Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead – Bergen Assembly 2019 begins its packed autumn programme with a long weekend (Thursday morning to Sunday afternoon), featuring the opening of the exhibition across five venues – Bergen Kjøtt, Bergen Kunsthall, Entrée, Hordaland kunstsenter and KODE 1 Permanenten – as well as performances, concerts, parties, talks, workshops and walking tours. The second edition of the Parliament of Bodies in Bergen, The Impossible Parliaments, takes place on the evening of Saturday, 7 September. 

There are extended exhibition opening hours during the Opening Days: all exhibition venues are open from 11am to 7pm. 

Get to know the platforms and themes of the 2019 edition and meet the conveners, collaborators and contributors of this year’s triennial!

PROGRAMME

11am–7pm
All exhibition venues are open

11am–2pm
Feminist Health Care Research Group, Politicising Healthcare: Activate Knowledge from the Health Movement
Workshop, limited number of participants, please sign in at events@bergenassembly.no for participation
Hordaland kunstsenter

In order to politicise health, we need to begin by learning to consider health as a space for political action and to empower ourselves to develop our own concepts of health and care. Inga Zimprich from the Feminist Health Care Research group invites you to formulate desires, re-activate knowledges from the Health Movement and to develop ideas for collective resistance.

Free hot drinks and snacks provided.
HKS is wheelchair accessible and has a barrier-free toilet.
The workshop takes place in English. Please email us if you require whisper translation into Norwegian. There is no translation into sign language.
There is no childcare available but children are welcome.

11am–1.15pm
political parties: Charles Roka / Situationist International / Raisa ‘Raya’ Bielenberg and Tore-Jarl Bielenberg / Gypsy Legacy
Talk, relocation and exchange of artworks, walk, music performance
Folk og Røvere, KODE 1 Permanenten / Cabinet, Belgin

In the context of Bergen Assembly 2019, Charles Roka’s painting Sigøynerpike (‘Gypsy Girl’) will be relocated in a public event from the Bergen Bar Folk og Røvere, where it is usually on display, to Kode 1 Permanenten as part of Pedro G. Romero and María García’s project political parties. It will be replaced by a selection of collages from the series España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart, 1964) by the Situationist International.

Charles Roka was a Hungarian-Roma artist who lived and worked in Norway for most of his adult life. His paintings were extremely popular, particularly the series of portraits titled Sigøynerpike (‘Gypsy Girl’), which he started in 1939. These paintings immediately captured the world’s imagination as an erotic symbol, a kind of camp Carmen. The work presented many controversial aspects – objectification of women’s bodies, capitalist desire, and the alienation of representations by means of advertising and its banalisation – but the fact that it made Roma culture resonate in spaces of bourgeois hegemony is of interest here.

The same disruptive effect was true of the pinups that the Situationist International disseminated in the series España en el corazón, in which the usual objectified women invited people to come to Franco’s Spain and commit revolutionary acts …

11am
Folk og Røvere
Talk with Tore-Jarl Bielenberg

Tore-Jarl Bielenberg (b. 1935, Oslo) is a Norwegian journalist, cultural worker, translator and author. He has been committed to the rights of Roma people for most of his adult life. His book Romá/Sigøynere. I går, i dag, i morgen (Roma/Gypsies: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow, 2012) focuses on the history, language, culture, religion and organisations of Roma and their significant contribution to the world’s culture and art.

Exchange of Charles Roka’s painting Sigøynerpike with a selection of collages (reprints) from the series España en el corazón (Spain in the Heart) by the Situationist International

12pm
Walk from Folk og Røvere to KODE 1 Permanenten, carrying the painting to the exhibition Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead at Kode 1 Permanenten

12.15pm
Installation of the painting in the cabinet of Pedro G. Romero and María García’s project political parties
KODE 1 Permanenten / Cabinet

12.45pm
Raya and the Gypsy Legacy
Music performance
Belgin

Raya Bielenberg (b. Raisa Udovikova in 1931) is a singer, actor and one of the most highly profiled mediators of Roma culture in Norway. Born in the Soviet Union, she worked as a dramatic artist before coming to Norway in 1967. She soon joined the Norwegian public debate as an enthusiastic spokesperson on the conditions and rights of the Roma people. Bielenberg founded the annual YAGORI – gypsy music festival in 1999, building up a large audience for Roma culture. She gives concerts with the group Raya & the Gypsy Legacy, where she is joined by her children and grandchildren.

1.45­–2.45pm
Workers’ Families Seeking Justice (WFSJ) and its Support Group, Murder Not Accident
Presentation with excerpts of the new film
Belgin

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. The annual death toll of occupational diseases is estimated to be at least six times this figure. None of these deaths are registered as work-related and most of the victims of work-related violence remain unnamed.

3–6pm
Voicing the Dead and the Politics of Mourning
Panels and discussion
Belgin

Departing from the question of when a life is grievable, and indeed, when it is not, the panel will discuss how and who can speak for the dead in artistic production and circulation of images. We will ask, following Judith Butler, which frames need to be made and unmade in this work and, moreover, how lost lives can be spoken and accounted for in an aesthetics of the living. As opposed to the tradition of grief as private, we will attempt to posit and discuss a politics of mourning and how this can be presented in the public realm, insisting on the continuation of life and that the dead are not actually dead.

3–4.30pm: With Simnikiwe Buhlungu, Hans D. Christ, Iris Dressler, Malebona Maphutse, Paul B. Preciado; hosted by Simon Sheikh

5–6pm: With Banu Cennetoğlu and Burkhard Liebsch; hosted by Simon Sheikh

6–9pm
the Mycological Twist, Troll Swamp
Gaming session, limited capacity, for participation please register at gaming@bergenassembly.no
Entrée

Troll Swamp is a large-scale board game for multiple players, based on the formats and characters from the popular tabletop game Dungeons and Dragons. The game has been developed and tested with various groups in Bergen, and utilises role-play and teamwork in order to act out scenarios against online trolling. Through the analogue nature of the game, a playful situation emerges where one plays an imaginary character. Guided by the Dungeon Master (a storyteller guiding the players through the game), each player will face their own online habits as well as their relationship with others. Troll Swamp has the potential to enable its players to regain confidence, rethink dynamics of interaction and reclaim a different space of expression online.

6.30pm
political parties: Javiera de la Fuente
Performance in the context of the projectCanciones de la Guerra Social Contemporánea, approx. 10′
Belgin

In the late 1970s, Guy Debord made frequent trips around the Iberian Peninsula. In Spain and France he was in contact with the Autonomist movement. It was in this context that he decided to put together a songbook of what he euphemistically described as the ‘Spanish neo-democracy’.

Canciones de la Guerra Social Contemporánea (Songs of the Contemporary Social War) is a project to reconstruct and put into circulation the songbook assembled by Debord under that title. Twenty-seven songs are presented in different ways and by various artists – in compilations, concerts, performative presentations and grouped together with informational material.

Javiera de la Fuente is a flamenco dancer and an independent researcher. She brings dialogues between flamenco, performance and contemporary dance.

7.15–8.30pm
Sarah Browne, The Shambles of Science, 2019
Premier screening of new film, conversation with Sarah Browne, Nora Heidorn and Iris Dressler
Belgin

Sarah Browne’s new film The Shambles of Science, featuring human and canine protagonists, makes a connection between two historical events: the involvement of Swedish physiology students Lizzie Af Hageby and Leisa Schartau in anti-vivisection protests in London; and the contemporaneous force- feeding of suffragettes held in Holloway prison. Central to the film is the way the bodies of both the dogs and the women were represented in the contemporary press as prone and unspeaking, whether subject to illegal experiments or resisting state-sanctioned ‘care’ in the prison system.

9–10pm
Boris Ondreička, Actually, the Living Is Not Living, 2019
Performance, spoken word with double projection and sounds
Bergen Kunsthall / Landmark

In Actually, the Living Is Not Living, Slovak artist and curator Boris Ondreička proposes negative or ‘concave’ readings of the official Bergen Assembly theses. Being dedicated to pessimistic and nihilistic thoughts (as embedded in recent Black Metal Theories) and a biogenetic sulphur-world hypotheses of the origin of life, Ondreička does not differentiate between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’. In such a negation (blackening, or ‘nigredo’) of ‘the permanent return’, he finds the only possible application of deep ecological thought.

10.30–11.20­pm
M. Lamar, The Demon Rising, 2016–ongoing
Music performance
Piano and vocals by M. Lamar, music composed by M. Lamar, libretto by M. Lamar and Tucker Culbertson
Grand Hotel Terminus

Artist, counter-tenor and composer M. Lamar works across opera, metal, performance, video, sculpture and installation to craft sprawling narratives of radical becomings. A self-branded ‘Negrogoth’, his compositions draw from the Negro spiritual, folk lamentation, operatic excess, dissonant black metal and gothic opulence, through which Lamar reflects upon the violent histories of colonialism, its traumas and legacies. The composition The Demon Rising – for male soprano, piano and projections – is inspired, in part, by the grand jury testimony of Darren Wilson (the white police officer who murdered unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in 2014). The Demon Rising embraces and incarnates white fantasies of blackness as oversized, superhuman and a supernatural menace. At the same time, it charts the black subject’s psychic and mythic odyssey from dehumanising rituals of death toward a self-made re-membering.

8pm–2.30am
Said Warya
Dj Set
Belgin

10pm–2.30am
Violent Disco! 
With Olav Eggestøl, DJ Py and Trym Søvdsnes
Bergen Kunsthall / Landmark

ADDRESSES

Belgin, Rasmus Meyers allé 3, 5015 Bergen
Bergen Kjøtt, Skutevikstorget 1, 5032 Bergen
Bergen Kunsthall, Rasmus Meyers allé 5, 5015 Bergen
Entrée, Markeveien 4b, 5012 Bergen
Folk og Røvere, Sparebanksgaten 4, 5017 Bergen
Grand Hotel Terminus, Zander Kaaes gate 6, 5015 Bergen
Hordaland kunstsenter, Klosteret 17, 5005 Bergen
KODE 1 Permanenten, Nordahl Bruns gate 9, 5014 Bergen

OPENING DAYS PROGRAMME
Thursday, 5.9.2019
Saturday, 7.9.2019
Sunday, 8.9.2019

DOWNLOAD OPENING DAYS PROGRAMME