The art silo has opened the grain chambers to the public

5,500 spectators poured into Kunstsilo in Kristiansand on the opening day on Saturday.

Then they got to see with their own eyes the much talked regarding – and debated – art museum which was a dusty, disused grain warehouse before NOK 710 million transformed it into a building that awakens international attention.

– I know that there have been many opinions regarding this project along the way, but now we have reached the point where we can be happy with the result, said Culture Minister Lubna Jaffery (Ap) before she declared the silo open.

Free tickets

– We put the tickets out as free tickets because we wanted to invite everyone in, regardless of age and place of residence and profession, says commercial director Eldbjørg Dahl.

– It was like posting a Coldplay concert! The tickets just flowed out and were gone following a day. As an art museum, we have never experienced anything like it.

While the public was allowed in on the opening day for two hours at a time in groups of 200, from 12 May you will already be able to spend as much time as you want in Kunstsilo.

Then own works

Artists in the region have already been invited in the week leading up to the opening day. Some of them, such as Marianne Heske and Willibald Storn, might thus experience their own works on display – Heske’s “Gjerdeløa” in a separate room.

It was really well done, because “only” 620 of Nicolai Tangen’s collection of 5,500 works have been selected for the opening exhibition. It is called “Nordic passions”, and includes artists from all over the Nordic region. Tangen had the world’s largest collection of Nordic modernism, which he donated to Kristiansand in 2015.

Kunstsilo also manages the Sørlandssamlingen and the Christianssands Picture Gallery, which together with the Tangensamlingen make up a total of 7,500 works.

150,000 a year

The gift of art from the multi-millionaire and oil fund manager led to a motley road over nine years, with much debate locally – both angry comments at night in the comments section and political unrest. Now the employees experience it more positively, both in the streetscape as well as for what it will mean not only for the region, but also nationally.

Kunstsilo has budgeted for a visitor figure of 150,000 visitors a year. According to Dahl, that is “a high number for a city like Kristiansand”. The neighboring building, the Kilden concert hall, has 200,000 annual visitors.

– We work with long-term plans and program activities with music, debates and being a space for expression. We concentrate on the opening, and then we build stone by stone. It seems that many people want to visit us, visitors – both locally, nationally and internationally.

– Promise to play

Among the attractions is a room called S-Lab, devoted to the intensive dissemination of art, which Kunstsilo is quite unique in doing. The starting shot goes with the painting “Tivoli” by Reidar Aulie from 1935.

– We will take a work of art from our collection, digitize it with the help of a robot that takes photographs in high resolution. Then you can model and animate and recreate scenes from it in the room – before you come out and finally see the original, Eldbjørg Dahl tells NTB.

– You look at the artwork with different eyes because the method brings the work to life in a completely new way. Communicating is regarding making it available. There are no limits to how an art museum can communicate its works more. It is “allowed” to play more, be open and make things available.

A tribute

A well-dressed managing director, Reidar Fuglestad, began the official opening on Saturday by saying that Kunstsilo has high ambitions.

– We will have world-class art experiences and an exciting program that will make you want to come once more and once more.

Between speeches, a bustling crowd, reactions and cannon shots, chairman Stein Olav Henriksen also used the opportunity to congratulate Norway on what he refers to as one of the biggest cultural political events in Norway in a long time.

Tangen and the Minister of Culture also referred to the opening as a special day.

– This is a tribute to artists who have spent their lives expressing what is inside their heads, so that the rest of us will have great experiences, said Tangen.