Femtensesse proudly presents a solo presentation of Marthe Ramm Fortun at Liste Art Fair Basel. Fortun forms emphatic connections with the audience in ambulating performance series and ephemeral sculptural interventions. For Liste Art Fair Basel she will present such a connection between a site specific installation in the booth interconnected with a series of performances extending from the fair out into public space. Fortun’s reactive works confront a gulf between the vulnerable individual and the historically governed representation of the female body, extending to stigma surrounding life and work when you belong to one or more categories of otherness.
In the work Fortun will present at Liste, entitled Life Hacks I’ve Picked up from Death Notices,
Performance schedule:
Monday June 12 at 2 pm
Wednesday June 14 at 6 pm
Saturday June 17 at 4 pm
Each performance , typically lasting twenty minutes and each performance unique, starts in Femtensesse’s booth (Booth 83) at Liste Art Fair at Messe Basel, Hall 1.1 before extending into public space.
Liste Art Fair Basel Messe Basel, Hall 1.1
Fortun considers unpaid care work in a wider sense. For the artist, there is a strong connection between the leaking maternal body, non normative pregnancy and birth experiences that interconnects with her being the daughter of an addict. Intergenerational boundaries and bodily control dissolves in vomit, feces, excess, ecstasy, love and a form of backwards aging and regression that further complicates the experience of motherhood. At the time of creating this work she was in the process of stopping to breast-feed with the professional complications it had entailed to nurse her child for more than two years. In a time consuming format with no obvious value, straddled by the paternal ghosts of art history, Fortun questions the general use of performance art as a cheap content generator in a neo-capitalist value system.
Marthe Ramm Fortun (b. 1978, Oslo) lives and works in Oslo, Norway, where she is adjunct professor at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Fortun received her education from University of the Arts,
London, New York University, New York and HISK – Higher Institute of Fine Art, Ghent. Recent solo exhibitions include Skriver for ikke å skade at Femtensesse, Oslo (2022); TA VARE! at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo (2019); Stones to the Burden at The Munch Museum, Oslo (2016) and Skrive
byen, skrive den om at UKS, Oslo (2014). Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and biennials in Norway and abroad including Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal; Monnaie de Paris, Paris; Gladstone Gallery, Brussels; The Vigeland Museum, Oslo; Komplot, Brussels; Performatik, Brussels and Performa, New York. Current projects include ALL SHE LEFT BEHIND!, a museum acquisition of five performances at Henie Onstad Art Center, Høvikodden (2021- 2022); a new commission entitled All What Matters for The National Museum, Oslo (2022-2023);
and We Shall Not Write Textbooks (2019-2029), a ten-year performance cycle for the project Minerva’s Voice at the Museum of Natural History in Bergen, curated by Marit Paasche and commissioned by KORO – Public Art Norway.
Entrance behind Art Unlimited Maulbeerstrasse / corner Riehenring 113 4058 Basel
A selection of Marthe Ramm Fortun’s work is presented online at Liste Showtime from June 7 – 25, 2023.
For further information or sales inquiries please visit femtensesse.no or contact Jenny Kinge at jenny@femtensesse.no / + 47 414 29 679.
Photo: Julie Hrnčířová
With generous support from OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway and Norwegian Visual Artists Fund
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