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 Taken from the unpublished (imaginary) play, The Heptahedron, written by Thomas Clerc that is (supposedly) based on a performance of a geometry class by Afif for the 2014 Marrakech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

A Look Back on Vienna’s “Curated by” Gallery Festival

Ola Vasiljeva
En Rachâchant, installation view Vleeshal Museum (2015)
courtesy the artist
photograph: Leo van Kampen

text by Lara Schoorl


Hope For The Rising Sun of Promise: East not West

Every September, for the past fourteen years, the start of Vienna’s gallery season coincides with Curated by; a monthlong festival that invites international curators to organize exhibitions in the Viennese contemporary art galleries, under an overarching theme. This was the first year that an “impulse provider” was invited to propose said theme to the curators. Elected by twenty-four participating galleries, Dieter Roelstraete, received the inaugural position to present a curatorial and artistic framework for the fourteenth edition of Curated by. 

In the shadow of the Russian invasion in Ukraine and the ongoing war, Roelstraete proposed “East” for the theme. More specifically “Kelet,” Hungarian for East, and explicitly the opposite of “Nyugat,” West. Nyugat was the name of a Budapest-originated, avant-garde journal from the early twentieth century; “Nyugat” one word that captured the desire for what was happening culturally in Paris and Munich, in the West. At that time, Budapest was still the second capital alongside Vienna of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, an interesting fact when thinking about cardinal directions now. Austria, and Vienna in particular, has long carried a gateway position (for culture) between East and West. During in the first half of the last century and through the Iron Curtain, and in the past two decades, Austrian art institutions have often gravitated towards the West in terms of who and what was shown. Yet now, as people move from Kyiv to Lviv, flee from East to West and South to North, Roelstraete urged, more than ever it is important to shift our perspective from West to the (expanded) East. And to then not see East as a place of trauma, but of promise, because “Is it not in the East,” he asks, “where the sun rises?” 

The theme, “Kelet,” remains open for interpretation to the gallerists and curators as East, of course, is a relative position or place depending on where one finds themselves. Although one imagines that this year the galleries might have invited curators and the curators in turn artists from the(ir) East. For Roelstraete “Kelet” provided a platform to contemplate a semantic shift for the meaning of East and or versus West through art in the European imagination. Curated by then may have formed a preliminary map of the state of art in the East (which can also be understood as Central or South and East of Vienna all the way to the Pacific). And such was the impression of the twenty-four exhibitions that spanned curators and artists of multiple generations from Ukraine, Slovenia and Georgia, to Kuala Lumpur and Mexico, and many countries in between.

The full-length curatorial essay by Roelstraete can be found here and below are highlights of this year’s Curated by, reflective of the various interpretations of “Kelet.”

SOPHIE TAPPEINER curated by Lukas Hofmann

Anna Zemánková
Untitled, the second half of 1960s
perforated paper, pastel, acrylic, china ink, embossing
60 x 41 (Detail)
Copyright and courtesy: The Artist’s Estate

Spread across two floors, SOPHIE TAPPEINER presented Pollen, a small retrospective of the self-taught Czechoslovakian artist Anna Zemánková (1908-1986). All works are on paper, all as seemingly fragile as their subjects, “my flowers,” as she called them, curator Lukas Hofmann explains. And all made in the twilight hours of dawn, before the rest of the world woke up—an unconscious nod to the East where the sun would rise as she worked. She used various techniques to create the flowers, often perforating the outlines and shapes in the paper and then coloring them with aquarelle paints, but some include stitching, ballpoint, and collage elements. They each required the viewer to take a step closer, especially her last works, which gradually became much smaller (a result of having both legs amputated and working exclusively from a board in her lap), to see the difference between thread and line and light, and then a step back in case the sun passes by or a light is lit behind them (as with the lamps), and their colors change, and shadows dance. Although the organic appearance of flowers, plants, butterflies and birds in the work is recognizable, the still not exactly true to nature imagery oozes a strong sense of elsewhere. Humble in their size and material, they breathe a kind of freedom. 

CRONE WIEN curated by Eva Kraus & Volo Bevza

In 2022, the works were equally as sharp as the exhibition title. Showing exclusively young artists from Ukraine, curators Eva Kraus and Volo Bevza localized East in one place to inquire about the repercussions of the war (and prior events) that take effect both locally and globally, and how those are experienced. Any type of event, including a war, but also protests and uprisings, can now be witnessed collectively through various instant (social) media outlets. Bevza wrote: “On the ground, you can feel the war, but most importantly, it is ‘experienced’ digitally.” The war takes places in Ukraine, in the East, in our phones all over the world. Reality is stretched into the digital realm, or the digital realm absorbs our reality. Either way, a blurry in between space is created and it is in this liminal space that the artists in 2022 make work. Analog and digital realities bleed into each other in the photography-based works of Victoria Pidust and the paintings of Artem Volokitin of Bevza. A floor to ceiling curtain, also by Bevza, printed with an image of a ruined structure characteristic of his paintings divided the front space of the gallery from the back space. A curatorial intervention gesturing to both roles he occupied in the exhibition. One literally had to walk through or around the edges of the image of destruction enforced by the war in Ukraine. Although dark, the painterly quality and manipulation of the photographic image, as with all of his recent work, softens the harsh visual as it swayed lightly in the gallery space. A contradiction felt also in mediated reality. Not only the image but our sense of reality was distorted moving through the exhibition. Behind the curtain, Yevgenia Belorusets, well-known for her war dairies presented an older work. “Please Don’t Take My Picture Or They’ll Shoot Me Tomorrow” (2015) is part of the series “Victories of the Defeated” which documents the lives of communities during the military conflict in Donbas (indicating too that this war has been ongoing) through photographs and texts. A two-sided sculptural installation, on one side the exaggerated large cover page of a fictional paper Today’s News, and on the other side a portrait of miner a filled up the center of the front space. Through irony—the paper’s subtitle reads “You’re reading a quality-looking newspaper with a seriously dubious name”—Today’s News criticizes the misinformation that the media spreads and how it corrupts the truth, another way in which our reality, be it digital or analog, is distorted.

WONNERTH DEJACO curated by Kilobase Bucharest

Alex Horghidan
Untitled [series Polyamory], 2020
graphite on paper framed
35 x 35 cm
Courtesy of the artist, TRIUMFAMIRIA, Museum of Queer Culture and Family Servais Collection

WONNERTH DEJACO opened its doors two years ago and although this was their first time participating in Curated by, their presence was strong. The group exhibition JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY ON THE PEPPERSIDE OF SUPRANFINITE was one of the few shows where the work completely took over; it was louder than the standard white cube aesthetic of the space, but in a way that was welcoming, meeting the viewers at their frequency. The curators, Dragos Olea and Sandra Demetrescu, who collaborate under the hybrid curatorial practice KILOBASE BUCHAREST, brought us dreams of a future in a utopian queer universe called Suprainfinite. Suprainfinite is a space imagined by the art collective Apparatus 22, which includes Olea, in 2015. It is used here in the fictional locale of Pepperside to contemplate hope and joy, and how those experiences can support our future on Earth. They utilized a science fictional approach to explore the idea of utopia, proposing that in radical imagination we find tools the that can facilitate change and evolution in the present. This attitude was visualized by a curatorial intervention Title for an Exhibition (2021) installed in the window and visible first from outside the gallery. In various languages, an LED loop said: “queer since the dawn of time” and “our queer forefathers” suggesting that queerness has always been present in the world. Inside, the “ultra fragile” Shields (2019-ongoing) adorned with tassels or stitching by Irina Bujor rounded off the corners of the first room. A soft voice seeped from behind them, sharing wishes that would change the violence in the realities of transgender people. In the second adjacent room, Irresistible (2021), a short film by Barbora Kleinhamplová in collaboration with Mistress Velvet, features the late queer dominatrix and their BDSM practice; as with their community organization and activist positions, Mistress Velvet used BDSM as a process to foster systemic change in the form of, for example, reparations by letting their white cis male clients read and study Black Feminist Theory. The curators made a point that queerness can become isolated in a bubble that to other communities is perceived as inaccessible or even violent. JOY ~ JOY ~ JOY aimed to not only leisurely depict joy but also the importance of notions of consent, care and comfort, which are of necessary concern to all people. These acts of care were scattered throughout the exhibition, in particular in the pencil drawings of Alex Horghidan’s Polyamory series (2020) in which groups of people, sometimes dressed sometimes not, but always in the comfort of a soft environment of grass, pillows, plants or a bed, and each other are portrayed at rest.

Summa: A New Journal On Realms Of Protection Published By Tabayer Jewelry


text by Lara Schoorl


What do you keep close—in your pocket, hanging around your neck, or passing through your fingers—to feel more safe amidst the mystery and reality of our world; which routines—burrowed in your tread, your thoughts, the sky, in the background—allow you comfort within your wandering mind? Those objects and presences of protection, that render wonder and convince significance, form the fabric of Summa, a new literary journal published by Tabayer jewelry. 

Echoing Tabayer’s philosophy to connect the metaphysical and tangible in their designs, Summa delves into ancient materials and contemplates forms of guardianship. The editor’s letter introducing the first issue tells us that summa “was a medieval literary genre that aimed to cover the whole terrain of a subject.” Following this intention, the contemporary journal sets out to publish stories on “the collective imaginary of protection—from the magical properties of amulets and talismans to ancient rites and private divinations.” For its inaugural issue, subtitled “Singularity and a Totality,” eight writers, artists and philosophers share texts and imagery on personal, societal and natural talismans and symbols. Their objects of study and care are rooted in yet transgress the material realm through the words that contextualize them in their personally attributed significance. 

Circles, gold, a potato, water, garlic, a symbol, a meteorite, time, and deities, worlds apart, transcend time and space and become the humble protagonists of these pages. Their histories strung together not only through a collective theme, but through the recurring materials in its content, of its pages and binding, and through the generous inserts—on the barely light blue pages—by the editors illuminating certain topics. Together these material and conceptual layers form a connected totality: Summa. 

No wonder then that the journal opens with “Primary Spheres” a visual essay by Batia Suter on round shapes as found in archival materials; a preface to the continuity of content that challenges the linearity of turning pages. Circles, as seen in (what appear to be) the eye of a parrot, the back of a child’s head, a cell, a shell, an instruction manual, a planet, and diagrams cover full pages. The images, that otherwise seem to exist independently from one another, cleave together through their found origin and circular forms, also foreboding, visually, how the all contributions subtly touch in language, references or content. 

In her essay “A gift from the stars,” Chloe Aridjis wonders, as she wanders through the Natural History Museum in Vienna, if the meteorite that her father gave to her as a child belongs to the same mother asteroid as (some of) those displayed in the museum exhibits. The fragments of meteors, once whole, once existing in a place beyond our imagination, could now inhabit our planet separated in museums or people’s homes and pockets. For Aridjis, the meteorite became an amulet when picked up from the earth in Durango, Mexico and placed in her hand. Pausing at this change, she also briefly references fertility figurines as the oldest “sacred scarabs.” While Aridjis obfuscates our sense of scale through her wonder—small, enormous and their proximity wax and wane in her essay akin to how the universe does as well—she plants a seed that grounds us in these pages with the mention of the ancient Venus talisman, who later on recurs in Fiona Alison Duncan’s text in the role of Inanna. Literal points of connection like these are scattered throughout the journal. 

Duncan proposes the story of Inanna to be the oldest documented Hero’s Journey, a narrative device as conceptualized by Joseph Campbell. A goddess from ancient Sumer, known for love, sex, power, justice and protection among other attributes (hence her association with Venus) has hymns recording her adventures dating from more than 2000 years BC. In one of them, she receives eighty mes—“an untranslatable term that means something like, ‘being, divine properties enabling cosmic activity; office; (cultic) ordinance,’” Duncan explains—from her father. These mes, Duncan continues, “bestow agency, free will, and protection against dependency.” Highly valuable immaterial talismans that emphasize that protection. Duncan also recognizes that Campbell mostly has studied male heroes for his theory, listing works such as the Odyssey and those of James Joyce are exemplary. Both of which, coincidentally, occur in conjunction with each other earlier on in the journal as a case study to connect the talismans that protect Odysseus from Circe, a root called Moly, and Bloom from Zoe by a black potato. 

Be it coincidence, thoughtful editing or life, the unintentional linkage between the texts in this first issue sparks excitement in your mind with its rhythmic interplay between new and then familiar information. Reading Summa is like following a choreography, allowing you to create your own narratives between the given ones. It soothes: to feel as though the world in some way can be, is, connected through a lattice of protection. It soothes: to experience that knowledge is fluid and our true armature, wisdom and questions. 

This takeaway is embedded within Tabita Rezaire’s poetic essay, “The Tongs of Gold.” The value and power of (inner) knowledge flows as an undercurrent in Rezaire’s essay, in which she recounts practices and memories of her ancestors and of other cultures and characters in history to illustrate the damage and violence inflicted upon earth and people by the gold mining industry. “When will you understand the true gold is water?” she dreamed her grandmother told her. And, “She knew a seed of wisdom was worth more than a mountain of gold,” referencing the journey of Queen Makeda visiting King Solomon. Carrying the past, she bears words of hope for the future (considering our current time a threshold) and encourages us to challenge the attributed meaning of wealth, treasure, scared, sacred and gold: “one can mine more gold from the depth of the heart than the from the core of the earth.” Her language so full and genuine that the words become precious in their own regard. I will keep them with me.

In a different context, Federico Campagna also questions the use of gold; gold that covers the background in medieval paintings: Fondo Oro. Moving away from material explanations—such as wealth, ornamentation, (lack of) technical skill—towards a metaphysical understanding—that what is both known and not, the omnipresence of God—to argue for the function of the gold backgrounds, Campagna begins to efface the distance between mystery and reality. In doing so, however, he circles back to what Rezaire came to as well: gold provides a space to rethink reality. It is impossible to fully grasp the ever changing space around us. Rather than attempting to grasp, medieval painters painted gold backgrounds because the gold became a symbol for the impossibility of one static background. Instead the gold offers endless imagination to those who perceive and construct space. Thus Campagna ends his argument that “Here lies the talismanic function of these images [fondo oro], as a tutamen (Latin for “protection”) rather than a mere decus (Latin for “ornament”): they strive to keep their viewers within the realms of “subjectivity” where reality is endlessly revealed and reimagined and to preserve them from the blindness that befalls those who become dead “objects.””

In each of the texts and imagery mentioned above protection seems to align with the ability to change oneself or what surrounds you via meaning and position. These concepts of protection, ethics, and origin, at the core of Tabayer’s philosophy, have translated so beautifully into their literary project Summa through the words and images of a profound lineup of authors hailing from disparate fields and places: Batia Suter, Laynie Browne, Chloe Aridjis, Federico Campagna, Tabita Rezaire, Daisy Lafarge, Fiona Alison Duncan, Shumon Basar. This first issue of Summa, more an anthology than a journal, contains many more texts to read and knowledges to uncover than what I have highlighted here. The journal is available on antennebooks.com and tenderbooks.co.uk. It is released annually in print and is accompanied by two blogs, MATERIA PRIMA and WHAT PROTECTS ME, where some of the texts are published online as well.