I Must Say At First It Was Difficult Work

18.09 – 24.10 2010

 To download the map of the exhibition, click here

To download the press review of the exhibition, click here

I Must Say That At First It Was Difficult Work is the opening exhibition at Kunsthall Oslo, with works by Dina Danish, Judith Hopf, Johan Berner Jakobsen, Silke Otto-Knapp, Yvonne Rainer, Mary Redmond, John Smith, Saul Steinberg & Inge Morath, Arild Tveito

The exhibition combines new commissions from contemporary artists with painting, photography, film and performance from the twentieth century. We have invited five artists – who each have different ways of relating historical culture to their own practice – to select existing works by others, and also to make new work themselves to exhibit in relation to their selections.

This is not a thematic exhibition, but it is concerned with looking at, thinking about, and making art. It is about how culture is transmitted and also consciously reinterpreted or changed; about that part of an idea or an experience that cannot be bought, sold or archived; about the ways in which the past influences the future and the ways in which the culture of the present alters the way we see the past.

The exhibition title comes from a poem of the same name by the British poet Matthew Welton, who took it in turn from Raymond Roussel’s essay ‘How I Wrote Certain Of My Books’. You can read Welton’s poem and his note on his use of Roussel’s method, which indirectly inspired the structure of this exhibition, here.