Wall to wall: Andrea Kroksnes on the art of Kristina Braein

AT ONE END OF A GALLERY, WHERE THE ELONGATED SPACE IS SEPARATED FROM A surrounding park only by a wall of windows, the eye fixes on a handrail that could be a dancer's barre. The stretch of wall on which it is mounted appears slightly darker than the rest of the gallery--on a closer look it becomes clear that the white paint has been sanded off to expose raw concrete underneath; this area reaches up from the floor to a point slightly above the bar and is bordered by pale yellow masking tape. The arrangement seems to be reflected in the plate glass, until, coming closer, one notices that the window is actually open and that the apparent reflection is in fact a continuation of the installation: There is another rail on the concrete wall outside that almost meets the first one, at the point where interior becomes exterior. And so the "reflection" turns out to be an inversion rather than a copy--the result of taking up the relationship of inside and outside already prevalent in the building's architecture and turning them inside out. Like a Mobius strip in space, the sculptural installation provides a kind of performative architecture that can be read as a metaphor for the dialectical play of supposedly opposite sites.

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The intervention described above is a representative moment in the oeuvre of Norwegian artist Kristina Braein. It appeared at the Venice Biennale last summer as one of a series of site-specific works she titled The Dilemma of Politeness and installed in the Nordic pavilion as part of the exhibition I cocurated there with Anne-Karin Jortveit. Built in 1962, that structure, designed by Norwegian architect Sverre Fehn, heeds modernism's call for rationality, which is nowhere more evident than in the building's architectonic ground plan--a rectangular grid consisting of forty-eight large squares, each itself composed of forty-nine smaller tiles--rigorously derived from Le Corbusier's modulor. Braein disregarded the rigid rules of the existing plan. All of her works throughout a nine-year artistic career are likewise sly commentaries on modernism, its form as well as its ideology. Her favorite materials of fake-teak flooring and carpet swatches are clearly heirs to a modernist heritage, and the geometrical compositions that the artist creates out of these everyday items can be read as subversive redeployments of the vocabulary of minimalist abstraction. Indeed, the materials she uses are, if not secondhand, low-end (she buys her carpet tiles at the Norwegian megastore Carpet Country), and they seem to resist meticulous craftsmanship (her plastic paneling, for example, never quite meets at the junctions). And so the tiles she used in the pavilion came in all sizes and colors, and they were never neatly fixed into a rectangular grid but loosely arranged and piled on top of each other. Walking through the modernist building, one accidentally stepped on red and gray carpet squares slightly smaller than the pavilion's white travertine floor tiles. In one corner, a cluster of them rested together with a towel on a fake-pine laminate floor cover. In the middle of the room a row of imitation-teak panels formed a square that sat awkwardly askew on the gridded floor of the pavilion. At once elegant and clumsy, Braein's installations cohabit with the architecture that surrounds them and bring out some aspect of the space that normally escapes our eyes. With such interventions, Braein playfully insists that one can deploy outmoded sculptural and architectural conventions without necessarily adhering to them: There's always room for reinvention.

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Braein used the title for this type of engagement--The Dilemma of Politeness--once before, for a series of installations she made at the 2001 Norwegian Sculpture Biennial (curated by Maaretta Jaukkuri). Engaging both the other works in the exhibition and the space itself, Braein positioned her subtle but concentrated spatial interventions throughout the venue. In one of the galleries that was carpeted, she did nothing more than put up a little shelf on which she displayed a hodgepodge of knickknacks, found objects, and other detritus--a tube of Chanel hand lotion, a plastic doggy, a tulip, an empty film box, and a dissected rubber finger. The title may have arisen as a response to the difficult task of reacting to something that is already there and which takes center stage, such as the awkwardly domestic carpeting of the gallery space. Indeed, the carpet seems to set the tone for Braein's jazzlike improvisations. The Dilemma of Politeness describes an ongoing struggle in Braein's work, which is always site-specific and relational to the surrounding context. The "dilemma" pertains to the difficulties of straddling the fine line between an appreciation of the existing material world and the thrill of overthrowing the old and outdated. Her installations place an accent on what we might describe as a room's "excess," or "surfeit": a dimension of the room that is already contained within the space but resides in its niches and margins. It might be a glut of material, a leftover, a detail--features typically overlooked that take the space beyond its central meaning and function. Perhaps a trace of something that hints at transformation and re-signification.