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WETLANDS

Marius Presterud

Curated by Exgirlfriend

May 28th, 2021 - June 25th, 2021

Exgirlfriend

Lankwitzerstr. 14, 12107

By appointment

Opening Reception

May 28th @ 18.00

Limited space//registration needed

Exgirlfriendberlin.com

Sympoietic sensibility, or lack thereof, runs like a red thread through Marius Presterud’s first solo exhibition in Berlin, WETLANDS.

For WETLANDS, Presterud presents site-specific works from the ecologies of two urban cultural centers of Europe: Svartkulp, the swamp and wetlands surrounding Oslo, the capital city of Norway, and Exgirlfriend, located just outside the city-center of Berlin.

Svartkulp was wrongfully assumed to be Oslo's geographical center for some twenty years, and as such, follows in a long line of miscalculations concerning human centeredness. Replying to the current libertarian Norwegian government’s encouragement of artists to focus on making more profitable art, Presterud follows this encouragement to its logical conclusion in his work from Svartkulp. At Exgirlfriend, Presterud presents works whose primary participants/audience are bats, bees, and night butterflies, reflecting practices that are oriented towards survival on a damaged planet and doomsday prepping, rather than future optimism and eternal growth, hinting at a respite from humanist utopian escapism.

Working in the overlap between art and ecosystemic change, Presterud calls his activities services, suggesting a consolidating, non-reactionary stance. Service distinguishes itself from activism through the self-inclusion in immediate, situated, complex and emerging relationships and ecologies, rather than reaching outward to change some external concept or forces or a self contained act. This marks a shift from anthropocentric sentiments towards a perspective of ‘becoming-with’ the forces at hand, and by doing so, replacing concepts of guilt and culpability with response-ability.

Marius Presterud (b.1980, Drammen) is a Norwegian artist based in Berlin and Oslo. He works across a variety of media; performance, poetry, sculpture and ecoventions, as well as in academia and psychotherapy. He has toured Europe and been a featured poet at venues in Paris, Berlin and Istanbul, and he has performed in established galleries such as the Henie Onstad Art Center, Norway, and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany. In 2018 he was a debutant at Norway's 131. National Art Exhibition.

www.osloapiary.com

Image: production image by Siv Dolmen