Lene Berg - The Festival Exhibition 2022

Music & culture

May 20

My father´s desk. One of several cover-photos for Arnljot Berg´s novel “Nøkkelpersoner” (Key peopel) published by Gyldendal Publishing Company in 1981. Foto: Arnljot Berg Estate.

Who: Bergen Kunsthall

What: The Festival Exhibition 2022

Where: Norway, Bergen

Project period: 2022

Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present Lene Berg as Festival Artist 2022. The Festival Exhibition is considered the most important solo presentation for a Norwegian artist in the country and has been shown each summer since 1953, in parallel to the Bergen International Festival (Festspillene i Bergen). Lene Berg works as an artist and filmmaker and over the past two decades has produced outstanding works that question the way in which images create facts. In the Festival Exhibition, she presents an extensive new project titled Fra Far (From Father), which continues her investigation of current socio-political climates through autobiographical material.

Berg was nine years old when her father was arrested in Paris in 1975 and imprisoned for the murder of his wife (the artist's stepmother) Evelyne Zammit. This dramatic childhood experience is the starting point of the project which unfolds in a series of film and audio works, together with scenographic elements, in the main galleries of Bergen Kunsthall. Berg reconstructs her memory of the events and the gaps that exist in her recollection through archival as well as staged film scenes and documents. Confronting harsh autobiographical experiences, the exhibition investigates fundamental questions of guilt, memory, and the collective production of truth. Letters between the father and his children, drawings, objects and smells feature as elements that constitute and create remembrance. Besides her own experiences, the works give voice to other perspectives, to her family but also to outside observers, to friends, and to objects both from her father and that once belonged to the stepmother.

Lene Berg, *Dagen står opp*, 2022. Film still.

Berg’s father – the film director and author Arnljot Berg – took his own life a few years after his release from jail and return to Norway. An influential figure in the Norwegian cultural scene during his lifetime, he left behind a now almost forgotten legacy of movies and short films, novels, stage plays, photographs and vinyl records. In examining her father’s life and work, Berg creates an encounter between a living and a dead artist, a father and a daughter, a woman and a man, and contemporary Norway and the country of the 1960s and 1970s in which Arnljot Berg lived and worked.

Lene Berg, born 1965, lives and works as a film director and visual artist in Berlin and Oslo. She studied film at Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm and has directed four feature-length films in addition to a large number of video works and short films. Berg’s latest production, the autobiographical film False Belief, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019 and was nominated for the Amnesty and Teddy Awards. She represented Norway in the 55th Venice Biennale with the film Dirty Young Loose (2013). The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book that includes material and notes. A novel by the same title will be published in autumn 2022 by the renown Norwegian publisher Kolon.