Robert Carter: So if I am not a twitcher, and this is not an exhibition about pigeons, what is it?

Åpner fredag 30. september kl. 18 – 19.

Åpent kl. 12.00 – 17.00 hver dag unntatt mandag som er lukket.
NB: Torsdag åpent kl 13.00 – 20.00.
Gratis adgang.

Restrictions were lifted. The covid marquee finally taken down. I flew to France. I read the newspaper (online). The newspaper was called ‘La Montaigne’ after the volcanoes which loom over the city. In La Montaigne I read about a baker who raced Pigeons in the Tour de France Colombophile. I thought a Tour de France of pigeon racing sounded pretty fun so I got in touch with him. He said he would happily share his passion with me and told me to come back and bring a camera.

The truth is I am no more interested in pigeons than anyone else. I guess they are a bit annoying. The idea behind bird watching is not that you spend time looking at pigeons. Bird watchers look for rare birds, birds they haven’t yet seen. So if I am not a twitcher, and this is not an exhibition about pigeons, what is it?

For me I can never escape context. It’s a failure of my own imagination. In France I found myself thinking about artistic labour. I asked myself, what is the artist’s relationship to class? Sure we work for money, we are both poor and middle class. We rely on the state for support and feed the landlord class with our meagre wages. The people pay the artist and the artist pays the landlord. Is this a good system? Is this the system we want? If it isn’t, is it possible to change it and if so how?

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Robert Carter is an artist and writer from a former mill town north of Manchester. From 2016-2018 he was an Associate Artist of the Liverpool Biennial. He graduated from the Bergen Art Academy with an MFA in 2020 with his first short film Notes on Dad (2020). His follow up film The Archive is Present (2021) takes the theme of hoarding from the first film and moves into the realm of photography and data storage. In 2022 he was selected for the 100 day residency program with Artistes en Résidence, in Clermont-Ferrand, France.
www.robcarter.org

Exhibition made possible with financial support from
Norsk kulturfond / Kulturådet and Bergen Kommune

Production Support from Hordaland Kunstsenter
Thanks to BEK – Bergen Centre for Electronic Art