Moder Evgenia

Music after the stage.

Aino Theisen was once a concert pianist. She performed on NRK, won competitions, and studied in Copenhagen and New York, before entering a monastery, where she is now known as Mother Evgenia.

Marte Gunnufsen’s camera follows Mother Evgenia’s life and work in the monastery, tracing how music remains present in her daily and spiritual practice. In the exhibition space, a self-playing grand piano plays and transforms the music heard in the video.

Gunnufsen and Mother Evgenia share a common beginning: both trained as pianists and studied with the same piano teacher as children. Though each chose a different life, music remained central to both of them. The self-playing piano in the room points back to that shared musical past, while also giving sound to the different paths that followed.

Want to know more?

• Marte Gunnufsen is trained as a classical pianist, visual artist and piano tuner. Her works often develop through close contact with the people she works with, through conversations, shared time and forms of collaboration. Previous projects have been made in dialogue with drag performers and sex workers, listening closely to their voices, choices and ways of living.
• Gunnufsen about her practice: "I am drawn to people who choose to live differently, and to the values, commitments and convictions that shape such lives. I am interested in what we are willing to sacrifice for what we experience as true and necessary."
• The musical material is drawn from works performed by Mother Evgenia, including piano music by Frédéric Chopin and Camille Saint-Saëns.