From Kinga Bartis’s quietly captivating paintings to Madeleine Andersson’s nauseating footage of human brains, this year’s participants in Bergen select their favourite recent exhibitions
At the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz this autumn, during Austrian election season, a large banner hung over the façade of KM– Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien. The banner showed a photograph of Austrian artist, curator and musician Jörg Schlick, sat at a café table in a meadow wearing a beige dress, sunglasses, a hat and brown leather sandals, and holding two crutches in his left hand. In the background, one sees a pond and hair-curler shaped sculptures on a hill. If one knew of the artist’s 2005 cancer diagnosis, the dress could be identified as a hospital gown. There is a fragile glamour in the staging of ambiguity in this photograph, taken a year before Schlick’s death in December 2005.
