Kerstin Bergendal
Born in Gothenburg in 1957, living in Copenhagen since1984 and graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1992.
Kerstin is recognized as a pioneer and prominent practitioner of a particular subdivision of site-specific contemporary art, called time-based participatory intervention. This practice implies that the artist maps out and affects the world around by formulating, poising and revising a process of questioning. With such inquiries Kerstin creates and develops relationships and collaboration between others – local people alongside professional groups and representatives. As she maintains these relationships durationally, Kerstin is enabled to produce a joint action force within each site that can enable real change. Through imagining possible common change, this practice targets a realized utopia. In her work, Kerstin rethinks and challenges the historic “license” that has traditionally given artists the right to work autonomously – understood as self-oriented, utopian and without direct applicability or determined usage. For almost thirty years, she has studied, expanded and turned the particular operational space of art inside out. Along the way, she has formed an artistic toolbox that is counter to that of the ‘autonomous artist’: one that opens to elicit, address and inform the underlying structures that always characterize any place and any context.
Kerstin’s projects include Trekroner Art Plan Project (Roskilde DK 2001-2011) including the Overview – the story of a city that is not yet (Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde DK 2003), Toying with Brochmanns Place (KOES museum of Art in Public Domain, Koege DK 2005), Twenty Days in Viborg – a Journey (Viborg Kunsthal 2, DK 2011) PARK LEK (Marabouparken Konsthall Sundbyberg SE 2010-2014), A NOW-TIME ZONE (Bristol City 2018) and PONTON (Stockholm Konst 2017.
She currently realises Aproposeneng /Concerning a Meadow, which will be performed and published in a gradually updated homepage: www.aproposeneng.dk. (Copenhagen City DK 2019-2021).
Kerstin Bergendal teaches and conducts research at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.