The works of Norwegian artist A.K. Dolven are both forceful and delicate. The National Museum in Oslo is hosting an outstanding retrospective of her work.

For decades, A.K. Dolven's works have transformed the spaces of art institutions during exhibitions. Her film and video works, abstract paintings, expressive hand and footprints, drawings, and sound works are demanding yet tender, gripping yet meditative, introspective yet outward-looking. Often, they are all of these things simultaneously. She utilizes marble and steel, light and shadow, sound and snow.

The artist's works are part of the Norwegian nature in which they were created, or they push into urban spaces worldwide. A.K. Dolven, born in 1953, comes from Oslo and was anchored for many years in Berlin's emerging art scene during the post-reunification period, then in culturally productive pre-Brexit London. Today, she works again in Oslo and in the Lofoten Islands.

Visitors to her magnificent retrospective exhibition "amazon" at the National Museum in the Norwegian capital should approach it from Akershus Fortress. This way, they can experience firsthand how the artist confidently and effortlessly intervenes in the political and philosophical discourses of our time through her art, without an activist gesture.

In "Untuned Bell" (2010-2020), this happens in dialogue with the overwhelming architecture that dominates Oslo's small yacht harbor: the fortress, the gigantic city hall, and the hosting National Museum itself. The museum is housed in a sprawling building completed a few years ago according to plans by German architects Klaus Schuwerk and Jan Kleihues, whose almost windowless slate facade appears quite forbidding.

In front of this triangle of urban self-representation, A.K. Dolven's large, elegant sound sculpture demonstrates that an artistic statement in public space can be audience-oriented. Between two steel pillars on a steel cable, a large, heavy bell hangs at a height of 20 meters, which is made to ring by decisively pressing down a Cry Baby foot pedal, a readymade from rock history.

The association with the English idiom "putting your foot down" (asserting one's position) is entirely intentional. Every passerby is invited to operate the pedal and through this performative act not only playfully interrupt the normalized daily routine, but also send a democratic noise disturbance into city council meetings with the bell's sound. The way this work functions is characteristic of Dolven's entire body of work, just as the creation story of "Untuned Bell" is characteristic of her working process.

The artist discovered the bell, which had been discarded for musical reasons, as scrap metal and saw metaphorical relevance in its degradation, whose artistic possibilities she explored in a notebook. Since 1988, A.K. Dolven has kept such notebooks in which she researches, draws, and writes around a thematic field, an experience, a phenomenon, or a thought, and thus these books are also thinking spaces and independent works of art. It is fascinating to view the notes in the exhibition and trace their echoes in the displayed works.

Sometimes ton-heavy works have emerged from them, sometimes almost abstract, fleeting video works whose meaning is the experience of time, such as "januar" (1997), in which sometimes one, sometimes the other female breast rises and falls from a fog-colored liquid. Or "THE doors" (1996); here the gaze follows, captivated, an air current that plays with two swinging doors.

This body of work also includes Dolven's engagement with iconic female figures such as "amazon" (2005). In this film, the viewer's eye darts back and forth for 90 seconds in rapid alternation between close-up and medium shot among the archer's finger, hand, shoulder, and arm, and finally shoots away with the arrow from the tensed bowstring. It is a breathtaking experience of strength, courage, speed, and rhythm, based on a silent piece by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Otherwise, the path through this exhibition is underscored by the sounds of Dolven's sound works, and it emphasizes the inventiveness of her inspiring art. In it, one encounters a rich world that can be contemplated long and thoughtfully while listening.

The exhibition "A.K. Dolven. amazon" runs at the National Museum in Oslo until August 31. The catalog costs 449 NOK, approximately 38 euros.