As artists of the week at Kunstschlager Gallery Idun Baltzersen and Anna Ihle are presenting Passive Aggressive. Coming from a summer residency in Bielefeld, Baltzersens woodcut is an excerpt of high productivity in a lonely environment. Ihle carves a small convertible in wood for the show, and insists on staying in bed while working in Reykjavik. Baltzersen and Ihle found a common space in the desire of doing their own thing, looking away and staying in.
Baltzersen (b.1987, Trondheim) works with woodcut. A big part of her artistic practice is the process of continuous production – producing objects, that in itself being a comment on the value of manual labour, a protest and or a form of resistance. Reoccuring in her work, the teenage girl is recognizable with her hoodie and conversek. Presented as if they were posters from a teenage room, the large scale woodcuts of girls looking away are turned into monuments.
Ihle (b.1984, Stavanger) has during the last years committed her time to the concept of work. Her artistic practice is research based, both in material and social fieldwork. Starting points range from textile production in a Gandhian tradition in India to researching her own protestant work ethic while learning woodcarving and bondage techniques.
With support from Nordic Culture Point.
In psychology, passive-aggressive behavior is characterized by a habitual pattern of passive resistance to expected work requirements, opposition, stubbornness, and negativistic attitudes in response to requirements for normal performance levels expected of others. Most frequently it occurs in the workplace where resistance is exhibited by such indirect behaviors as procrastination, forgetfulness, and purposeful inefficiency, especial- ly in reaction to demands by authority figures, but it can also occur in interpersonal contexts.
Another source characterizes passive-aggressive behavior as: “A personality trait marked by a pervasive pattern of negative attitudes and characterised by passive, sometimes obstructionist resistance to complying with expectations in interpersonal or occupational situations. Behaviors: Learned helplessness, procrastination, stubbornness, resentment, sullenness, or deliberate/repeated failure to accomplish requested tasks for which one is (often explicitly) responsible”.
Source: Wikipedia
Anna Ihle 