Media and style Educated as a film director Berg integrates not only film, but also text and collage and installations in her work. In the late 1990s her work began to be shown in contemporary art venues. Berg's work is often characterized by a hybrid format, mixing genres, using different forms of media, narrative structures and artistic techniques, to investigate historical and political topics. A common theme in many of her projects is how a particular notion of truth is contingent, and how reality might be considered differently through the inclusion of additional stories, or an alternative perspective.
Notable projects Encounter: Gentlemen & Arseholes In the project Encounter: Gentlemen & Arseholes Berg reproduced the first edition of the literary magazine
Encounter (magazine) from 1953, inserting her own notes and images between the pages of the magazine's original content. The additional materials were collected from books, newspapers, private albums and conversations, and were not available to the public at the time of the original publication. The inserts shed new light on the
CIA’s engagement in the
Cultural Cold War, as expressed through the original magazine. The story of individuals engaged in the magazine is further expanded upon in the film The Man in the Background.
The Man in the Background In the film The Man in the Background Berg investigates the fate and role of
Michael Josselson, director of the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, in the
Cold War era. The video material consists of Josselson's private super-8 footage from a vacation in 1958 and interviews with his widow Diana, shot nearly 50 years later. In 1966, the
New York Times revealed that the Congress for Cultural Freedom had received funding from the CIA, and thus it was exposed that the Josselsons had lied to everyone around them for nearly two decades. The revelation changed the life of the Josselsons radically and painfully. Furthermore, the film poses questions about the other contributors to the magazine, their complicity and the scapegoating of the Josselsons.
Stalin by Picasso Stalin by Picasso consists of a book and a film, as well as an outdoor banner, depicting the eponymous portrait, that Berg intended to hang on the facade of
Folketeateret at
Youngstorget in Oslo. The project received wide media attention when it was revealed that the
Norwegian Labour Party, represented by
Martin Kolberg, had stopped the realization of the project. The banner was also part of Berg's exhibition at the
Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2008, but again was met strong reactions and was taken down without Berg's consent after only two days. The original portrait was also met with harsh critique. The drawing was commissioned by
Louis Aragon, the editor of the
French communist party's weekly magazine
Les Lettres Françaises. However, after much criticism from fellow party members and colleagues Aragon chose to distance himself from the portrait. The project addresses the relationship between art and
politics,
free speech, and the ways in which art challenges political narratives and structures. In 2013 Berg was part of the official Norwegian representation at the 55th International Art Exhibition,
la Biennale di Venezia alongside
Edvard Munch.
GOMP: Tales of Surveillance in Norway 1948-1989 In 2014, Lene Berg staged an event about the illegal
surveillance of dissidents in Norway during the
Cold War. Witnesses and actors testified about their personal experience of the political surveillance they had either been subject to or had carried out. The event was conducted as a live television broadcast, an event Berg thought the
Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation should have organized, but never did. The project's subsequent film,
GOMP: Tales of Surveillance in Norway 1948-1989, uses documentary and fictional elements to frame a piece of Norwegian and Cold War history seen through the eyes of the individuals involved on both sides. GOMP and Dirty Young Loose, were both produced by Studio Fjordholm, the film production company of producer Helga Fjordholm.
False Belief False Belief is an autobiographical film that documents the prosecution of Lene Berg's partner through the New York legal system. The story tells in retrospect how charges of harassment by their neighbour develop a momentum of their own in court, without any solid base of evidence. Berg uses photographs, court material and her partner's accounts to reconstruct the events that began when the couple first noticed signs of gentrification in their neighbourhood in Harlem. The evidence that is unveiled points towards a larger system of corruption and racist practice within the legal system, that tries to push black people out of certain districts as a part of systematic gentrification. In 2019 False Belief was nominated for both the Teddy Award and the Amnesty Award during Berlin International Film Festival.
Fra Far/From Father Fra Far/From Father is an extensive project with multiple parts in which Berg explores the life, work and death of her father, the late film-director and writer Arnljot Berg who committed suicide in 1982. Part one was the Festival Exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall in 2022. The second part was Bergs first novel, also entitled Fra far, published by the renown Norwegian publisher Kolon in 2023. The third part of the project will be a feature-length film with the working-title "The Horsemen of the Apocalypse" to be produced by Twentyone Pictures.
The Festival Exhibition (first part of Fra Far/From Father) The exhibition deals with Berg's own memory as well as the public representation of her father Arnljot Berg. In 1975, when Lene Berg was nine years old, Arnljot Berg was convicted of the murder of his second wife, Evelyne Zammit. For the Festival Exhibition Berg produced video, audio and installation works using material remnants, newspaper articles and personal memories she has of her father. The works were presented across five separate rooms, each exploring a different perspective on the persona of her father. The starting point is a short film entitled "The Day Rises“which follows the process of Berg memorising the scene of the crime before her father’s arrest, despite the fact that she had not been present. The questions about the veracity of memory raised by the film continue throughout the rest of the exhibition. Berg does not try to recreate the exact events of her childhood or to draw a coherent image of her father. Instead, her works investigate the inseparability of fact and fiction within memories. The different medial representations and viewpoints through which Arnljot Berg appears, show the difficulty of enduring the incongruence of a person who is at once a loving father and a convicted murderer. The exhibition is accompanied by an artist’s book based on Arnljot Berg’s book Fengsel (1979).In addition to the original text, the book consists of inserted letters, pictures, drawings and texts that both add to and contradict Arnljot Berg’s original publication. ==Filmography==