variations of the human anomali».