BIOGRAPHY
Linn Cecilie Ulvin is trained as a visual artist, a writer and an actor/director, and she works with emphasis on the written word, installation and performance. She also curates exhibits and does commissioned work within the art sector at large. Her work is essentially interdisiplinary. With the hybrid as a starting point, she finds many ways of experimenting with different forms of artistic expression, different medias and combinations of realities. Discussions on gender, sexuality, and identity are subjects she is deeply affected by. Her work is often in the framework of documentation, in the realm of fiction and reality. By staging and trying on different identities and points of views, she wishes to explore and question our understandings of reality. She is interested in a kind of self-investment, more than a staging read as superficial posing. This calls for the willingness to take risks, where the process and the final work of art sometimes are two sides of the same story. The atmosphere and valour of her work often combines humour, performability and vulnerability as important aesthetic and narrative expressions.
Ulvin has exhibited performances and theatre work in Norway, Europe and China, and participated on various exhibitions and artprojects. She has published two novels and written material in different foras. In 2007 she curated The Vestlands Exhibition in Norway, and in 2003 through 2006, she collaborated with Hjørdis Kurås initiating the concept UTKANTEN (outskirts)- initiative for flexibility at UKS, Oslo, focusing on projects related to video, sound and performance. They also curated the videofestival JOHN SKIES or SALLY SWIMS, presenting fifty video artists from Norway and San Francisco.
Ulvin is educated at Oslo National Academy of The Arts and Skrivekunstakademiet in Hordaland. Her background is
physical theatre and she has for several years worked with theatre and performance art in her own company. In 1991 she established Kompaniet Panterbiffene together with Toril Goksøyr and Maria Joynt, a company which played an important role on the ninetys fringe-theatre scene. (1991-1998). Dealing with multippel artistic expressions has been a natural development. Ulvin had her debut as an author at Tiden Norsk Forlag in 2001, the year before she graduated from The Art Academy, with the novel The Sky Behind Is Exhaustingly Blue (Himmelen bak er slitsomt blå). In 2005 she published her second novel Closer To Love (Nærmere kjærligheten).
Thematically Ulvin has for some years been particularly interested in activism and rebellion, and the phenomenon of fire. She has examined the role of people who set fire to buildings (pyromaniacs) and fire related to rituals, as well as looking at fire as metaphor for psychological processes through installation, performance and text.
In the performance Report From A Suburb, participants from a suburb of Beijing facing the very real threat of demolishion, performed a mix between a protest and a ritual burning of a house. The installation Denounce Me Before It's Too Late the audience partake in the confessions of a pyromaniac. The novel Nærmere kjærligheten (Closer To Love) is about fire and setting fire, examining an artist's art making process.
In her later works, Ulvin is alongside with her fine art projects, working on her third novel, trying to make spatial meeting points where text, visuality and performativity is focused on. The Unforgivble, The Remorse and Stories About The Silent Woods, is some kind of joynt title for this body of work. So far the manifestations has differed: The video-performance Gartner i egen Hage, was shown at Podium, Oslo in 2009. The text and picturebook Wild Tree, which was published in 2010, is a collaboration with the fine artist Vanna Bowles, where Ulvin has contributed with the written material. Bowles and Ulvin has later had a performance called Wild Tree Live, a reading on the book at The House of Litterature in Oslo. In 2010 Ulvin had a soloshow in Telemark, Norway, showing installation and performance based on her third novel. She has also been represented with a tekstbased work at Bowles solo shows at Hordaland Art Centre and Angelika Knäpper Gallery, Stockholm in 2010 and at Galleri Thomassen in Gothenburg, 2011.
In 2011 Ulvin is completing a public art commision at Bjørnsveen Secondary School in Gjøvik, Norway, a project she was invited to do togehter with Bowles. She will also participate in an interdiciplinary project in performing arts, initiated by the artist collective Wrap, which endpoint is a tour of performances at various theatre venues in Norway. In 2010 Ulvin was, together with Bowles, assigned an artist residency at Ringsveen, Jakob and Anne Weidemanns estate in Lillehammer, where she will work until the autumn of 2011.
Next to her artistic practice Ulvin does teaching assignments in fine art and creative writing. She has taught at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Oslo National Academy of The Arts, and has had writing workshops in the primary and secondary school. Ulvin also does consulting in the cultural field. She has worked as an consultant for Buskerud County Municipality, planning development and organization of the regional film field, in the forefront of political decision-making, as an artconsultant for Public Art Norway (KORO), and she is assosiated with the company NameAbrand as a consultant/name developer. Currently she is engaged in three different projects for Public Art Norway(KORO).
Linn Cecilie Ulvin lives and works in Oslo, Norway.
26.04.2011
BIOGRAPHY (pdf)
CV (pdf)
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