Jacob Wren on Lene Berg

Lene Berg’s projects often take a historical footnote as source material to reveal paradoxes and gaps in how we see history and its relation to current predicaments. Her work suggests that consensus views of politics, history, sexuality, etc., are often misleading, that they reveal considerably more in what they exclude, in how they leave things out, than they are able to tell us about the machinations of the world or what happened in the past.

In 2008, Jacob Wren wrote an article for C Magazine entitled Glad the CIA Is Immoral which focused on Lene Berg’s project Gentlemen & Arseholes, how it spoke to so many of his ongoing concerns about art and politics. His text ended by going a bit over-the-top, with a last line that read: “Lene Berg is the artist I have been waiting for all of my life.” After a screening of two of her best films - The Man in the Background (20 min, 2006) and Stalin by Picasso or Portrait of Woman with Moustache (30 min, 2008) – Wren will give a presentation that places these projects within a larger context.

Jacob Wren

Jacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Unrehearsed Beauty, Families Are Formed Through Copulation, Revenge Fantasies of the Politically Dispossessed and the upcoming novel Polyamorous Love Song, a finalist for the 2013 Fence Modern Prize in Prose. As co-artistic director of Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created the performances: En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, the HOSPITALITÉ/HOSPITALITY series including Individualism Was A Mistake and The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and their current project Every Song I’ve Ever Written.

Lene Berg

Lene Berg works in an area where text, film and photography alternate, integrate or function simultaneously. She exposes and plays with clichés, structures fact and fantasy in opposition or in duality, struggles with sexual politics while searching for new forms of narration. Lene Berg’s work flows freely between art and cinema while her recent works are the films Kopfkino (2012) and Dirty Young Loose (2013). Kopfkino won the prize for best documentary at the 8th Annual Pornfilmfestival in Berlin 2013 and has been nominated for the Nordic:DOX award in Copenhagen. Dirty Young Loose (2013) was exhibited at the Norwegian Pavilion, La Biennale di Venezia, 2013.