Realesthetics departs from the hyperreal aesthetics of real estate adverts, a mix of reality and representation. Within inflated housing markets (such as in Oslo), there is a whole philosophy of how to stage the imagery for maximum profit. The golden rules of home staging stress that the object should be de-personalized and neutral, so that possible buyers can project themselves onto the white-beige canvas of a new home. In broker-tongue, any lingering remnants of past homes are called potential. The word holds both the potential of becoming something or someone, and a destructive potential that lies in extensive home renovation. The written descriptions often underline that anything can be redone once you move in. Many ads even feature alternative floor plans or an AI rendering tool to generate images of a new kitchen.

If home staging produces what Jean Baudrillard would call hyperreality (meaning a simulated digital reality detaching from the physical one), the renovation that follows a home purchase creates surrealistic scenes. While a landlord would settle for covering the past with generous layers of wall paint, a home-owner needs to obliterate the traces of other people’s homes. Entire walls disappear, the bathroom is suddenly in a yellow bag outside the building. After a while, all that remains is a facade and a dream-like composition of objects and materials torn out of their intended context.

Julius Carlsson Jeansson (b. 2001, Stockholm) works with installation, drawing and sculpture. His material practice engages with the relationship between politics and aesthetics by interrogating timely and fraught issues including our experience of physical and digital space, our social fabric and the commons. Through drawings embodied in plaster Julius Carlsson Jeansson cast temporary sights and places that we share an existence with, at least for a moment. The drawings both act as an eye prosthesis for innate objects and as a way to solidify an environment or thought process. In addition to his education at the Kunstakadmiet, has he also studied one semester at the Sculpture department at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin.

Kasper Nihlmark (b. 1998, Stockholm) does not usually work with real estate. Instead he is drawn to themes of perma-crisis and political impotence. As stagings of potentially threatening scenarios, his sculptures echo the vague urgencies of atmospheric systems and geopolitics derailing in real-time.

The three visual departments at Oslo National Academy of Arts (KHiO) — Art & Craft, Design and the Academy of Fine Art host a public program at the Academy Room at Kunstnernes hus during March, April and May.

Join us for exhibitions, events and workshop presentations related to the departments’ study programs, brought together under the umbrella of KHiO QuARTerly.

The Academy Room is located in the back of Kunstnernes Hus in a former professor studio and classroom that has been used by the Academy of Fine Art intermittently since the 1930s.