4037 St. Claude Ave
New Orleans, LA 70117
Mal Educación Anne Katrine Senstad
Curated by Christopher Saucedo
November 11 – December 3, 2023
Annihilation of the question compels praxis
Theodor Adorno, 1931
Capitalism is a purely cultic religion, perhaps the most extreme that ever existed. It is a religion that recognizes neither truce nor redemption
Walter Benjamin, 1921
Mal Educación is the second solo exhibition by Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad at Good Children Gallery and is part of her ongoing research project Capitalism in the Public Realm. A title that sets the stage for numerous question marks, Mal Educación ushers in a focus on the relationship between light and text as method for the examination of ethics, citizenry, agency and allegory. With this, Senstad transforms Good Children Gallery into a luminous hall of letters, presenting critical text based works in Spanish, Arabic, Chinese, English, German and Russian through word play and sublime critique of capitalism and our contemporary crises of the human condition.
As deconstruction of the playfully insulting expression Mala Educación, Senstad, creates her own form of Wittgenstein’s Language-Game and Word-Meaning, where language is defined by the actions into which it is woven. The title is drawn from Spanish film director Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 film, Bad Education, which narrates the nature of oppression by institutions of power over the disenfranchised and marginalized.
Inspired by Almodóvar’s acuity, Senstad’s text works are intended to motivate ethical considerations of the moral zeitgeist. They examine the alterations of our value systems wrought by financial greed and corporate power. Senstad’s work compels place in a consumerist society – as well as how to resuscitate a shared humanity in the spectre of war and posthumanism. Through light and color, art can open the discourse on the hidden value systems underlying society and the culture at large.
For the center-piece of the exhibition, Senstad returns to a poetic evocation of ethics that her work has explored in the past, Gold Guides Me — a neon text work in Arabic calligraphy transliterated in the artist’s handwriting. Those familiar with Senstad’s oeuvre will identify the reference to her monumental work commissioned by the Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale in Belgium in 2015 where said phrase was presented in latin alphabet letters scaled after the Hollywood sign. Gold Guides Me capitalizes on the phrase, Hope Guides Me from the 6th century poet and statesman Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy — a valediction for Lady Philosophy of life’s vagaries and vicissitudes as conjured by the author while imprisoned and awaiting execution. In exchanging “Hope” with “Gold” Senstad’s wordplay invokes the ontological forces underlying institutions of power, oppression, and greed. Also on display, we encounter the diptych Liquid Assets in English and Chinese (2020-2023) on the whole sale of society, sovereign nations, the reduction of the citizen and human value. The neon version of the exhibition title Mal Educación (2023) in dialogue with Gold Guides Me in Arabic, creates a direct line with the ideological debates of the human enterprise that continue into the twenty-first century, as alternative value systems are posited in response to class divisions wrought by an acceleration of the Anthroposcene, war, and the erosion of humanism, Senstad returns to Marx in the German IST-MARX MARX-IST (2023) that plays with cultural memory and its implications, suggesting the death of ideas and questioning what the alternatives are. Senstad’s play on the German word “ist” invokes Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, (Act 3, Scene 1)— ”To be or not to be” —to elucidate the famous ideologues’ impact on today’s existential struggle between freedom, human rights and civil rights.
In dialogue with the neon text works, Senstad presents a new iteration in the static light sculpture series Ascension/Descension Graphs (2020 – ongoing ), with Ascension/Descension Graph X – a work that addresses the reduction of human value in society to a financial and corporate scaling system, graphs and spreadsheet, forecasting growth or decline. The sculpture series evolved during the pandemic, and act as memorial to the victims of the pandemic, where numbers of victims per week were presented to the public in the corporate graph system. The patterned sculptural neon abstraction Portal for Perpetuity VII (2023) is a new iteration in the illusionary infinity series, intimates nature’s perpetual cycle of regeneration and how mankind’s present grappling with notions of scarcity and of infinity through scientific progress and technological innovations continue to advance the human enterprise.
Consistent with the exhibition narrative, Senstad’s text-based video installation, Money Above All – Russian Version (2022) by the artist’s holding company-as-art-work, under the pseudonym GGM Holdings, is part of her activistic web project issuing not-for-sale minted NFTs of corporate-military aesthetics and text-based art that critique the current era’s war climate and the arms industry. The GGM Holdings non-tradable NFT’s can be found on Opensea.com/ggmholdings, utilizing the speculative marketplace as an extension of Mal Educación.
The exhibition is supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway and he Norwegian Government’s Grant for Artists/ Kulturdirektoratet.
Illustration by Carlos Baragli and Anne Katrine Senstad inspired by Albert Holenstein
A conversation on Light, Sound, and the Experimental, with artist Anne Katrine Senstad and Jerry Therio of New Orleans Neon and the New Orleans Neon Art Museum, on the occasion of Senstad’s solo exhibition Mal Educación.
New Orleans native Jerry Therio is a legendary neon artist, innovator and neon collector who has collected, restored and designed neon since 1978. He uses neon, new and vintage, as a medium for fine art, in full scale art installations and gallery exhibitions that have earned critical acclaim. Therio has produced neon for theatre, performance, and numerous movie sets filmed in New Orleans. He has created neon for New Orleans Carnival Krewes’ floats, such as Endymion, Bacchus, and Orpheus, as well as improvisational site specific neon installations for public art, and “Neon Sound Performances” in collaboration with jazz musicians and groups such as Sun Ra Arkestra and Kool and the Gang.
Anne Katrine Senstad is a Norwegian interdisciplinary artist based between New York and Oslo. Her practice includes installation art, spatial light sculpture and site specificity, photography, video and film, and text based art, with a focus on the phenomena of perception and the cognitive system in response to the properties of light, sound, and color. She is concerned with sensorial aesthetics and ethics – the transformative and transcendental ideas of art and philosophical practice. Mal Educación is the second solo exhibition by Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad at Good Children Gallery as part of her ongoing research project, Capitalism in the Public Realm. The exhibition explores the intersection between light and text to address critical subjects of ethics, agency, citizenry, and allegory.
Capitalism in the Public Realm 