COURTESY KUNSTNERNES HUS
Kunstnernes Hus, an artist-run organization devoted to contemporary art in an enticing early Modernist building in Oslo, named Anne Hilde Neset as its director, to start in June. Neset is currently artistic director of nyMusikk, an enterprising center for new music and sound art, and has worked extensively with discipline-blurring artists including Christian Marclay, Kim Gordon, Camille Norment, Carsten Nicolai, Tony Oursler, and Diamanda Galas. She worked previously as an editor and co-director of The Wire, the experimental-music magazine based in London, and through her nyMusikk festivals “Only Connect” and “Off the Page” has brought international artists and thinkers to Norway to work in the midst of institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Oslo and the intensely endearing Henie Onstad Art Center, home to a formidable collection of Fluxus art.
At Kunstnernes Hus, Neset will helm an organization in a building that opened in 1930, with a charge to focus on art from Norway and beyond. In addition to exhibition space, the building also plays home to fellow arts organizations and the fantastic Torpedo art bookstore, as well as a film program in a newly built cinema. In a statement, Neset said, “Kunstnernes Hus has a historic atmosphere and can accommodate a kind of interdisciplinary thinking that is not often found in Oslo. It can showcase diverse art forms at the same time, and is an ideal space in which to examine issues from many different angles—exhibitions, film, talks and music. I see it as a place for cultural exploration, exchange of ideas, and opinion-forming.”