Matias Faldbakken’s show at Galleria Huuto deals with the dialectic between independent underground culture and the commercial mainstream. This theme is furthered into questions concerning the grey areas between traditional positions of ‘power’ and ‘rebellion’ respectively.
Two videos will be presented in the show. One of Us (2005) shows a clip from Tod Browning’s notorious Freaks (1932), where the ‘freaks’ are welcoming a new member to their community. Seen in light of contemporary culture’s fetishsation of uniqueness, the clip distorts ideas around inclusion in- and exclusion from the normative, and in that way shakes the hierarchical ladder.
Movie Scenes Where The Problem Gets Bigger If Or When They Fight It (2004) presents a few examples of the film industry’s formulations around the idea of co-optation and appropriation of resistance – a nightmarish fantasy that also tend to haunt cultures of opposition.
A free newspaper is also made for the occasion. It bears the name See You On The Front Page Of The Last Newspaper Those Motherfuckers Ever Print and uses the format of the traditional broadsheet newspaper as an arena for textual and visual improvisation and anarchic semi-satire.
Finally, Faldbakken’s latest novel Macht und Rebel (2002) will be presented. The book was translated into Finnish last year and published by Johnny Kniga. The novel tells the story of a left-wing rebel who teams up with a progressive trend consultant to avenge himself on the activist community that he has learned to hate deeply.
Faldbakken has exhibited at KunsWerke, Berlin, Kunstverein München, Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Biennale of Sydney and Momentum – the Nordic Festival of Contemporary Art. This summer he will be the Norwegian participant in the Nordic Pavilion at the Biennale of Venice. He has published two novels and resides in Oslo, Norway.
