23.8. — 15.9.2024

The works exhibited at Forum Box are part of the larger research project Landmarks, which explores land demarcations, territorial struggles and language. The project encompasses sculptures, installations and live actions, and for the show at Forum Box it is presented through a textile piece and a video documentation of a performance, which premiered at this year’s Festspillene i Nord–Norge in Harstad.

The textile weaves together advertisement banners collected from public space, and hangs as a 7-meter long flag in the gallery. The piece is created in collaboration with visual artists Sarah Key (Brazil) and Terje Grimen (Norway). For this work, Key designed a typography based on pixação: a style of street tagging born in the peripheries of São Paulo. Pixação is a coded language, a type of performative writing on walls, facades, buildings and monuments, which is historically linked with acts of protest against repressive regimes. The calligraphy of pixação is often repetitive, quick-to-execute inscriptions, symbols or hieroglyphic characters in black and white. OIMOMARÃ, originally a word from Tupi-Guarani language, means “to survive in adverse times”.

In the video documentation we see five performers enacting different actions in public space. Their performative scores are based on theatrical games developed by Brazilian artist and activist Augusto Boal in his seminal work Theater of the Oppressed, as well as archival images, newspaper material and US Army field manuals. They appear and disappear in the landscape, performing a series of images inspired by military exercises, displays of authority and discipline, police control, resistance movements and collective actions. 

Bianca Hisse  (b. 1994, São Paulo, Brasil) lives and works in Oslo. She holds a Master in Visual Arts from Kunstakademiet i Tromsø (2019). Her works have been exhibited across Norway and internationally, including: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Finland (2023), Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Germany (2023), Kunstnernes Hus, Norway (2020), MAR Museo, Argentina (2021). Her projects have also been included at the Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennial (San Marino), and BienalSur: International Biennial of Contemporary Art of South America (2021).