Photo: Raina Vlaskovska

Gitte Sætre's oeuvre deals with current and relevant issues, such as climate change, neoliberal ideological patterns, as well as cultural radicalism. Her body of work is characterized by the weight of contemporary society, yet opening room for humor and quiet reflection.Her work investigates roles and positions through generations, related to philosophical questions like forgiveness, guilt and freedom within the close family sphere, and into the sphere of national and international politics She is maybe best known for Woman Cleaning, a series of video-performative penance where she washes places and/or objects. Before she started on this extensive cleaning project, her work was related very much to women and the private sphere through a project called Mothersdust(morstøv). In this project she collected dust from her house and used it as her artistic methodology. Photographing small mass of dust as a series of work. House dust comprises hairs, fibers of cloths, crumbs and mold, mites and bacteria. Waste derived from the very essence of daily life and its symbols our existence of, as if it were, the intimate microcosm that exposes one’s activities. She has constructed a figure that diligently washes and tries to create harmony, gain some sort of control or at least some understanding of the world around. The project is strongly linked to her as a person, a norwegian female born in 1975. A generation that thought everything was possible. The project is within the sphere of national and international politics and touches upon rituals with religious connotations, feminism, humor and hopes and dreams. ​ Gitte Sætre enters the world and engage in major geopolitical issues with the act of cleaning. Together with her we are lead to practice a caring gaze towards reality. She want us to look upon language and the reality as something significant and something that concerns us. ​Gitte Sætre has a BA in painting from Universidad de las Americas (UDLA), Mexico where she graduated in 2009. After some years she started the Curatorial Master Program at the Institutt of Art in Bergen, 2010. Her interests lie within methods to understand particular forms of knowledge production.Gitte Sætre is a multidisciplinary artist, working with dialogue based art, performance, photography, video and sound. Her work has been shown at Bomuldsfabriken, Oslo Kunstforening; House of Foundation as the collateral programme of Kochi Biennale, India; Media Impact, Moscow; Artic Artforum, Arkhangelsk; Komunitas Salihara, Jakarta; Kongernes Lapidarium, Copenhagen; XX1 Gallery, Warsaw; Pristine Galerie, Mexico, the WhiteBox in New York, Kunsthall 3.14 in Bergen, Bergen Kunsthall, KODE, Fylkingen, Stocholm, The National Theater in Bergen and Guramayne Art Center in Addis Ababa.