YES, WE CAN CANGE

With the exhibition YES, WE CAN CHANGE Hans E. Thorsen examines the mediatory potential of posters. As part of this project the windows of Volt have been plastered with the exhibition posters, blurring the boundaries of the work of art and its secondary signage. The poster has also been mounted around the city as conventional advertising for the exhibition.

The poster project can be seen in relation to what Thorsen calls “art as disturbance of official media” - both as probematizing people’s expectations of posters and their assumption that the gallery will be displaying something other than its signage. The slogan YES, WE CAN CHANGE has been inspired by political posters; a medium that the artists thinks has all but disappeared from the Norwegian public sphere.

A common thread that runs through Hans E. Thorsen's practice is the undermining of expectations towards different media and modes of expression as well as investigations into the role and function of documentary. He often works site-specifically, both within and outside the gallery space.

Hans E. Thorsen graduated with an MA from the Academy of Fine Art at KHIO, Oslo in the spring of 2008. His degree show included the project “The Road to the Stenersen Museum” at Kikut and the Stenersen Museum in Oslo. This site-specific work consisted of a series of signs placed around Nordmarka (a popular area for walking and skiing outside Oslo) and a series of photographs of these works in situ. The signs were produced by the Skiing Association and were, as such, official, but they displayed the current distance of the viewer from the Stenersen Museum. The works mimicked existing signs in Nordmarka situated where the ski tracks cross, which indicate the direction and distance to various destinations, and were appended to these.

Thorsen’s BA project from 2006 was entitled “About an office and my mother Anniken Thorsen”, where the artist moved his mother, who was the director of The Relief Fund for Visual Artists, and her entire office to the Stenersen Museum, where she worked for six weeks. Thorsen was part of the art project Collaborism at this year’s Autumn Exhibition; he a member of the artists’ collective Sisyfos Minigolfklubb; and also works as a writer and art critic.