Bergen Biennial Conference
17th - 20th of September

As scholars and curators have recently acknowledged, the history of exhibitions is both one of the most vital and, paradoxically, ignored narratives of our cultural history. And given the increasing role of biennials and other perennial exhibitions of contemporary art in contemporary culture, it seems all the more necessary to critically examine them today. The impetus to do so now comes in response to the Bergen City Council’s plans to establish a biennial for contemporary art in Bergen, Norway, for which the Bergen Kunsthall has taken up the task of organizing an international conference and think tank to study and discuss the status of the biennial as an exhibition model, and also to launch a debate concerning the plans for a biennial in Bergen.

The aims of the Bergen Biennial Conference, poised to be one of the most extensive examinations of the biennial phenomenon to date, are to identify and explore existing ‘biennial knowledge’ from different regions of the world and to incite new critical thinking and writing on recurrent large-scale art exhibitions—their history, socio-political and economical contexts, as well as their impact on artistic and curatorial practices.

Taking research as its starting point, the Bergen Biennial Conference will bring together an international group of curators, critics, artists, and thinkers so as to benefit from their discussions of their findings, and create the occasion to reflect collectively about the practice and potential of biennials as institutions. The event’s discursive format—a combination of symposium and think tank—made up of three days of lectures as well as seminar style workshops with young and leading professionals in the field will be complemented with a two-volume reader. The first volume will include existing seminal texts on biennials from around the world, and a second volume will be composed of newly commissioned texts and a report on the event. On the occasion of the conference, the archive on international biennials that was conceived as part of the 28th São Paolo Biennial and constituting the most comprehensive documentation source on biennials anywhere, will be present and available for consultation in the Bergen Kunsthall.