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 Artimei 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. ↩