A Review of Across, with, nearby – The Fifth Bergen Assembly, Norway
Bergen Assembly Open Office, outdoor view. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio
text by Maja Ćirić
I land in Bergen, greeted by rain (of course) and trolls—oversized, 3D, half-folklore, half-welcome committee. They stand at the airport like a soft portal, opening into a city where myth and weather slip into each other. Some places pray for rain. Bergen—Europe’s wettest city—prays for it to stop. But weather, like time, is arbitrary. “You can wear the watch, or you can live the time.”1
Looking in from the street, I’m drawn like a moth to the low, electric hum of a neon sign: The Bergen Assembly. A glowing threshold. Inside, discarded garments from Haukeland Hospital hang from the ceiling in Before Incineration (2025), an installation by the architecture collective Al Borde, working with reuse and spatial constraints—suspended like ghosts who never left, part of the Bergen Assembly Traces.
Audience gathers amidst Al Borde’s Before Incineration, 2025, an installation at the Bergen Assembly Open Office as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio
It’s the opening weekend of not quite an exhibition, not quite a symposium. Something that slips through cracks, porous, shape-shifting. Part visual, part discursive, part performance—and part something unnamed, lingering in the mist between buildings.
Here, the city listens. The fjord leans in. The landscape itself becomes venue, vibrating gently as the three-joint conveners—Adania Shibli, the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS), and Ravi Agarwal—together with many tracers, stir the waters at this planetary edge.
To convene is not to curate. It’s to call in what lingers—traces, flickers, the almost-visible. It allows things to collide, drift, dissolve—not to lose meaning, but to hold it differently. It’s a deliberate mixture of form, thought, feeling, and rupture. Not chaos, but intimacy. Not neatness, but density. It speaks across borders, across bodies—a soft unfastening of structure, and a firm refusal of silence.
Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo, Post-Capitalist Architecture-TV ‘270° Version’, 2024, installation view at the Bergen School of Architecture as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift
It moves horizontally more like a 270° view stretched across 13 screens—Post-Capitalist Architecture TV: 270° (2024) by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo—disrupting the fixed gaze of perspectivalism and introducing the constantly shifting, place-responsive worldview of the Sámi, a nomadic Indigenous people whose perspective refuses to stand still. Stolen Horizon III (2023) by Prabhakar Pachpute doesn’t just span the wall; it digs. Mining becomes a metaphor: not only an industrial act but an excavation of layered cultural and ecological memory, like the Roman warship unearthed in Serbia’s Kostolac coal mine, the painting reveals what lies beneath. The exhibition at BAS, too, reaches wide and deep. It unfolds like echoes overlapping—somewhere between light and dark, like Susan Philipsz’s Slow Fresh Found (2021), submerged frequencies resonating through the silo chambers of the Bergen School of Architecture. Like Meet the Locals: Underwater, Jana Winderen’s sound performance — creatures beneath the surface emitting sound, barely audible yet deeply present. Like a negotiation between hands — shaping clay, tracing keys, trimming hair — Koki Tanaka’s videos unfold in the in-between.
It presents like the Palestinian mujaawarah2 — the ancient rhythm of gathering, of passing through, of sharing not only space but also violent structure, like the Nakba3, for a moment in time. After all, let us not forget that the Oslo Accords—those fragile, trembling agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization—were signed in the quiet of Norway in 1993, when the world briefly held its breath, believing that maybe, just maybe, the weight of history could soften, and something like peace could begin to bloom between two long-wounded nations.
Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, Laitïam, 2023, installation view at Nonneseter as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift
Yet, the Communist Museum of Palestine is an ongoing attempt to unfasten planetary life from the sustained violence and erasure that is the Nakba—not as event but as structure, not only of Palestine, but of the world. Here, the Nakba surfaces as a planetary wound, encoded across timelines, geographies, and peoples — each struggle activating another. Through its دال-صفر (d-0) project, the Museum conjures mujaawarah, a proximity practice, invoked by many, but perhaps most hauntingly by Munir Fasheh4, Harvard-trained, and stitched into the pedagogy of his seamstress mother, who knew mathematics schools dare not teach. He saw what schools miss—knowledge is not education. And so Bergen Assembly leans into this unlearning and re-knowing—not alone, but together, inside the close—redrawing the communal without asking permission.
In the stone belly of the Tower Base, Bergen’s oldest building, two other mothers hold space from different eras and origins. Lapdiang Artimai Syiem’s Indigenous Khasi mourning of a male fawn in a video reenactment of the U Sier Lapalang folk tale — set within a landscape, trembling, alive — flickers against the permanently placed bronze hush of a WWII memorial, mother and child locked in stillness. They don’t mirror, they murmur. Two bondings, grief as grounding, placed not to resolve but to hum across the grain of time. Story slips through—not as history, but as presence—where architectures remember without speaking, and temporalities touch without fusing.
AgriForum’s Acts of Re/Collection at Bergen Kunsthall as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025, exhibition view. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio
Stranges Stiftelse, founded in 1609 as a poorhouse for women, is an architecture of exclusion—narrow rooms tucked along galleries, reached by steep wooden stairs, each one overlooking the communal hall like a quiet witness. What does it mean, spatially, to be poor and alone? Bergen Assembly doesn’t just enter these spaces—it listens to them. Archives for Social Change gathers here, not as display, but as companionship: five independent archives holding the quieted, the refused, the tender revolutions of those who organized, resisted, and cared. Skeivt Arkiv (Norway), the Dalit Archive and Feminist Memory Project from Nepal Picture Library, the Grindmill Songs Project of rural India, and Stiftelse’s own historical papers lean into each other—histories not aligned but in relation, held together by the will to remember what power tried to forget. In five tiny former bedrooms, five imagined lives of women unfold — drawn from the archives, rewritten with care by selected writers who listened closely to what history left unsaid. A delicate matchmaking that resonates in all directions and remains punctual.
At Bergen Kunsthall, founded in 1838, the walls pulse with gestures of resistance, memory, and collective becoming. The space unfolds like a palimpsest of movement—across borders, histories, and urgencies—centering experiments in anti-colonial thought and radical togetherness.
Bergen Kunsthall, installation view showing Vikrant Bhise’s Memory, Resistance, and Consciousness, 2023; as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio
Entering frontally, you are immediately met with Memory, Resistance and Consciousness (2023) by Vikrant Bhise — a painting rooted in the uncompromising legacy of the Dalit Panthers, the revolutionary Indian collective that fought fiercely against caste apartheid, gendered violence, and class oppression. The canvas doesn’t just hang — it insists. A call, a cry, a continuum.
To the left, under a luminous shamiana—the ceremonial canopy transformed into a porous site of gathering—the AgriForum comes alive. Convened by Agarwal, hosted by FICA5 and artist Sanchayan Ghosh, this space shelters a living, breathing archive: Acts of Re/Collection — multidisciplinary, agrarian, artistic. It murmurs of seed, soil, root, spirit — an ecology of shared memory and speculative farming futures. The shamiana is less an object and more an embrace — an architecture of hospitality and insurgent pedagogy.
Organizing for Social Change at Stranges Stiftelse as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio
At the end of the space — the black box — five films from The Directors (2022) by Marcus Coates, artist and amateur naturalist, unfold with quiet intensity. Each is a collaboration with an individual — Mark, Lucy, Anthony, Marcus, Stephan — who has lived through episodes of psychosis. Through Coates’ reenactment and shared authorship, they reclaim their narratives on their own terms. The screen becomes a threshold — trembling with vulnerability, lucidity, and quiet courage. Here, video is a terrain of radical empathy; a gentle, yet powerful, gesture toward dissolving the stigma still tethered to mental health.
On the right wing, history ricochets, as convened by Adania Shibli. A retrospective of Gruppe 66’s6 three seminal exhibitions held at the Bergen Kunsthalle is shared rather than displayed. This Scandinavian, situationist-leaning collective unfolds through contemporary reinterpretations of their co-ritus (collective + rite) method from the late 1960s and 1970s — a choreographic practice of resistance, ritual, and rupture born as a response to institutional complacency. Here, the past is not archived; it is re-embodied, re-spoken in new tongues by today’s artists.
Gruppe 66 at Bergen Kunsthall as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025, installation view. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio
Just as water carries the memories of others, EPOS—the literary boat, a floating library serving coastal communities in Western Norway from the 1960s until 2020—hosts an art program, Water as a Linker and a Separator, embarking on a multi-stop journey through the Hardanger Fjord. We, the opening weekend crowd, boarded EPOS towards Salhus. Greeted by sound: a performance, a tidal offering. An offering to the sea by Elin Már Øyen Vister and collaborators, held at the shoreline where the boat had anchored. So archetypal it felt like it could move the tide itself. From there, we drifted inland to the Textile Industry Museum, once a knitting factory, still holding the breath of labor long after the machines fell silent in 1989. Inside, among worn looms and the lingering echoes of a working-class neighborhood of wooden Nordic houses, disruption did not appear as rupture, but as something more familiar — a condition. It drifted across borders, nested in nearby trouble, stretched between closeness and distance.
What the Bergen Assembly conveners seemed to offer was not a tangled complicity, but something gentler: a kind of relief. Like the twisting machine we encountered on the museum floor—its metal arms plying colorful threads together, not to confuse, but to hold. To bind. There is a quiet force in that gesture, in the re-threading of what has frayed.
Jakkai Siributr, There’s no Place, 2020–ongoing, installation view at the Textile Industry Museum Salhus as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift
Jakkai Siributr’s There’s No Place (2020–ongoing) picks up this thread with aching precision. His textile banners—suspended like breath from the ceiling—began in a refugee camp on the Thailand–Myanmar border. There, members of the stateless Shan community were invited to stitch their life stories, one thread at a time. Through embroidery, memory passed from hand to hand. Siributr resists fixed authorship; instead, the work becomes a space—porous, open, collective—where narrative is not imposed but invited, and where histories are not merely preserved, but reimagined and remade.
From Lakota Indian poems to the Norwegian literary act of naming the industrial meat complex, the undertaking of the Bergen Assembly feels less like an exhibition and more like a search — for a word, a wound, a world still forming. Art for those who aren’t truly invested, yet still addressed. For the half-interested, the distracted, the ones who stumble into it accidentally. Maybe especially for them — because they carry the weight of the big pockets, the silent majorities, the soft architecture of society.
If this assembly of relations weren’t rooted in Bergen, I doubt it would hum with the same resonance. Here, the land presses in—not as a distant backdrop, but as presence. The damp air, the weight of the sky, the quiet rhythm of water folding into stone. Everything feels shaped by something older, heavier. Isidora Sekulić’s letters from Norway in 1914 captured it simply: “So much of nature in this country—by its beauty, its terror, and its power—is superior to man, that all the importance and interest of Norway’s past seem to be more the will of geology and geography than the fate of a people.”
It’s true here. In Bergen, the past doesn’t live in monuments or myths, but in the earth’s sheer force—in cliffs, fjords, moss, and cloud. The works don’t just occupy this place; they are held by it, folded into a terrain that remembers more than we do. Maybe that’s the point: resonance isn’t always about meaning. Sometimes it’s about atmosphere—about being in the right kind of weather to feel it.
Had this been placed further west—closer to the art world’s centers of gravity—it might have slipped into commodification or the tidy boxes of identity politics. The focus would shift from fragile, shifting relations to something more legible, more fixed. But here, the rhythm is slower, softer, less utilitarian. There’s no pressure to explain everything. It’s a place where work can take its time—where ambiguity isn’t a problem to solve, but a space to inhabit. And that difference in tempo changes everything: how the pieces unfold, how they breathe, how they hold you.
We were listening to a panel at the famous Amundsen Bar at the Grand Hotel Terminus, one of Bergen Assembly’s venues. Someone mentioned it was once the place from which an explorer was bid farewell, setting off to find a friend lost on an expedition further north — a journey from which he never returned. It seemed fitting. In a way, the Bergen Assembly had sent us out as explorers too. But unlike that story, we came back — and brought a friend with us.
We are all just passersby. But even in passing, something stirs: a feeling, a flicker, a thread pulled loose. Impermanence doesn’t absolve us. If anything, it sharpens the need to take responsibility.
To witness. To respond. To stay, if only for a breath. A footprint in wet moss. A glance that clings. A gesture, unfinished but felt. What we touch touches back. Nothing holds. But everything leaves an imprint. And Bergen Assembly, in its passing, left traces—soft, deliberate, awake. It remembered to take responsibility.
Jakkai Siributr, There’s no Place, 2020–ongoing, installation view at the Textile Industry Museum Salhus as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift
Bergen Assembly is on view through November 9 @ Halfdan Kjerulfs Gate 4, 5017 Bergen
1 At one of the panels, Rene Gabri quoted a wise man from Jerusalem. ↩
2 Mujaawarah is a group of people who want and decide to be together, with no authority within the group and no authority from outside ↩
3 The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. ↩
4 Munir Fasheh is a learning theorist and practitioner, who taught mathematics and physics. Based in Ramallah, Fasheh founded the Tamer Institute for Community Education during the first Intifada as a center for developing learning environments outside of schooling in Palestine. ↩
5 The Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art. ↩
6 Gruppe 66, which directly intervened in the cultural status quo; Konkret Analyse, blending abstraction with gesture; and Common Life/Samliv, a fusion of art and learning, taboos and togetherness. ↩
Bergen Assembly: Yasmine & the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron
Installation view from Shirin Sabahi’s exhibition, The Moped Rider, 2022
Bryggens Museum. Courtesy the artist © VG Bild-Kunst, Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Nicolas Rösener
text by Lara Schoorl
The days after the opening weekend of Bergen Assembly, my (personal) quest for the Heptahedron continues. Revisiting my notes, the exhibition texts and issues of Side Magazine, searching for names, plays, the histories of artists, artworks, and possibly imaginary people, I am not quite lost but certainly uprooted in the spiraling narrative that Saâdane Afif inspired across seven exhibition sites in Bergen, Norway.
I confuse the artists with the characters and characters with exhibition sites, or perhaps that is the point; to let my imagination run its own course. Together, they form my image of the Professor, the Coalman, the Moped Rider, the Tourist, the Fortune Teller, the Bonimenteur, and an Acrobats. The cast of Afif’s Bergen Assembly. And together these characters are to merge into a heptahedron; a seven-sided shape—my heptahedron. A multifaceted concept that is used as the storytelling device in the perennial exhibition to connect the presented artworks (old, new, and commissioned) to our current world. Taken from the unpublished (imaginary) play, The Heptahedron, written by Thomas Clerc that is (supposedly) based on a performance of a geometry class by Afif for the 2014 Marrakech Biennale (see the possibility for the consciously imposed yet profound confusion). This form, evokes both mathematical and apocalyptic associations, literally shapes, and conceptually thematizes the third edition of Bergen Assembly. Each character is linked to one of seven sites and each site shows three participating artists. A conglomeration of layers that fold in on each other, challenging thought, yet facilitating navigation.
Flag for Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron
© Bergen Assembly 2022, Convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Nicolas Rösener
Afif, as convener of the triennial, in turn invited Yasmine d’O as its curator. It is d’O who gives substance to this Heptahedron; the artists she curated into the shows flesh out the geometrical skeleton. As can be read in her curatorial statement, d’O had also been thinking about the idea of a solid body with seven faces for some time. Of course, she turns out to be (semi-)fictional too—on a webpage that sells clothing items on which Afif collaborated with Star Styling, I read that Yasmine d’O may refer to Yasmine d’Ouezzan, the first woman billiards champion of France in 1932. Although, not much information is found when further research concerning this fragment is conducted. Nevertheless, Yasmine, whoever she may be, is a crucial figure in the narrative of the exhibition. Having the Bergen Assembly titled after her, introducing her as the protagonist of the curatorial narrative under the same name as well, she becomes a symbol for the myriad paths through which one approaches the exhibition(s).
As in all plays, there is a certain order of appearance of characters, although it is not mandatory to abide by in this case. And as often when consumed by a narrative, I cannot help but to have a favorite character. In Bergen, I visited each of them, spent time with their origin stories in the curatorial room at Bergen Kunsthall and with the works they are assigned to host in their locations. Although all characters resonated, each very aptly responds to current themes—questioning systems of knowledge production, acknowledging our human footprint, addressing climate crisis, highlighting identity politics, breaking gender boundaries—it was the Fortune Teller who kept calling me back. As fourth and middle character, tucked between The Moped Rider and The Coalman (arguably the strongest opposition between characters: freedom, movement and sidetracks versus death, old ways, and stagnation), spread across the spaces of Northing, an empty house, and a public open air listening booth, the Fortune Teller comprises the only non-institutional site. Jessika Khazrik, Miriam Stoney, and Alvaro Urbano are the artists that make up The Fortune Teller.
Khazrik’s interdisciplinary installation, ATAMATA, is presented in Ekko, a club in Bergen, which includes a seven-channel video, silver-colored material covering sculptures as well as the club’s architecture, a series of interstellar raves, and a four-day music and performance program that “re-addresses club spaces as templar and serendipitous places of techno-political congregation and collective attunement with an ability to re-create and host different times and desires into the present.” The club becomes a social place not just for fun, but to celebrate, elevate, build, and change community; club as a place to call out and be heard. In an artist talk, Khazrik explained that the etymology of the Arabic word for ‘club’ returns the meaning to “calling,” while pointing out that silver as a color reflects rather than absorbs, multiplying what is present around. The affirmation we hear you, we see you is given additional dimensions in Khazrik work.
Across the street, in the abandoned rooms of Østre Skostredet 8, Urbano re-installed his work The Great Ruins of Saturn (2021). With the lights turned off, one steps into and becomes part of a performance in progress upon entering the old wooden home; shadows of small metal sculptures dance on the wall and inevitably on anyone stepping among them. While reminiscent of children’s projection puppet lamps, these sculptures also include stars and planets, the majority of the imagery are symbols of capitalism: dollar bills, UFOs, skyscrapers, futuristic cars, the Statue of Liberty, and the famous Unisphere. They directly refer to presentations, thoughts, and imaginations seen at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, of which some architectural ruins still remain unused in Queens’ Flushing Meadows Corona Park. Now disassembled, the remnants of the fair speak to one of the themes in Urbano’s practice: the longevity of the idea of future. What has become of these futuristic plans driven by corporate greed and capitalist gain? Originally made for Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, restaging the work in a ruin of Bergen, Urbano allows for the future to be reimagined again and acknowledges the cyclical understanding of time: that what was once future is now past.
Installation view from Alvaro Urbano’s exhibition The Great Ruins of Saturn for The Fortune Teller, 2022 in Østre Skostredet, Bergen. Courtesy the artist. © Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Thor Brødreskift
It is not possible to hide from the future, perhaps similar to the way debt will catch up to you eventually. Stoney was commissioned to create a new work for the Bergen Assembly, for the Fortune Teller in particular, and so she wrote a book-length poem called Debt Verses in the voice of the Fortune Teller about debt and indebtedness. The poem is written in English and translated into Chinese and Norwegian, all languages appear alongside each other in a truly beautiful, harmonica foldout design with a magnetic cover so that it can be opened and read from two sides while remaining one book. This physical layering of the publication follows the structure of the narrative. Aside from commenting on credit lines, college loans, and debt collectors, seemingly fictional structures are voiced through bureaucratic auto messages, but in reality with the power to kill that haunt and settle into the fabric of everyday life, Stoney reels in another reality of academics and the acknowledgement of knowledge that is borrowed, which she extensively footnotes. Sometimes seen as a hiding behind others, the extensive referencing on one hand points to the exclusiveness of academia, and on the other, how an indebtedness to the backbone of the women informing it has long gone uncredited. Presented at Northing Space, temporarily turned into a bookstore, selling just one book, Debt Verses, deceives us a little just like its collectors and any form of socially constructed belief system. But not for long, as outside, this ironic ploy is countered by the installation of a public listening booth on Østre Skostredet, giving any passerby access to a full-length audio recording of the poem by Stoney.
Debt Verses, book signing by Miriam Stoney as part of Miriam Stoney’s exhibition Debt Verses | Vers om gjeld | 赋债, 2022 for The Fortune Teller, Northing Space Bergen. Courtesy the artist, Northing Bergen. © Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d’O. Photo: Yilei Wang
Whether conceptually or visually, each of the Three Fortune Tellers’ works is a call for visibility or immediate inclusivity. Silver-reflecting walls and daytime club hours in Khazrik’s work, shadow and light play in Urbano’s, as well as the act of re-predicting a formerly imagined future, and the literal highlighting of others’ texts informing one’s writing in Stoney’s poem are among some examples making this call tangible. It makes sense that in uncertain times of pandemic, war, raging gas prices and a declining economy, an insight into the future is most wanted now. This attitude, however, risks the future—the 1964 World’s Fair is an example par excellence—to turn into a commodity. Thus, when Afif introduced a Fortune Teller, she appears not to know what is to come, but as becomes so evident in Stoney’s words, to understand the guiding impact of the then and now on what will be. As the fourth character, The Fortune Teller is all of us, the rest spirals out of her. Beyond her call for a contemporary clairvoyance as opposed to a future one, all other characters, which I will leave for you to encounter, spread a message from their past or future positions: be here now. A seven-sided form is tricky to imagine, let alone perceive completely at once, and so the heptahedron becomes a very accurate allegory for the impossibility to see the future if we cannot even see around the corner. To see all seven sides, one has to move, one character at a time, until a fragmented whole can be pieced together from the different viewpoints obtained. Then still, the figure that appears, is subjective; combine all subjective perceptions and the rest spirals out of her. “Depending on how you choose to look at it, the ebb and flow of life is a continuum that is either circular or moves back and forth, rather than being linear.”
Bergen Assembly runs through November 6, 2022 in Bergen Norway.
Installation view from Jessika Khazrik’s exhibition, The Fortune Teller, 2022 at Østre, Bergen Courtesy the artist. © Bergen Assembly 2022, convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Light design: Shaly Lopez. Photo: Thor Brødreskift