Image: Stenersen
Gardar Eide Einarsson’s largest museum exhibition to date, ‘The Purpose of a System Is What It Does (POSIWID),’ opens at Stenersen on Friday 30 October. The exhibition will be presented across two floors and on the facade of Stenersen. It surveys 25 years of Einarsson’s artistic production.
Since the late 1990s, Einarsson has worked with questions of power, oppression, propaganda and state violence, examining how political and social systems affect people and how power can be expressed, concealed and normalised. The announcement says that Einarsson moved to New York the day before 11 September 2001, an event that influenced the artistic practice that followed.
The exhibition’s title is taken from British systems theorist Stafford Beer and points to a central question: whether a system’s true purpose is what is said about it or what actually happens in practice. Einarsson draws on state propaganda, police manuals, popular culture, activism and punk to examine how power and control manifest in images, symbols and language, while also investigating how resistance emerges.
Several new works respond to contemporary events and current political developments, while other key works address national identity, public spaces, surveillance and protest movements. Despite the exhibition’s serious undertone, humour remains close at hand, with Einarsson combining sharp social criticism with irony and visual precision.
The exhibition forms part of Kode’s programme of established artists with personal and professional connections to Bergen. Born in Oslo, Einarsson studied in Bergen and is now based in Tokyo; over the past 25 years, he has exhibited in museums and galleries around the world.
