The Withdrawal of the Red Army
Exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the exhibition Den røde armés tilbaketrekning | Возвращение Красной Армии | The Withdrawal of the Red Army which is created in the context of the shared history between Norway and Russia, as seen from a northern perspective. A history that until recently has been under-communicated, but has global significance.
Time, memory, resistance and play form the conceptual anchors for the exhibition itself. Works are contextualized to evoke a spatial poetics premised upon intersecting historical eras, geographical borders, psychological lacunae, and both living and dead ideologies. Thematically, it revolves around notions of history writing and constructions of reality through language, the negotiation of collective trauma through games and play, camouflage, appropriation and repetition, alternate endings as well as questions of originality and authenticity in the work of art.