BERGEN.- At Bergen Kunsthall, Joan Jonas presents a new version of an ongoing series of installations under the title Reading Dante. The series, on view until March 27, 2011, began in 2007 and each new version incorporates elements from the preceding ones. In Reading Dante Jonas reinterprets the journey of the soul through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven – following Dante Alighieri’s epic The Divine Comedy. By way of her distinctive ‘shamanistic’ visual language Jonas offers an idiosyncratic approach to one of the most important works of world literature. The project is not an attempt to illustrate the text; it is rather a personal translation of Dante into a visual language where central elements and symbols from Jonas’ visual vocabulary (mirrors, masks, dogs, cones etc.) enter into and shape their own narrative in the light of the artist’s overall oeuvre. In an earlier grand-scale series of this ty