Anne Katrine Senstad: Veieja Escuelera

Synesthesia is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Anne Katrine Senstad – VEIEJO ESCUELERA. The exhibition brings together neon sculpture and text based works in a new iteration of the artists long-term project Capitalism in the Public Realm established in 2014. Initiated by her monumental site-specific text work Gold Guides Me commissioned by the Bruges Art and Architecture Triennale in Belgium, her ongoing project examines our contemporaneous conditions through the optics of perception, spatiality, value systems, and language.

Central to the exhibition is Senstad’s word-game aesthetics where she facilitates
meanings ensconed in luminous neon environments. The title, VEIEJO ESCUELERA, is a misspelling of the term Old School, creating multiple new associative meanings determined by the onlookers own language and culture.
Simultaneously, stimulated by misalignment, the title looks at old ways of handling business or seeking justice. In a global technocratic multi-plutocracy, said enterprises normalize, conceal, immerse, and integrate themselves, resulting in dehumanized operational systems of state and nations. The old familiar capitalist society has been transformed, mutated, Frankensteined, with nostalgia set in amongst the old guards.

Senstad’s platform Capitalism in the Public Realm draws on Joseph Beuys’s seminal work The Capital Space 1970–1977, created for the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980. As a symbol of his constant search for liveable alternatives, Beuys developed a new definition of capital: released from its relation to money, his conception put the creative potential of human beings at the centre of economic thought: “Art = Capital”. While Beuys’ environments question capital and the potentiality of a moneyless society with no central power, Senstad’s Capital Realm looks at what lies beneath and how that can be reconsidered from within, rather than what can replace it. Through the conjunctural, her word-play, and the lyrical, she considers the essence of value systems, societal and philosophical conditions of citizenry, and importantly; conditions for ethical consciousness.

In Senstad’s text based practice she brings forth meanings, languages, and semiotic narration as an aesthetic value system. Her Arabic neon text sculpture, first exhibited at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, supported by Office for Contemporary Art Norway, – an Arabic calligraphy version of Gold Guides Me in her own hand writing, represents the transformation of meaning from one language to another surpassing notions of “the other”, returning it to states of an original universality and the collective good. The text work Gold Guides Me (2014) is a word-play and an extraction from the 6th century Roman
poet Boethius’ prison book The Consolation of Philosophy, where Senstad has altered Hope Guides Me to Gold Guides Me, reflecting on our contemporaneous hunger for the accumulation of commodity, wealth, land, and power. The zeitgeist of ethical and human values is replaced by a wholesale, all-inclusive Captial Realm.

With the neon text work MAL EDUCACIÓN, (2023), she plays further with novelties of language. Inspired by Pedro Almodovars’s film Bad Education / La Mala Educación (2004), the film itself is the subliminal reference. Pedro Almodóvar’s commentary on marginalization, abuse of power, addiction, and violence exemplifies human nature in a society ruled by inequality and dogmatic control. The term itself is a playful expression of a streetwise badass, pointing towards new meanings of empathy and solidarity through endearing humor.

The neon sculpture Ascension/Descension Graph no 11 (2026), utilizes finance and marketplace lingo, as well as religiosity, as method for a lyrical contemplation on human value in a capitalist society. The largest sculpture to date in the Ascension/Descension series the artist started in 2020, initially derived from a response to the pandemic and its weekly measurements of life and death displayed as a corporate graph system of growth
and losses, today continued in the spectre of war and post-humanism. The series is simultaneously an aesthetic nod to Dan Flavin’s diagonal fluorescent sculptures, an early influence on Senstad’s practice. This latest iteration covers over 18’ of the gallery wall space in a green, blue and copper ascension to the empyrean, or existentialist descension to what lies beyond, and loss.

With Portal for Perpetuity no 07, (2023), Senstads neon and mirror sculpture harnesses infinity in a box, suggesting a meditation on energy as infinite emission, consumption, and dependency. Placed on exposed cinderblocks, the installation invites to a contemplation on the artificial and natural realms of space and autonomy, advancement of the human enterprise, and regeneration.

Anne Katrine Senstad is a Norwegian interdisciplinary artist based between New York and Oslo. Her practice includes installation art, light art, photography, film, and text based art, with a focus on the phenomena of perception and the properties of light, sound, and color. She is concerned with sensorial aesthetics and ethics, the transformative and transcendental ideas of art and philosophical practice. Senstad has exhibited widely internationally, including MELK, Oslo (2026), Galerie Floss & Schultz, Cologne (2025), Kunsthal Regelbau 411, Denmark (2023), Seinajoki Kunsthall, Finland (2021), Kai Art
Center, Tallinn (2020), Freight & Volume Gallery, New York (2020), He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen (2019), 55th and 56th Venice Biennales (Collaterali Eventi), (respectively 2013 and 2015). She has published three artist books, most recently a monograph on her monumental light sculpture practice, Neon Guides Me, 2022, (Praun & Guermouche).

Contact: clayton.harley@gmail.com

@synesthesia47
@anneksenstadstudio
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