IGNORANCE IS AN EMPTY SPACE: OLE JØRGEN NESS AND ANGUS BACKBURN

IGNORANCE IS AN EMPTY SPACE
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Main gallery

Catalogue text by Ole Jørgen Ness and Angus Backburn

Presented as part of the 2001 UKS Biennial, Supported By UKS Gallery, Oslo, Powerstation and Corporate Initiatives

Presented as a project of the UKS Oslo Biennial — which took place at a number of places around the globe simultaneously, including Oslo, Hong Kong, Yokohama and Melbourne — Ignorance is an Empty Space brought together the work of Norwegian artist Ole Jorgen Ness and Melbourne artist Angus Blackburn. With macro and micro proportions, and a disorienting sense of scale, Ness and Blackburn’s room-scale video and sculptural diorama created a bio-physical landscape with a search for the thylacine or Tasmanian Tiger as its point of departure. If navigating the work was akin to a walk through the forest, the discursive journey followed in the footsteps of colonists - listening for the echo of Gondwanaland, and critically gazing on the ‘civilising’ enterprise of the natural history museum and its contemporary scientific and consumerist progeny.