Arrangement av Kunsthall Oslo

Rostockgata 2-4, 0191 Oslo

Lars Holdhus – Where Oil Is First Found Is in the Minds of Men
28th September-27th October 2024
Opening Friday September 27th 7pm

Lars Holdhus’s first solo exhibition in Norway revolves around the idea of petro-masculinity, a complex of identities and ideologies linking fossil fuels, technology, neo-colonial exploitation and patriarchal power.

When the internal combustion engine was invented, the USA was still officially a slave state, and the only place on the planet where women had the same political rights as men was the Pitcairn Islands in the Pacific Ocean. Oil extraction and petroleum production developed in parallel with car manufacturing at a time when social, political and economic power belonged overwhelmingly to Western men. Automobiles and motorcycles were designed and explicitly marketed as male fetishes, ready to receive the sexualised power fantasies that the dream industry needed to project onto them.

Holdhus’s show at Kunsthall Oslo dramatises the legacy of this coupling of benzene to testosterone. Fifteen sculptures – somewhere between mannequins and scarecrows, built from literally toxic creosote-soaked salvaged wood – represent fifteen characters who each play a part in this contemporary play of petro-masculinity, from the Patagonia-wearing tech bro, to the Viking biker, to the art-world frequent-flyer heading for the Deutsche Bank lounge.

As context for these sculptures, Holdhus has sketched an outline map of the global economic system onto the gallery floor. A series of workshops during the exhibition will give visitors and invited speakers the chance to discuss, modify, extend, or critique this initial mapping.

Holdhus is an artist, musician and activist currently based in Oslo, and co-founder of the project Good Praxis.