BOMBA, Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo
In November 2024, Dag Erik Elgin will present an exhibition intervention at Kunstnernes Hus. BOMBA will engage the presence of Pablo Picasso's seminal Guernica at Kunstnernes Hus in 1938, just one year after the painting was completed. At the top center of Picasso's painting depicting the terror of the aerial bombing during the Spanish Civil War, a light bulb surrounded by a lampshade emits sharp, cone-shaped rays of light. In the painting, the lamp is surrounded by twisted bodies, and it ambiguously exists both as an ordinary electric light source and as a bomb at the moment it explodes. The Spanish word BOMBA refers to this ambiguity, referring both to the bomb and to the light bulb (in Spanish, bombilla eléctrica is a diminutive of bomba).
Taking as its point of departure this pivotal moment in the exhibition history of Kunstnernes Hus, Elgin's intervention will reflect on the complex legacy of modernity and modernism, the technological and artistic innovations of these eras, and the continuation of war into the present.
People involved
