A neon sign in a Bushwick gallery misspells “Old School” on purpose, and that typo is the whole argument. It’s called VEIEJA ESCUELERA, a solo show by Norwegian artist Anne Katrine Senstad now up at Synesthesia, the art gallery at 43 Porter Avenue. According to the gallery’s announcement, the exhibition runs through August 2, 2026, and it opened on the Fourth of July, timed to the Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of American independence.
The show is built from glowing neon sculpture and text based works, and the deliberate misspelling in the title is doing the heavy lifting. Per Synesthesia, garbling “Old School” is meant to spin off new meanings depending on the viewer’s own language and culture, while pointing back to older ways of handling business or seeking justice that Senstad argues have been normalized, concealed, and folded into everyday life in what her statement calls a technocratic, post-human, multi-plutocratic world.
That’s the register of the whole thing. The exhibition is a new chapter of Senstad’s ongoing project Capitalism in the Public Realm, which she started in 2014, and the gallery frames it with a line from Walter Benjamin’s 1921 writing: “Capitalism is a religion that recognizes neither truce nor redemption.” The curator is Clayton Harley.
The project leans on Joseph Beuys’s work The Capital Space, made for the German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, where Beuys proposed a new definition of capital untethered from money and summed it up as “Art = Capital.” According to the gallery’s text, where Beuys imagined replacing the system, Senstad is more interested in looking at what sits underneath it and whether that can be reconsidered from within.
Several of the specific pieces come with their own backstories. One neon text sculpture, an Arabic version of Gold Guides Me, was first shown at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans in 2023 with support from the Office for Contemporary Art Norway. The gallery explains that the phrase is a rewrite of “Hope Guides Me,” lifted from the sixth-century Roman writer Boethius and his prison book The Consolation of Philosophy, swapping hope for gold to needle at the modern appetite for wealth, land, and power. Another work, MAL EDUCACIÓN from 2023, is Senstad’s first misspelled Spanish piece and takes its cue from Pedro Almodóvar’s 2004 film Bad Education.
The largest work is Ascension/Descension Graph no 11, made this year. Per the gallery, it uses the language of finance and the marketplace alongside religious imagery, and it stretches over 18 feet, roughly 6 meters, of wall in green, blue, and copper. Senstad started that series in 2020 as a response to the pandemic, when weekly death tolls were being displayed like a corporate chart of gains and losses. The gallery also notes the series nods to Dan Flavin’s diagonal fluorescent light works, an early influence on Senstad. Two more pieces come from her Portal for Perpetuity series, neon and mirror sculptures set on exposed cinderblocks.
Senstad is an interdisciplinary artist who splits her time between New York and Oslo, working in installation, light, photography, film, and text. The gallery lists a long exhibition history that includes MELK in Oslo, He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, and the 55th and 56th Venice Biennales as collateral events in 2013 and 2015.
Synesthesia describes its mission as building local community through the arts in Bushwick and giving artists a platform for experimental work. It’s the same gallery that in May hosted “A Different State,” a show about empire and resistance. The July 4 opening reception ran from 6 to 9 p.m. with a DJ set from Synesthesia, a bar, and a BBQ.
Featured image: Courtesy 116314194.mailchimpapp.com
