A live performance on newly invented instruments staged in an abandoned public aquatic center, Tarek Atoui’s WITHIN I, 2016, highlighted the September convergence of the 2016 Bergen Assembly. This work was emblematic of the collective spirit of this year’s program, being part of an ongoing collaborative sequence involving instrument makers, speaker designers, software engineers, and musicians. The performance was produced as a collaboration between 2016 co–artistic director Atoui, composer Pauline Oliveros, and several local musicians and performers, and was the result of years of research in instrument making, audiology, and acoustics. The instruments were built in cooperation with a local high school for the deaf; designed to optimize tactile feedback for the player, they are also highly visually demonstrative. Around the pool complex, the associated exhibition “Infinite Ear,” co-organized by Atoui and the curatorial duo Council, featured several complementary investigations into the aural sphere, including a bar where drinks came paired with sound tracks, a screening program, sound massages by appointment, and a program of deep-listening sessions for small groups. In its interdisciplinary cross-fertilization, the project registered as an apotheosis of the Bergen Assembly ethos.
Each triennial Bergen Assembly has featured a different programmatic and personnel arrangement, but all have offered a break from many of the most notorious shortcomings of global megashows: Ethnogeographic box checking, big-name-artist pile ons, prepackaged thematic ideals, and just-in-time organizational chaos have all been noticeably absent. This year’s three sections—led by Atoui, the research collective freethought, and curator duo PRAXES, respectively—each unfolded over extended periods. Through press gathered for a series of events in September, many components of the show had already opened; a few had come and gone or were yet to begin; and the program as a whole runs through the end of the year.
This isn’t to suggest that the show as a whole looked radically different from the standard global contemporary art show, with its all-too-familiar setup. A thematic group exhibition curated by curatorial duo PRAXES at Bergen Kunsthall that centered around Lynda Benglis’s latex-and-foam pours was elegantly executed. What was remarkable about the show, one of several local Benglis-related exhibitions PRAXES organized over the past year, was not its format, but that the duo chose to spend the year preparing many vignette-size exhibitions to explore different phases of the artist’s work.
Among the commissions in this year’s assembly, Delete Beach, 2016, a six-and-a-half-minute video by Phil Collins, is an indulgent anime parable about young punk peak-oil renegades. Imagining a post-oil world in which a group of “burners” inject contraband crude like a drug as part of their anticapitalist resistance, the work came off as far too broad in its politics. Thin and gaudy, it offered little, given the significant resources required to make it. Screenings of the video were offered amid the roster of talks, exhibitions, events, and performances included in freethought’s two-day Infrastructure Summit, coinciding with the press days.
Standing out among the extended days of panels and curated hangouts was a staging of Things that surround us, a 2012 work by choreographer Clément Layes and his company, Public in Private. Layes’s performance unfolds as a mesmeric interaction between people and things, the three performers contending with naming, taxonomizing, and interacting with various fabricated and natural objects as well as with each other. The confusion, inflected by object-oriented ontology, mounts to the point of revelation. In a moment when ideas barely have time to land before seeming retrograde, the work’s depiction of the relation between humans, their things, and their things’ things was welcome as a still-true statement repeated. It was nice to have the time to linger on that.
—Rachael Rakes
