THE CLEAN UP by Marte Bjørndal

 By Art Historian Sladjana Dragicevic Trosic

The Clean up is a project by the artist Marte Cath E. Bjørndal in which she continues her journey along the nomadic meridians (we recall Marte artistic traces from Cape Town, Rio, The Norwegian Parliament to Moscow, Yunnan, Oslo). On the way, she encountered and explored various mechanisms of social and political systems, and, by similarity, connected them with the relation towards poverty, i.e. towards the ways of how the system protects the individual. The conclusion could be, regardless of which geographical meridian you are on and regardless of whether you live in the richest / poorest country in the world, the relation towards the individual who is in need of help is most likely similar. 



At the exhibition The Clean Up, the artist goes further, i.e. deeper into the history of her own case, presenting her personal dramatic and traumatic past in order to understand and translate other people's vulnerability through her own. In that sense, the artist is constantly re-examining her personal struggle within the chains imposed on her by the geographical meridian in which she found herself at that moment. With no intention to condemn anyone and without the need to call out anyone, but with the obligation and a deep human need to understand the lack of (im)perfection of the democratic system, the artist displayed original objects from her life, unopened bills, letters, court orders, various personal belongings i.e biographical data that were publicly available at the time, and which have now spawned an artistic work as such.



In such sense, the exhibition The Clean Up presents a collection of personal items that exceed their specific role and through the concept of open artwork they become a component of the artist's statement. Marte exhibits things from that period that was available - she literally cleanses her personal life, becomes a mole of non-operational, hard-to-reach, cyclical corridors of her past, and brings them to the shelf of critical possibilities in the language of art. At the same time, there is a clear need to re-examine the boundaries of the abstract and the associative apparatus that the artist is dealing with; likewise, an interesting analogy with the art of arte povera as a logical consequence of the relocation of utilitarian objects into the framework of artistic endeavor and through the expression of the facts. On the other hand, redefining utilitarian objects through the artists’ installations gives them a new meaning and redefines them on the level of a mythical story: from the exhibition „Prologue“ (2010) - the thought that we are „the owners“ of our lives without a clear understanding whether we truly know it, with the actual work “Post Traumatic” (assemblage, 303 x 200 cm, 2022) being a sort of an epilogue - representing the life through various artifacts (in this case the artist presented an assemblage of several hundred unopened bills), without any intention to contrive them as limited by their primary, denotative practice. 



For more than a decade, the artist Marte Bjørndal seems to have been moving between several aspects of the artistic expression: a) abstract - potentially emotional, i.e. existential, personal, unrepeatable, intuitive, different, b) associative - potentially mathematical, i.e. meaningful, substantial, measured, precise, tangible, and c) symbolic. The latter is recognized in the work “Muldvarp” (collage, 535 x 220 cm) where the title is written among the unidentified masses directly symbolizing the need for a better understanding of oneself / others, as a reconnection with nature, as an elementary determinant.



The exhibition The Clean Up“ represents a clear demand for freedom, i.e. for the specific way of seeing the world. In this sense, the artist, through constantly questioning her past, consciously and intentionally metamorphosed the form of a media symbol („Everyday Hang Ups“) to the level of personal acceptance and eventually to its presentation. Without the intention of providing the answer as the final form of pleasure, she emphasizes that the pleasure is in the infinite version of consciously doing good both towards oneself and to the others. Provided that we truly are aware of the good as such.