The work of Oslo-based artists Ingrid Book & Carina Heden constitutes a space in which social practices usually considered in terms of their separate institutional affiliations - art museums, urbanism, cultivation, gardening and landscape traditions, and finance - are offered as components of a larger discursive network.
Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén have shared a collective artistic practice for more than a decade. Their project Military Landscapes has been commissioned by the Bergen Kunsthall to be part of the annual Bergen Festival exhibition in 2008. Their solo show was entitled Stories for Empty Shop Windows and was shown at the Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria, 2007). The artist duo presented News from the Field/Ocampo as the official Norwegian Representation at the 26th Bienal de Sao Paulo, the same year they participated at the 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2004.) In 2003, the artist duo presented Temporary Utopias, a large scale exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. Hong Kong Press is the publishing entity of Book and Héden.
For the 26th Bienal di Sao Paulo Book & Heden edited a newspaper News from the Field / Noticias do Campo, printed in a high print run of 52,000 copies for free distribution, as an integral part of their installation “The Field / O Campo” constituting a meeting place between farming in cities today and the collective memory, the archive. This show brought together a multitude of voices by sociologists, biologists, architects, writers, NGOs and artists addressing issues of urban agriculture and the politics of land ownership, outlined in categories such as “World”, “Regional Brazil”, “Society”, “Science”, “Business”, “Cartoons”, “Sport”.
News from the Field / Noticias do Campo includes texts by Ina Blom, Ingrid Book & Carina Heden, Tjeerd Deelstra / Herbert Girardet, ETC group, Boris Groys, Helge Hiram Jensen, David Loffler, Hettie Pisters, Matteo Poli, Charlotte Pruth, Michael Wilkens ea.
The Field / O Campo, a multilayered installation, involved different media as well as a trans-disciplinary approach introducing artistic practice as a method of knowledge production matching the complexity of the questions raised. The artists here are making a shift from the museum as the former archive to urban agriculture as one form of a potential future archive.
Image Caption: Quilombos nr. 16, News from the field, Copyright Book & Heden, 2004