Thread by @BergenAssembly

The exhibition opens tomorrow! Time for a thread highlighting the wonderful artists and contributions at @kodebergen — please note entrance is free. The KODE-part of Bergen Assembly is divided into two parts: SALON and CABINET (political parties).

SALON dissolutes an institution that controls and is haunted by the past: the museum. The invention of the modern museum was in parallel with the peak of colonialism, was part of the nation-building processes and their construction of identity and the ‘other’.

The scientific discourses on race, genetic purity and superiority, of worthy and unworthy life, are interwoven with this institution in diverse ways. They are contrasted here with drafts of life that undermine eugenic forms of selection.

Aspects of care and preservation are treated in diverse and divergent ways: from the historical and current struggles of indigenous peoples to preserve their ecological, territorial and economic bases of life to alternative projects for cultivating plants.

From initiatives to eliminate deadly working conditions to the celebratory funeral for an activist collective; from the unfathomable love for a ‘monster’ to the critical questioning of the emotional work of women in moments of crisis. Here are the artists and works you'll find:

Simnikiwe Buhlungu / Malebona Maphutse (former Title In Transgression members) feat. the Community: Incorporating signifiers of mourning, a space becomes one of celebration, with t-shirts, video screenings and a shrine adorned with paraphernalia.

Capital Drawing Group is organised by educators and artists: Andrew Cooper, Enda Deburca, Dean Kenning and John Russell. They meet in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank to read and discuss Karl Marx’s Capital, and illustrate every chapter of all 3 volumes of the book.

Banu Cennetoğlu’s artistic practice explores the political, social, and cultural dimensions of the production, representation, and distribution of knowledge, how this forms a society’s collective thinking and is addressed in a society’s ideology.

Laressa Dickey / Magdalena Freudenschuss: «re:assembling emotional labour» is a process of re:appropriation, exploring emotions & emotional labour in context of political imprisonment. Dickey and Freudenschuss ‘re:work’ experiences during 2017 as partners of political prisoners.

Ines Doujak: «In today’s world, desperation is an economic force. Entire populations uproot and flee in the direction of the faintest glimmer of hope, only to find themselves in the worst of predicaments.»

For Bergen Assembly 2019, @n_gold presents a selection from his long-term, ongoing photographic series «Permanent Daylight». All motifs depict human-made or human-shaped sites, their historic traces, or the first signs of their future materialisation/ dematerialisation.

Minna Henriksson: «Nordic Race Science» is a survey of central figures engaged in ‘race science’ in Nordic countries between the 1850s and 1945: scientists who measured human skulls and living people in order to categorise humans into ‘races’ & place them in hierarchical order.

Niillas Holmberg / @jennilaiti / Outi Pieski: Is colonialism causing you problems? Does some anonymous official decide how your land should be used?

Don’t worry! We have a solution to your troubles: a moratorium!

Alexander Kluge is one of Germany’s most prominent writers and filmmakers. In this filmed conversation, the Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich tells the story of the wife of an assembly worker who worked in the area of Chernobyl after the fatal accident of 1986.

Darcy Lange created and presented the performance «Aire del Mar», a multimedia opera by Lange, during 1988 and 1994. Art historian Benjamin Buchloh considered Darcy Lange an exemplary artist.

Åsa Sonjasdotter divides her time between Berlin and the island of Ven in Sweden. She is a PhD candidate at Valand Academy in Gothenburg, Sweden, and a founding member of The Neighbourhood Academy, a bottom- up learning site and branch of Prinzessinnengarten in Berlin.

Nina Støttrup Larsen: «What role does mythology play in relation to the narratives that the so-called ‘West’ tells itself about its relations with the rest of the world?»

Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa’s methodologies include interviews, discussions, readings, participant observation, workshops, drawing, photography, printmaking, collage and commissioning. «in a very low voice, so then you’re sort of there» are dispersed across all venues of BA2019.

Workers’ Families Seeking Justice (WFSJ) and its Support Group: «Murder Not Accident» documents the collective struggle against ‘work-related serial murders’ in Turkey. In 2018, at least 1,872 people died due to preventable causes while working.