Tallerås has long been concerned with the city’s forgotten corners, waste grounds and unpoliced alleyways. For the past decade he has worked in a studio in a former metal casting factory at Rolf Hofmos gate 18, next to the T-bane line at Ensjø, an address that he has shared both with other artists and with a variety of informal operations, including an illegal poker game and a biker gang. Now that building, along with the rest of Ensjø, has been razed to the ground and rebuilt into Hovinbyen, a new kind of place that is subject to a more aggressive regime of control. The book Footnotes distills the artist’s archive of many thousands of analogue photographs into a poetic visual essay, an elegy not only for Ensjø, but for the idea of the city as a human landscape where culture might exist independently from capital. For the exhibition To Reclaim Lost Futures Tallerås has built a large-scale structure from scaffolding and found materials that serves both as a reading room for Footnotes and as the projection screen for a new video. In addition, Tallerås will present three new photographic works, a print edition and a found coin that has been worked on by the itinerant Oslo character locally known as kroneknuser’n [the crown crusher].

On Friday 15th September 4-6pm, there will be a city walk and discussion with Tallerås and the philosopher and art critic Sofia Ciel (The Glamorous City), taking in some of the locations discussed in the book, meet outside Kunsthall Oslo at 4pm. The Kunsthall Oslo gallery will be closed to the public on Friday 15th September in solidarity with the Global Climate Strike.

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Jon Benjamin Tallerås (b. 1984, Oslo) graduated from the Oslo National Academy of Arts in 2011 and has exhibited widely in Norway and internationally. Recent presentations of his work include participation in Performing the Fringe at Konsthall C, Stockholm (2020) and the Norwegian Sculpture Triennial, Oslo (2021), and a solo presentation at QB gallery, Oslo (2021).

Tallerås investigates the relationship between the individual and the urban environment. His work questions ownership through exploring different ways of navigating, seeing and exploring the ever-changing landscape of the city. domain. Looking and reading about Tallerås’ artists practice, the word flaneur easily comes to mind.

In his film “Errant Wondering” (2012) the artist is using the urban landscape in unconventional ways – jumping over fences, walking on roofs and train-tracks, climbing buildings, lampposts and gutters. Unusual acts of utilizing and seeing the city is at the center of his works. The work “Traversing the city” (2017) shows Tallerås walking the city from east to west in the underground – a passage of travelling used by large amounts of people every day, though always safely inside a train.

The romantic way of using nature is the way Tallerås uses the city, challenging rules of where to go and not. In all of his works, Tallerås is performing social readings of the ways of the city - questioning what is private versus what is public domain, and the relations between juridical, social and physical constructions. Tallerås’ interpretations of the changing urban language can be applied to many rapidly growing cities in Europe and the world.

Tallerås is acquired by Oslo Municipality Art Collection and Arts Council Norway.