The acclaimed Norwegian performance artist Ane Lan, alias Eivind Reierstad, will this summer perform at the Surreal House - a space of mystery, enchantment, subversion and desire at the Barbican Gallery.
Ane Lan is a Norwegian artist working in the field of performance, music and experimental film/video. His works address the complex relationship between media, the body, the viewer and society itself with its preconceptions and judgments. These visions fuse the boundaries between life and art in an intoxicating layering of meanings and myths.
The Surreal House, part of Barbican Art Gallery, is at times enchanting, playful and at others, deeply disturbing. It is a place that is everything that the rational, functional Modernist house is not. Orchestrated as a labyrinthine journey of exploration and discovery, an exhibition leaflet and accompanying book will nonetheless explain the themes that underpin the selection.
Ane Lan’s new groundbreaking exhibition is the first to explore the significance of the house within Surrealism and its legacies: A female Freud interrogates a woman on the couch: her dreams are shown as films, and are narrated live by a countertenor. 'Dream Chamber' seeks to interpret and project the unconscious meaning of society’s ‘neurotic’ symptoms. The needs underlying these symptoms are difficult to acknowledge, hence our denial and self-delusion, and we are invited to wake up. The performance itself will actually be in Norwegian, with subtitles in English.
Ane Lan alias Eivind Reierstad was born in Oslo in 1972. He graduated from the National College of Art and design in Oslo in 2002 and has since participated in various international exhibitions, such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, Paco das Artes, Sao Paolo, the 51th Venice Biennial and the 10th Istanbul Biennial. Lan has also participated in numerous film & video festivals worldwide.
In addition to Ane Lan, there will also be another Norwegian contribution at Surreal House in July. The London-based artist Ole Hagen from Norway works with video, sculpture and large scale drawings. In his video work, he combines found locations with constructed stage sets, masks and sculpted figures with living bodies. There is a strong theatrical aesthetics to Hagen's practice, that insists on the idea that DIY artifact and real affect can co-exist. This theatrical impulse has recently found an outlet in performance. At the event 'Fun House' at the Barbican Centre on 1 July, Hagen will perform in the style of a circus master from a mystical travelling road show.
Ane Lan: Dream Chamber - Part of Freud and Surrealism
29 July, 7.30pm
The Pit
The Surreal House
Barbican Centre
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS
Tickets: £12
Book online
Fun House
The Surreal House
1 July, 8pm
Barbican Centre
Silk Street
London EC2Y 8DS