Nina Beier b. 1975 in Århus Marie Lund b. 1976 in Hundested Both live and work in London and Berlin New Novels, New Men ( Jealousy, La Jalousie, La Celosia, La Gelosia, Die Jalousi oder die Eifersucht ) is an art project that runs throughout the exhibition period. Five invited men will read from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s book La Jalousie from 1957, each in his mother tongue. The book is one of the first examples of the ‘new novel’, which reinvigorated the genre of the novel in the 1950s. This new style developed narrative techniques that offer only brief glimpses of a world and just a few aspects of characters rather than complete personalities. In La Jalousie, the narrator registers information with a lack of engagement, while at the same time showing an obsessive interest in events and actions relating to his wife’s infidelity. The story is repeatedly interrupted by descriptions that progressively add insights into the narrator’s psychology. By allowing us to observe the reader as part of the exhibition, Beier and Lund help us to experience a number of the innovative aspects of Robbe-Grillet’s novels. We remain outsiders looking at someone experiencing something in which we cannot participate. What does language mean for the way we experience the world around us? How can we grasp the other’s experience by means of language ? In French, the word “jalousie” has two meanings, one of them translatable as “jealousy”, the other as “Venetian blind” ; several languages have terms that share this ambiguity, while those that do not have forced translators to seek alternative solu-
tions. This is something of which one might not be aware on reading the book, and one can only appreciate the differences if one reads in different languages. To what extent do such differences between languages define our experience of art ? In this regard, the artwork adresses a number of significant interpersonal themes. The five readers decide for themselves when they want to read from the book. They insert bookmarks and leave traces on the books in the course of the exhibition period. The work changes character during the intervals when the readers are not present, telling us still more about the traces that human activity leave. Traces of human activity are also the recurrent theme of the second work by Beier and Lund presented at the Momentum Biennial. How does one relate to art in the public sphere ? Nina Beier has been in touch with Ivar Ernø, former director of Moss Kunstforening and author of the book Skulpturer i Moss 2006 ( Sculptures in Moss 2006 ). The idea of this project is to track down artworks that have disappeared, been subjected to vandalism or the ravages of time, such that it became necessary to restore and/or conserve them. ( Calling ) Loss and Cause is the title of this project, in which the artists have created copies in unfired clay of lost sculptures and their locations under the condition that they be destroyed if and when the originals come to light. In this way the artists investigate not just how we are affected by the art we encounter in everyday life, but also the theme of originality and what it means to us. A recurrent feature of Nina Beier and Marie Lund’s work is its focus on interpersonal circumstances and forms of cultural expression. The object of their work is the immaterial space between people, which is full of codes, language, understanding and misunderstanding. Siv Hofsvang