Arts Council Norway

Ice has always moved. When glaciation took hold some 34 million years ago, interconnected rivers of ice combined to produce the Earth's vast ice sheets. As temperatures slowly warmed glaciers developed a unique balancing act; advancing and retreating to calibrate their annual winter accumulation against summer melt. Sometimes calving colossal icebergs into the sea. A positive feedback loop that has regulated the movement of ice for millions of years.

Contemporary art has become an arena for political debate, and nowhere is this more evident than at the art academies. Norwegian artist Sille Storihle has designed a role-playing game to explore the issues. The rules of the game are clear: The students at the Film and Art School in Kabelvåg were given fictitious characters which they themselves developed further and act out in a group critique of each other’s work. But while the rules are clear, the game itself can easily spin out of control! And it does in ‘The Group Crit’, where the students (who are all in character) don’t hold back from criticising each other’s artworks – and each other in general – so we soon forget the performative framework of the heated debate. The collective experiment challenges not only the students’ self-perception, but also Storihle’s own authority as a director. An important, witty and wild work created with the active participation of the students.