Nordic art today is as diverse, exciting, curious, and complex as it was 25 years ago. At the behest of the American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF), Scandinavia House and its gallery opened to the public in October 2000, establishing a permanent home for creative exchange between the Nordic region and the United States. Nordic Design: The Generation X, the gallery’s inaugural show, explored the range of contemporary design ideologies, materials, and methods represented in Scandinavia at the turn of the millennium. The Generation X was organized by Design Forum Finland (DFF) in cooperation with the Design Councils of Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and ASF. For the last quarter century, ASF has partnered with many Nordic institutions, curators, gallerists, art historians, and collections to present and engage with a wide spectrum of contemporary Nordic art. Photography, painting, sculpture, new media, ceramics, virtual and digital installation, performance, and research-oriented art have all featured in Scandinavia House’s exhibitions and programs. A Time for Everything presents work by 30 celebrated artists, each with established, robust and internationally acclaimed artistic practices, who have exhibited works in the gallery over the past 25 years. Although all of the artists come from the Nordic region, their methods and practices are informed by international artistic discourse, challenging the often dated and narrow ideas about Nordic identity held in the U.S. Going beyond heritage, the artists of A Time for Everything share a serious, meticulous, and joyful commitment to their output, and a desire to embrace new approaches while honoring unique cultural traditions. These artists captivate and challenge our understanding of visual culture through their engagement with diverse materials, perspectives, unease, and humor.

“The angels are action and meaning in one. Everything they do has to be interpreted.”
– Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Time for Everything, p. 6

Much like the protagonist in the celebrated novel of the same name by Karl Ove Knausgaard, the artwork included in A Time for Everything demonstrates the fusion of tradition, experience, knowledge, meaning, and change. After Knausgaard’s 11-year-old protagonist, Antinous Bellori, stumbles upon a pair of angels in the woods, he embarks on a lifelong theological journey to better understand his encounter. As the novel takes place in the mid-sixteenth century, Bellori’s quest for knowledge mimics that of contemporaneous Enlightenment thinkers such as René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Willhelm von Leibniz, and Isaac Newton.

While his study of angels is, foremost, a scientific pursuit, Bellori does not dispense with the category of the sacred or the divine. Nevertheless, questioning the Summa Theologica—the bedrock of Catholic scholasticism— leads him to a provocative insight regarding the potential for change within the divine order. The tumultuous early modern intellectual situation of Knausgaard’s novel—one in which science, belief, and faith came into unprecedented conflict—can be compared with our current political climate. As the author puts it:

“They lived in a period suspended between two contrasting views of the world, and, like hermit crabs changing shells, were quite naked and vulnerable, always alert, always on the brink of scampering back to the old shell, until they’d crossed the invisible line and the new shell lay closer, after which they simply had to keep pushing on.” - p. 28

It’s an interesting moment to reflect on changes in culture and tradition over the past 25 years. Our future feels uncertain: “vulnerable, always alert, always on the brink of scampering back to the old shell.” The opposition to exchange, dialogue, and intellectual pursuit today both mirrors and departs from that of previous historical periods. Urgent twenty-first century themes—memory, dematerialization, digitalization, technology, economy, nature, ecological catastrophe, anthropomorphism, landscape, and performance— are present throughout the works featured in A Time for Everything. References to tactile memory, process, and the body also recur. Many participating artists, including Margrethe Aanestad, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Sara-Vide Ericson, Britta Marakatt-Labba, The Icelandic Love Corporation, Shoplifter/Hrafnhildur Arnásdóttir, and Katrín Sigurðardóttir, are premiering new works. The abundance of ideas and references on display reflect the ways in which artists look to cyclical time as a constant for change.

I hope you will be inspired by the constellation of ideas, approaches, and methods included in this exhibition. I hope they inspire new quests for understanding in our exciting, albeit uncertain, times.

Emily Stoddart
Curator and Manager of Exhibitions and Community Programs,
American-Scandinavian Foundation