Marthe Ramm Fortun’s art project Stones to the Burden consists of a sculpture, a publication with commissioned texts alongside the artist’s travelogue, and a performance on Oslo’s number 20 bus route in August 2016. Tøyen as a site is the point of departure for this project, which investigates the dynamic between artist, audience and the public sphere.
The Bering Rose marble slabs are naturally lined with organic sediments. The large stone tablet has been cut to fit the size of the suitcase used to transport it and engraved with the words ”Friend, give me soul and mouth!” a quote by Norwegian poet Gunvor Hofmo (1921-1995). The small tablets derive their shape from Ramm Fortun’s sketchbook, and are inscribed with the artist’s chosen symbols for mouth and soul. From time to time, Ramm Fortun will remove the stone tablets from Munchmuseet’s atrium and take them to Tøyensenteret, inviting bystanders to handle the tablets in a tactile, verbal exchange. These interactions will generate a travelogue that the artist will draw on during a performance with the stone tablets at the end of August on the number 20 bus, which traverses Oslo from west to east.
Marthe Ramm Fortun (Oslo, 1978) lives and works in Oslo. She has recently held performances at KW Institute of Contemporary Art (Berlin), Beaux-Arts (Paris), Bozar Center for Fine Arts (Brussels), Stavanger Kunstmuseum (Stavanger) and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Høvikodden). Skrive byen, skrive den om was the title of her recent solo exhibition at the Young Artists’ Society (UKS) in Oslo, and she participated in a duo exhibition with Kasper Bosmans entitled Yesterday was different at Komplot in Brussels. Fortun has published 100 situasjoner (Aschehoug, 2013) in the Stemmer series that marked the centenary of women’s suffrage in Norway, and Inverted Sky; Letters to Jackie (Blackdog Publishing, 2014), based on her site-specific project at Grand Central Terminal for Performa 13 (New York, 2013). Fortun is a guest teacher at the Academy of Fine Art in Oslo (KHiO).
Jenny Kinge (1985) is an Oslo-based curator and co-curator of Marthe Ramm Fortun’s project for Munchmuseet on the Move. In addition to her freelance curatorial practice, Kinge works for the artist-run exhibition space 1857 in Tøyenbekken.
