Please join us for the opening on Friday 18th September at 7pm
Kunsthall Oslo is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Oslo by Azar Alsharif.
In her exhibition at Kunsthall Oslo, Grains of Golden Sand, Alsharif combines collage, photography, sculpture and architecture into a total installation that continues her investigation into the glamour and artificiality of advertising imagery.
Alsharif works primarily with found images, but her practice is equally informed by poetry and the subversions of the cut-up technique, and she finds a provisional, almost surrealist idea of beauty in the fragmentation of the everyday.
Detached from their original context and freed from the obligation to sell anything other than themselves, these scenes become inaccessible mirages of suspended desire, a vanitas on the holographic surface of the contemporary image world.
As Edgar Allan Poe writes in the poem which also gave the exhibition its title, You are not wrong, who deem/That my days have been a dream/Yet if hope has flown away/In a night, or in a day/In a vision, or in none/Is it therefore the less gone?
Azar Alsharif was born in Bushehr, Iran in 1984 and lives and works in Bergen. She graduated from Bergen National Academy of the Arts in 2011, and has had one-person exhibitions at Trykkeriet, Bergen (2015), Gallery SPZ, Prague, and Entrée, Bergen (2013). Alsharif was selected for the Norwegian National Art Exhibition in 2013, and has previously exhibited at Kunsthall Oslo in the group show Whileaway (2013).