About the Verksted series Verksted was launched by Office for Contemporary Art Norway in 2003 as a series of publications and seminars focused on current discourses relating to contemporary cultural production, culture and aesthetics. In 2006 Verksted was expanded as part of OCA’s programme with a renewed commitment to exploring the relationship between philosophy and aesthetics in the form of interrelated seminars and workshops, in addition to publications. The publications explored not only the most recent tendencies in art production but reviewed how particular points exploring political radicality throughout the Modernist period have been looked at. From 2006 to 2008, Verksted was organised by Marta Kuzma, Director of OCA, in collaboration with the London based philosopher Peter Osborne. This resulted in the publications Art of Welfare; ISMS1: Recuperating Political Radicality; and ISMS2: Populism and Genre. The year 2008 also saw the production of Ü – Drawings, an artist-book with satirical drawings and cartoons by Olav Westphalen. In the second half of the same year OCA was relocated to Nedre gate 7 in Grünnerløkka expanding its premises with the opening of a public space with an extended commitment in organising lectures, screenings, conferences, workshops and exhibitions. Following the homonymous exhibition held at OCA, 2009 saw the releasing of Sol LeWitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art containing the reproduction of the original manuscript.
In 2011 two new publications will be released within the Verksted series: the anthology Whatever Happened to Sex in Scandinavia, addressing the representation of Scandinavia as a sexually utopic territory constructed primarily during the 1960s and 70s in the rest of Europe and the US, and Big Sign – Little Building a book that looks at the expanded temporal and spatial field for cultural production resulting from the modern shift in the notion of landscape from the Kantian sublime to the space of leisure time.
About the Office for Contemporary Art Norway The Office for Contemporary Art Norway is a foundation created by the Norwegian Ministry of Culture and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in autumn 2001 with the aim of strengthening the position of contemporary visual arts and production from Norway and of stimulating and facilitating exchange between Norwegian and international art professionals and institutions.
Hjemmeside: www.oca.no