In Conversation with the Curators for LIAF 2013: Anne Szefer Karlsen and Bassam El Baroni

Natalie Hope O'Donnel, Sissel Lillebostad

Thirteen curators were invited to come up with a proposal for LIAF 2013, nine responded. When looking at the different projects, the board of Lofoten International Art Festival recognised a link between three curators, Bassam El Baroni, Anne Szefer Karlsen and Eva Gonzáles-Sancho: A way of dealing with emotions without getting sentimental and an interest for storytelling and its political aspects. The curators were asked to fuse their different positions and make a common platform for the biennial.

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Visningen av Mahmoud Khaleds film i Per Pedersens hus, Kabelvåg, LIAF 2013. Foto: Kjell Ove Storvik.

Kunstjournalen (KJ): You got selected as a team of three. Did you maintain your own position during the whole setup?

Bassam El Baroni (BB): We developed a shared construct, a methodology that had enough room for three different visions. It was a kind of architecture, where there would be room for three different personalities and visions. But in the end of the day, it comes together as one thing.

KJ: How much was retained from the original? Did you throw out the original proposals and started fresh?

Anne Szefer Karlsen (ASK): Yes, all of it was thrown out, and we started discussing.

KJ: Can you identify different aspects of the biennial that you feel resonate with your own position more than the others?

BB: What would resonate most with my own interest is the part of the project that I developed. And the artists I invited. We always discussed the choices of artists, but in the end of the day we knew each of us had a select number of artists to work with. So if anything, this is where I lived my own experience. But at the same time, I see a lot in Anne's part of the project that resonates with my position. I don't think there was any idea of retaining anything. That's important to point out. From the beginning we knew that this was just a process for selection that had to take place, and now that we're working together, we had to talk and negotiate and develop something. In the beginning it was very hard, actually.

ASK: We were negotiating if we were going to make a common project or not. That was actually the trickiest bit, to decide on doing it together.

BB: Yeah, because the easiest thing would be to do three completely separate projects.

ASK: We didn't want easy.

BB: At Manifesta in 2010 we were three teams, and there we decided to create three different projects. I think that is too easy. In this context, when there's no need for curatorial muscle, it is also not necessary. It's more about how to communicate within a certain context. So we made this kind of challenge between the three of us into a wider architectural construct that we communicated to people. This is how it came about.

ASK: Also, from a communication side of things, there was no point in splitting up what already is a temporary project – the biennial format – into more temporary projects. It would be confusing, more than clarifying. However, if you pay close attention, you clearly see three different voices in this project. The collaborative aspect of curating is rarely discussed, and most of the time the art system is simplifying the curatorial role into one subjective view point. The collaborative method of working we used for LIAF 2013 is also more rewarding, I think, both for the audience and for us as professionals, because it massages the whole idea of the biennial in a different way than if we would have gone with the easy solution.

BB: I think that would have been a nightmare, actually.

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Bani Abidi, Two of Two (2010), Lofoten Am-Car Club, Svinøya, LIAF 2013. Foto: Kjell Ove Storvik.

KJ: At the press conference the friction between LIAF and the local community came up as a topic. Is it possible to find similarities between the friction that obviously has been a very productive part of your collaboration, and the friction between LIAF and the community of Lofoten?

ASK: I'm actually not sure. I think those frictions are different to each other. The friction that happens between an organisation, – or a biennial – and an audience, is a public and almost impersonalised friction. While, in professional collaboration a productive friction is something extremely intimate and very personal, even. The friction that we have had is producing something complex, yet whole, that we can't leave from. Today is the opening, so maybe in two weeks we will feel that we've left it. But at this point of time, being in a current collaboration, I don't think we can differentiate between the friction and the space that is created from that friction, and the production of, in this case, an exhibition.

BB: I find working in Lofoten in many ways similar to working back home in Alexandria, even though they're completely different places. I think it comes from living in a place on the periphery somehow. These are places where you don't really feel the community needs what you do. Actually you don't feel this in most places, but some places it's much more pronounced. If there is friction, it's friction coming from the feeling of there not being any necessity for what you're doing here, there's no direct need for it. As in terms of us, it's a very positive friction; it's a professional relationship in terms of working together and trying to think together. Challenging, but always interesting.

ASK: Thinking of the words 'periphery' and 'need', what you are claiming is that there is a need for art other places that might not be so peripheral. But then again, everything is peripheral. BB: No, what I'm saying is that in places where there's an industry set in place, or there's a group of institutions, then there's already that kind of demand. But when you come to places like Lofoten, or even big cities that are not even 'on the map', somewhere like Alexandria, there's no reason for art, because there's no demand. And that's why, when I was working here, it is one of few places where I was reminded of how I started working back home.

ASK: Also, we are not here as individual curators, we're asked to act on behalf of an institution, which gives us particular access into the society, because we can say we represent this and that organisation, and in some ways this opens doors otherwise not open. This is one of the institutional perks, since we are not operating as individuals or independent curators doing a project out of our own will. As curatorial projects go the institutional affiliation is a grateful position to have.

KJ: Do the community also manifest some expectations to you as an institution?

ASK: This is a particular context to work in, because I think the expectations put on us was that we should act as if we also belong here. This is nothing outspoken, but something that we maybe have realised through the way that we have had to negotiate our work here. We realised that it wouldn't be productive to come in as UFOs. Some curators choose to do that, of course, but we didn't want to do that. Now that I think about it, the expectations were actually self-imposed, to some level. We discussed these issues quite a lot to move forward in the project.

BB: I think there are numbers of expectations in a community. For example, there are directions of education, that your project should play an enlightening role. Another expectation is that you should come in and make something that's popular. Those are two expectations that can circulate within an institutional environment that are very aware of its context. But then there's the more abstract international circuit of expectations, for example, one expectation would be to curate something that is highly critical and at the same time gains its value from a kind of resistance. Because there are two types of this idea, art that cares less about politics and more about aesthetics, or you can go the other way which is art that is more politically engaged and less aesthetically engaged. I think this game of expectations is very sophisticated. So when you're at a specific place, it's not just the expectations of that place. It's more the whole thing that functions around it, like the institution, colleagues, people in the press. How do you situate yourself within this game of expectations? You make choices, and these choices have to do with many things. So what you end up doing in the end is a balancing act between expectations and what is demanded of you personally. And I think we should always be quite honest about that. I think it's impossible to fulfil everybody's expectations; it's just not going to work.

LIAF

LIAF, Lofoten Am-Car Club and Murbruket, Svinøya, LIAF 2013. Foto: Kjell Ove Storvik.

KJ: Your educational programme seems to have a very strong artistic touch to it, by inviting people to do more interpretations, for example guides 'singing' the work. Thereby having a completely different mediation of the works itself, maybe even of the biennial as a whole. This mediation is taking place after the professional field has left town, when the ones who are here are the people living in Lofoten.

ASK: Yes, this is important to us, we did not want to put the guides 'on show'. They are hand picked guides from the local population, who were invited to study the art works to be able to present the exhibition to the local audience. We have in a way invited them to relate to the exhibition through each other, which is something they can do without us or any other expert being present.

KJ: Is it also a way of meeting those expectations that are not shaped yet?

BB: Yes. I think that's true.

KJ: In one of the venues, Per Pedersen's house in Kabelvåg, two of the works you display come forward as completely different stories. One video by Oliver Ressler has a very strong didactic aspect on petroleum industry, and the other one by Mahmoud Khaled featuring Franco Berardi reflects upon our existence as humans where we are doomed to fail. However, both of them are taking a stand in the very present debate in Lofoten at the moment, between people who are pro or contra the petroleum industry. Do you think these works meets expectations that is projected on you, since this society at present has strong ideological battles caused by questions of how to deal with the conflict between petroleum and fishery?

BB: You see, that's the thing. I don't think that it's just this society; I think these ideological conflicts are everywhere.

ASK: And this is also what we realised, and wanted to enhance, when we have been working on this project.

BB: We are living in really complicated times, and I think it's my job as a curator to facilitate a presentation of complexity, not to take a strong position and unify myself with a certain direction. I think of curating as inverse intellectualism. What an intellectual would do is to see the world from a certain perspective that he or she imposes on the world and narrates the world from. I think the curator must act the opposite of that, maintaining a kind of intellectualism that opens up to everything inside. As a curator you are a bit like a cook, you get the ingredients from other people, some can be committed communists like Oliver Ressler, and others can have completely different views. I think my role is facilitating a shared experience of these views. Because at the moment I don't think any ideology can function alone, and at the same time most ideologies have very clear and obvious problems. We are at a moment where ideologies need to coexist for us to understand how we can see upcoming times.

KJ: Could you elaborate what you mean with the professional and the amateur antagonism you are referring to in the concept?

BB: One of the pieces that is helpful in that respect is exactly Mahmoud Khaled's piece with Franco Berardi. I think Berardi is explaining amateur antagonism when he starts talking about proliferation – this is amateur antagonism. This type of antagonism just happens, and it spreads like virus, as he says. The platforms that instigate these antagonisms are not constructed as places for reflection on society, but they're already integrated in society. One example is how we use all these types of new communication platforms on Internet. They've become part of our lives and part of the way we communicate and think, and we internalise them. So when we start using them as forms of resistance it comes out of a natural correlation. I'm not saying that they're good, but they are not constructed as institutions that are made for reflection. And I think this is the key here. When something happens on such a platform, it spreads out of control, because it's out there. Whereas art has a very complicated relationship with that, although all the time we want art to resist, we want art to … I don't know. Change the world, or, you know. And there's a problem there, because it doesn't function that way.

KJ: Maybe it's because art resist being asked to do a certain job?

ASK: Maybe because art has become too institutionalised. If you have an institution instigating the same antagonism that happens through these more amateur movements, if you professionalise or institutionalise that, you actually have war, don't you?

KJ: Maybe one of the things that have given art a certain liberty, even in more authoritarian states, is that art has been seen as powerless. You can actually do whatever in an autonomous space. It is a lot of freedom within it, of course, but it's also a position where you have little influence. Influence can go both ways of course, but society doesn't really get easily shaped or changed by art.

ASK: In retrospect art may become the marker of that change.

BB: There are these two positions, and they're never going away, I think. The first position, a kind of open art, would be the perception of, let's say, Friedrich Schiller, for he is the kind of figure that constructed this path. Then there's the other position, where art has to serve society and play a political role, not just enlighten but provide directions towards improvement. Historically speaking, from my brief research and interest in these two polarities, I would say the first figure that comes out and speaks this way is John Ruskin. He's the kind of morally guided art person who starts this idea. If we look at how art is understood today, I think it has never broken out of these two polarities. I think there's a huge antagonism between these two types of attitudes. One edition of a biennial can pose a kind of war on the other type of vision or practice. For me it's important to realise that these are very old positions, when curating you would try to avoid taking one of these polarities. In this edition of LIAF, I think we've managed to do that. We have different types of stances that come together and formulate a mosaic of different voices. I'm against any kind of curatorial position that dictates what art should and should not be.

ASK: The curator shouldn't dictate, but through the choices you make you take a stand nevertheless.

BB: Yeah, but it's always a subtle and open stand. It's not a stand that is non-negotiable.

David Horvitz i Smedvika, Kabelvåg, LIAF 2013. Foto: Kjell Ove Storvik

David Horvitz i Smedvika, Kabelvåg, LIAF 2013. Foto: Kjell Ove Storvik.

KJ: Do you situate this biennial in relation to the rest of Norwegian biennial culture and the previous editions of LIAF?

BB: We looked at what's been done previously. We wanted to avoid certain things, of course, and we also looked at how the previous editions communicated. That was of high interest to us, because we wanted to think better devices of communication. So yeah, we were very much engaged in looking at previous editions of LIAF and try to find certain issues and certain problematics that we wanted to investigate or treat from our point of view, in this edition. But in terms of other biennials, I think no, because this place has certain limitations and certain conditions specific to this place. There's no real reason to think of LIAF in terms of a dialogue with what's happening in Bergen.

ASK: I think that one of the things that we did notice from previous LIAFs, was this particular interest in conservation of a certain history or outlook on this region, that we wanted to counter a little bit. Although some of the commissioned artworks in this edition are directly linked to here, they're at the same time extremely embedded in other spheres. They're not only about Lofoten. We've chosen artists that understand the subtlety of relating to a space through a commission and they've chosen to bring a lot of themselves, their own position, into the work instead of coming here and being wowed by nature, reproducing an initial overwhelming feeling that most people have when they step into Lofoten.

KJ: Like you put a mirror up, so you can see how beautiful it is, if you haven't noticed before.

ASK: Exactly. These commissions are doing something else, which I think is very important: they are more than anything connecting Lofoten to the rest of the world, rather than secluding this are as something special.This way we have succeeded in positioning this edition against previous LIAFs. And in terms of the other Norwegian biennials happening this year, I think it's a fun year to be doing this, because…

BB: It's funny.

ASK: It's funny. It's definitely not a race or a competition, I wouldn't at all frame it like that, but it is interesting to see how the different organisations have handled the biennial format, what the working conditions have been for the curators and for the artists. We didn't let the fact that there is three biennials happening in the same year in Norway influence the concept, or the thinking we have been engaged in. Our work has naturally been supporting the institution that we have been working for as curators, which is quite different I think, to positioning it artistically.

BB: We were interested in what was going on, we did look at the statements and all that kind of stuff, but at the same time we didn't feel we had to respond to them, because we know these are different contexts and we are dealing with this context here.

KJ: How do you relate to the format you were asked to fill?

ASK: We fill the format as well we can. It's kind of answered through the exhibition, I mean, I think the proof somehow is here.

KJ: The exhibition is the answer?

ASK: Yeah, I think the exhibition needs to be the answer for that. The way we have chosen to communicate with the audience and the guidebook are both part and parcel of that.

 

Kunstjournalen B-post nr.1_13: Assembly, Momentum, LIAF