ART-PRESENTATION:Lina Viste Grønli

In her work the Norvegian artist Grønli explores art as an alternative strategy and as a tool within alienation, through mediums that include sculpture, photography, collage, and writing, often her works deconstruct language as a narrative form. Her work investigates the tensions between physical things and abstract systems, particularly those of linguistics and philosophy.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MIT List Visual Arts Center Archive

Lina Viste Grønli with humor, and using everyday objects and materials, she considers categories that have been historically opposed and interprets the excess or remainder that is uncontained by these binary structures. The most common one in the English language, the letter E, is her starting point for her new body of work that is exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. A number of the works transform ordinary pieces of furniture into the visual form of an E. She plays with a tenet of structural linguistics, namely that the relationship between signs and the sounds they designate is arbitrary. The titles of these works that physicalize the letter E also use words that begin with the letter E. However, the artist interrupts her system of Es with assemblies of everyday objects bearing no evident connection to the letter. Mussel shells, kitchen utensils, and an apple are adhered to or rest upon books. Playing with the systematic and the arbitrary, these juxtapositions are generated through a method she calls “thinging”.

Info: List Projects: Lina Viste Grønli, Curator: Alise Upitis, MIT List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, USA, Duration: 28/7-25/10/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed: 12:00-18:00, Thu: 12:00-20:00, Fri-Sun: 12:00-18:00, http://listart.mit.edu