Annette Marie Kierulf

Annette Kierulf is Professor in Art with focus on Printmaking.

Annette Kierulf´s work ranges across a wide variety of media - from woodcuts, artist books to installation. She uses visual art is as a means of exploring issues on economy, production, technology and contemporary life.

Since graduating from Bergen Academy of Art and Design in 1992 she has worked as an artist, curator and writer. Recent exhibitions include Brannon, Büttner, Kierulf, Kierulf, Kilpper at Bergen Kunsthall and Night work in the Garden at Kunstnerforbundet, Oslo. She is the recipient of many scholarships and has held residency at Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin.

She is Co-Founder and Editor of Kunstjournalen B-post, an independent magazine with annual editions on contemporary art. Each issue discusses current themes through commissioned texts and art projects. The journal is printed in an edition of 4.100 and is supported by Bergen City Council, The Norwegian Council for Cultural Affairs, Fritt Ord, Hordaland County Council and Norwegian Fine Artists Association.

She was the curator of the 4th Momentum - Festival of Contemporary Art, together with Mark Sladen in 2006. From 1999 - 2007 she ran the art project By the Way in the centre of Bergen, a gallery space consisting of five large windows. She has experience with public art commissions as consultant for KORO - Public Art Norway and Art for National Tourist Routes in Norway.

Artistic Research Focus: Woodcuts and Artist Books.

Artistic Research Project:
Kierulf's current artistic research project The Medium is the Message - Wood Cut as Cultural Critique is exploring woodcut and printmaking as discursive tools as well as aesthetic forms of resistance. The result of this research takes the form of exhibitions and publications.

The project is a collaboration between Annette Kierulf and Caroline Kierulf; they make individual works within a common theoretic and thematic frame, with a common artistic research aim: To explore ways of developing woodcut, one of the oldest forms of printmaking and information technology, to become a contemporary medium for critical artistic practice.

One objective of the project is to uncover layers of graphic aesthetic forms that influence contemporary art as well as our everyday visual worlds. In a high-tech society the low-tech medium of woodcut can provide a distanced view on contemporary society. The woodcut - as a media form - has some specific limitations that account for its characteristics.

 
Each medium establishes, as Marshall McLuhan has shown, its own level of meaning. While McLuhan, in the sixties, analysed the role of the new media as carriers of an ideology of progress, that is, in itself constructing the worlds in which we live, Kierulf and Kierulf choose to reverse this line of reasoning and explore what happens if one presents contemporary, hegemonic forms (deriving from the financial world, advertising, popular culture, and new public management) in an old medium such as woodcut. By spelling out these and similar gaps and mismatches between theme and technique, they want to focus attention on some under communicated areas of contemporary media, including the too often neglected values of slow time, ecological sustainability, and a sense of community. Thematically, the project evolves around the social issues of prevailing economic thought, an increasing ecological awareness, and feminism. More specifically, they will look at relations between lifestyle, values, and aesthetic codes.

Annette Kierulf and Caroline Kierulf have worked collaboratively since 1996.

Artistic Research Based Teaching:
"Tegnetank" and "Artist - Academy - Society", Bergen Acedmy of Art and Design.

Dissemination and Knowledge exchange:
Public seminar: 'The Medium Is the Message - Wood cut as Cultural Critique', Bergen, 2011.

Bibliography:
Brannon, Büttner, Kierulf, Kierulf, Kilpper, catalogue, Bergen Kunsthall, 2012.
Håndens kraft, Silje Rønneberg Hogstad, review, Billedkunst nr 6, 2012.
Tresnitt og ripsvin, Stian Gabrielsen, review, Kunstkritikk, 2012.
Norther Comfort, catalogue, Rogaland Kunstsenter, 2001.

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