One of Erlend's other projects

I am sitting in the Jimjilbang reading my emails properly here at night and realize that our companion Erlend Hammer has written the following press release for a show opening at Lautom Contemporary in Oslo now June 28th. Nice little text, it's just a press release, he did not curate the show (my other friend Raimar Stange did,) but he wrote this text for it. I wanted to link directly to the website HERE, but for some reason it is not online there nor is he credited. But here it is for all the our dedicated friends who follow our work in Seoul:

So there I was in Berlin generally minding my own business and then Randi flew down so that I could meet Raimar. ”I think you two will really get along” she said. ”What the hell?” I thought. ”You could be brothers” she said when we were sitting in Raimar’s kitchen. ”What? Nooo...” Raimar and I both said with exactly the same look on our faces.

”Historyteller.” There’s something just slightly off with that word. It’s very close to what we are used to, but that little prefix suddenly makes all the difference and adds a tension that transgresses the cosiness of just telling stories. It’s like in that great episode in season 7 of Buffy where Andrew the reformed geek is telling the story of “Buffy- slayer of the vampires.” Immediately your ears prick up.

Raimar tells us that the exhibition is structured in sections: history of pop culture, history of politics, history of science, history of architecture, history of art. So then it’s a history of the Project of Enlightenment, I think. But now that all that is over and done with, should we still understand it as a collection of different histories developing in parallel alongside each other? Of course not. In reality they’re all branches of the same thing, the human storytelling that makes up the entirety of our shared histories and cultures. Not so much autonomous units within a framework, and more like different genres within a shared social practice. Science, for example, is the genre where we tell the story of how to master nature. Art is the genre where, depending on certain preferences, we tell stories amuse and delight, or shock and raise awareness. A huge part of modernity was about defining how these genres differed, and a large part of postmodernity has been about describing how they are similar. So we’ve become more interested in how they don’t differ. There is difference, of course, but it is usually of focus, not kind.

Returning the difference between story and history, the central issue here concerns how the word history writes a check that story knows won’t clear. History makes certain demands that story usually does not. History is what happened. A story is what I want to tell you. For this exhibition the phrase is adjusted, so that your attention is projected towards how it is a history that I want to tell you. Well maybe not I, but Matthew Antezzo, Isabell Heimerdinger, Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Elke Marhöfer, Karina Nimmerfall, Peter Pommerer, Julia Schulz, Veronika Schumacher, Christine Würmell. And Raimar Stange brought them together to do so at Lautom Contemporary, Randi Thommessen’s gallery in Oslo.

So then, back in Raimar’s kitchen, we talk about football, whether or not Bill Drummond is just a cynic and how Øystein Aasan had told Randi that Raimar probably shouldn’t hang the exhibition by himself. And then suddenly Randi says that the real reason we needed to meet was because I would be writing the press release for the exhibition. “Sometimes Erlend is kind of a gonzo writer” she said. “I don’t care” Raimar said.

Erlend Hammer