Stream, installation Small Projects (2018)

Søndag 21. okt kl 16.30 / LIVE STREAM / HARSTAD CINEMA SAL 2

In “Stream”, by Alfred Benedict Marasigan, the artist will do a live stream from a non-place in Harstad, inviting the audience to see the stream live in the cinema, on location with the artist or online. A homage to light, place, and the moment. Inspired by the widespread use of livestreaming across all online media and the peculiar popularity of Norwegian slow TV, the project responds to the seemingly minute, banal, and insignificant narratives being told every day.

Artist statement

My practice revolves around Canadian geographer Edward Relph’s “sense of place.” I’ve always made art in relation to where I am and I often investigate the questions “Why am I here?” and “Who am I where? How or in what form?” Introspection, phenomenology, and cultural geography are significant elements of my practice.

I am a Filipino gay millennial middle-class contemporary artist; these identifiers I use for myself carry individually charged associations that I struggle to escape, embrace, repurpose, and reevaluate every day. Landscape painting has often been my entry point, middle ground, and safe space for these inquiries, and it has helped me situate myself in a world where I keep questioning who I was, am, and should be.

Currently, I have been concerned with how these questions are recontextualized by my stay in Tromsø. I can feel my worldview changing drastically in a very peculiar place in the world, and I continuously attempt to negotiate my conflicted existence into historical and technological spaces through my new media works. Ultimately, the spatio-bigoraphical elements of my works consistently explore the complexities and ambiguities of belonging.

Stream, Tromsø (2018).

Alfred Marasigan (b. 1992) is born and raised in Batangas, Philippines. He graduated from Ateneo de Manila University and have taught visual art history, painting, and aesthetics in that institution. His background in landscape painting led to a spatio-biographical practice informed by cultural geography, local Romanticisms, and virtuality. He is currently taking up his MA in Contemporary Art at Kunstakademiet i Tromsø. At the moment, his works are concerned with his experiences in Northern Norway. His other artworks have also been included in various local and foreign exhibitions in and publications with Small Projects (Tromsø), c3 Contemporary Art Space (Melbourne), The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Los Angeles), Galerie Métanoïa (Paris), Poh Chang Academy (Thailand), Cultural Center fo the Philippines (Pasay City), Toshima City Hall (Tokyo), Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Manila); and publications like Fordham University’s CURA Magazine, SFMoMA’s Tumblr, and Ateneo’s Heights, among others

Screenshots Stream, Tromsø (2018)