Amber Ablett

“I am an artist, writer and curator based on Osterøy, an island 45 minutes outside Bergen. I have a social and research-based practice using sound, video and workshops where I use my experiences as a woman with a Trinidadian-Irish-and-British background living in Norway to open up discussion relating to belonging, home and identity.

Amber Abletts website.

Using performance, text, video, sound and social-gatherings, my work looks at the importance of place and belonging to how we live and communicate with each other, focusing on how our society shapes, reflects, controls and limits our multifaceted identities. I use my own position, experiences and stories as a starting point to create a space for questioning, communality and critical thinking; I am interested in how we learn about ourselves through learning about other people, and the conflict between our internal and perceived sense of self.

I see art as a space of change, on the personal and social level, and so my projects, that often take place over a number of years, step away of the spectacle; they often use frameworks, both physical structures and emotional or cerebral exercises, where conversation and collective research can become the artistic medium. My collaborative projects often borrow and rework exercises from gestalt psychotherapy, which I use to explore the links between the body and mind, and the gestalt theory of polarities, that our whole is composed of conflicting, but harmonious parts.

There are different layers of audience participation in my work, from intimate gatherings where co-creation and reciprocity are possible, to sound, video and text installations, which share or extend personal or closed research. I am interested in the spatiality of sound and how it can create communal spaces, to listen, learn and think together; sound in my work is a tool to document and extend. I use crafts, hobbies and popular music as analogies to invite in audiences who might not normally connect with- or feel welcomed in- contemporary art.

My Fathers Left. Commissioned by Borealis Festival for Experimental Music, Norway and Bergen Center for Electronic Arts. Photo by Thor Brødreskrift.

Recent projects include:
My Fathers Left, a poetic sonic essay housed within a wooden listening structure, and collaborative project. The sonic essay begins with my own exploration into how the narratives that British, Norwegian and Western society teach us shaped and warped the way I saw my relationship with my own father and my own history. The work speaks to the privileges and oppressions of white supremacy as they appear in intimate bi- and multiracial family histories and the simultaneity of generational migration. Presented at Borealis Festival of Experimental Music and co-commissioned by Bergen Center for Electronic Art.

Hvileåret takes inspiration from traditional farming methods that view rest as an active process of growth. The project focuses on rest within activism and those who fight against oppression, through workshops, exhibitions, text and collective thinking.

Hvileåret, is a participatory and artistic-research project to investigate, learn about and question the role of rest in societal growth. The project has been held at Bergen Kunsthall and Kunsthuset Kabuso, shared through sound, workshops, text and a research installation. Hvileåret (The Fallow Year in English) looks to traditional farming methods, where rest is viewed as an active process of sustainable growth (crop rotation, fallow fields), and nature to explore tactics for long term and engaged activist work.

I run The Supplementary School Film Club now in the second season at Bergen Kjøtt, an intersectional film club that meets six times a year and invites a different guest working within activism or community care to select and introduce a film each time. We watch films together to look at the intersections of oppressive structures and how different communities tackle and dismantle them. The SSFC takes direct inspiration from The Black Supplementary School Movement begun in 1960s Britain by West Indian communities to fill the gaps about the breadth of the British experience and history left out by mainstream education.

A project from the past but that still influences my practice, is TASC, a collaborative project I founded after graduating from my Masters in Bergen. Here we used the dinner table as a charismatic object that enabled open, in-depth and horizontal discussion and learning. Over four years between 2014 and 2018, we developed a number of participatory art works where food became a tool for removing hierarchy in art discussions including projects at Entree, Bergen Assembly and Hordaland Kunstsenter."

Artist Statement by Amber Ablett.