In Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes we dream as we live & sometimes we live as we dream, Ciudad Juárez, México (2013), Francis Alÿs attempts to enact the aphorism expressed in the work’s title, and in doing so problematizes the idea of trying to create something beautiful in the face of a terrible situation. Here, Alÿs kicks a flaming soccer ball through Ciudad Juárez at night. His path is illuminated only by the light from the fire, which he must strike with his foot in order to proceed. The darkness of the night provides a veil for the city’s ever-present problems, including the sale of drugs, prostitution, and police indifference, which are only momentarily glimpsed along his route. This type of walking comprises an important facet of Alÿs’s practice, the repetitive, meditative action serving as a catalyst for the recognition of deep-rooted issues. The artistic act becomes at once poetic, absurd, impossible, yet somehow possible.

Francis Alÿs (b. in Antwerpen, 1959) is an artist based in Mexico City.

Thanks to David Zwirner Gallery.

Snow, Darkness and Cold is a study of the Udtja region in Norrbotten through a four-channel slide show. In a photographic montage, the moss, lichen and flora of the forest overlap with pictures from anthropological studies, and traces of the military activities that have taken place in the area since the beginning of the Cold War. The work takes as its starting point the zoologist and photographer Carl Fries’ contribution to the yearbook of the Swedish Tourist Association from 1924. Through text and photography, Fries describes a walk through Udtja, located in Sápmi between Jokkmokk and Arjeplog. As part of Sweden’s popular education project, he portrays the nature, people and wildlife that he encounters in the unspoiled landscape. Through the lens of the camera, we follow Andersson as he traces the ideological transformations of the landscape: In 1958 the Defence Agency built a massive Robot Testing Ground (RFN) in the area, the same size as all of Blekinge county (some 3000 sq km). RFN was the main testing facility in Sweden, established with the ambition to begin a nuclear programme. As the infrastructure expanded, more jobs were created, and the town of Vidsel as well as an airport was built. From there, the people in Udtja’s Sami villages were flown out as the military needed space for their training. In 2004, the state produced a report on how international military testing and training on Swedish territory ought to be developed for the future. It was concluded that “the combination of the large and sparsely populated area, the climate and the existing military infrastructure creates almost unique conditions for military testing and training activity.” Since then, business in Udtja has entirely focused on foreign clients, the weapon industry, and the military. It has become the centre of the collaboration between Swedish Defence and NATO.

Where the industrial era was built around natural resources like forestry, mining and hydroelectric power, we may now add a fourth resource to the list: the very sparseness, desolation and emptiness of the region. Andersson’s work strives to understand the optics through which this relation to nature becomes possible, because the landscape is, of course, anything but empty. Perhaps something else emerges from this imagined emptiness? The lack of awareness of the governing powers manifests in pictures, attitudes and affects.

Henrik Andersson (b. in Göteborg, 1973) is an artist based in Stockholm.

Who is Afraid of Ideology? was filmed in Rojava (also known as the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria) in 2017. The work listens as members of the Kurdish resistance movement discuss how practical work relates to ideological doctrine – what is the best way to use an axe? When is it okay to cut down a tree in order to survive? A static camera depicts a mountainous landscape in late winter. Meltwater runs into streams as the snow begins to give way. Environmental consciousness within the movement developed in parallel to changes in living conditions during the war. Just as nature has its own defences, so vulnerable groups must also protect themselves. The scenes that play out are not in sync with the accompanying audio. Instead of dripping, rippling water, we hear members of the Kurdish women’s movement in Rojava talk about their relationship with nature. When the women are thereafter shown on screen, it is silent. This editing allows the viewer to listen to an individual speaking for a collective movement, and also keeps those who represent radical viewpoints anonymous.

Marwa Arsanios (b. in Washington DC, 1978) is an artist based in Berlin, Beirut and Vienna.

The exploitation of nature and fast economic growth are interconnected in many places in the world. In Monira Al Qadiri’s investigative project she hones in on the ecological, cultural and economic legacy of two industries in the Gulf states, namely those of pearl and oil. These materials have at different points in history been fundamental to the region, where oil has now overtaken the once more prominent position of the pearl. In the installation Spectrum 1 we see six sculptures in glittering mother-of-pearl reminiscent of underwater creatures – corals or sea-anemones – mounted onto a purple wall. But actually, the strange objects follow the form of the drills used to extract oil. Depending on the angle and how we move about the space, the sculptures change colour. Nonetheless, their dominant colour is purple, and perhaps an omen of what’s to come: in the oil industry, that colour signifies extraordinary danger. It appears on oil rigs only after the warning colour red – at this point, an explosion is inevitable. For superstitious reasons, you do not wear purple to work.

Monira Al Qadiri (b. in Dakar, 1983) is an artist based in Berlin.

Cabo de Roca is the most western point in Europe. Here, ‘where the land ends and the sea begins’, sits Portugal’s most remote lighthouse, which Sunstone takes as its starting point. The film’s narrator is the keeper of the lighthouse, Roque Pina, and he takes us on an associative journey through the history of navigation via the physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, who, during the 1820s, invented a new optical technology to make lighthouses shine brighter and further. The film traces Fresnel’s lighthouse lenses from their emergence, to being exhibited in a museum. The lens is singled out from the mechanical structure of the lighthouse and studied as an object. Two hands hold the massive glass device against the sun, the lens fractures the light, but at the same time darkens your field of vision. The symbolism of the lighthouse is manifold – on the one hand a bearer of light on the dark seas, associated with the potentials of vision, and the enlightenment’s ideals of scientific progression. But also as the enabler of expansive naval military operations, notably the colonial occupation of other continents, and the capitalist developments that it brought back to Europe. “We need a philosopher of lighthouses,” the narrator declares.

Sunstone explores the relationship between visibility and knowledge, light and enlightenment through the lens of optical technology, 3D, CGI-imagery, and 16mm analogue cinematography. The artists Filipa César and Louis Henderson come together in their shared interest in fictitious documentaries, and alternative modes of narration. Over the course of the film, we follow an abstract conversation about the design of navigation systems and colonialism, where our modern digital satellite system, with GPS as the prime example, at once guides and surveils us. Navigation systems developed by the military are a manifestation of power, but they also grant power. Because those who make the maps, also make the future.

Filipa César (b. in Porto, 1975) is an artist based in Berlin.
Louis Henderson (b. in Norwich, 1983) is an artist based in Paris and Berlin.

Jelly Night takes on the idea of sleepwalking as seen through the eyes of a Walt Disney animation, and fuses it with Yat-Kha’s trance-like music. The colour is drained from the film and everything slows down. As Yat-Kha is singing about his childhood love to a great river, the flowing music opens a lucid dreamspace. This state of consciousness borders on dreaming, but is one where the dreamer is aware that she’s dreaming. We are wandering through the night, lead by the music like Donald Duck is lead by Daisy, and though there does not seem to be an aim to this strange, dreamy rhythm, music and image, city and landscape, viewer and viewed melt into each other. Sigmund Freud has claimed that dreaming is just another form of thought. In this twilight zone, consciousness and the unconscious move as one. Perhaps this is what it takes to conjure new hallucinations that allow for more than a level of criticality.

Anna Dacqué (b. in Vienna, 1964) is an artist based in Berlin.
Thanks to Yat-Kha och Global Music Centre.

On the south side of Luleå’s central peninsula, in the first and last weeks of the biennial, a monumental light work by the artist Vishal K Dar will play out. Six beams of light from three locations – the crane at Södra Hamn, Cementa’s silo, and the barge - will move in precise mechanic rhythm making spatial diagrams in light along the coast, on the water and in the sky. The three sites sit on the edge of the city, separated by 145 degrees. As the temperature drops, the water will become solid and the distinction between ground and water will dissolve. In this way, the work takes place in two steps: when that distinction exists and when it doesn’t.

With a background in architecture and a deep interest in the scientific understanding of the physical laws of light and space, Dar creates a work in which darkness itself assumes the status of icon. The title, Dirghtamas, roughly translates to “a long darkness,” a reference to the long winter night’s of the north. The beams move by a pre-programmed time-index that has them appear and disappear in turn. Dar studies light in transformation, and with his work stages an intervention into days that have taken the shape of nights. Together, the six beams will make up cosmological clocks. And lit up, the oversized objects in the harbour will seem delirious, like ghostly creatures stepping into the space of the work. The beams of light appear as both innards and breath for these industrial effigies, as if the stars themselves were put to work in the quiet chaos of the darkness.

Vishal K Dar (b. in New Dehli, 1976) in an artist based in Gurgaon.
Thanks to Dykab, Cementa, Luleå Municipality, Luleå Technical University and Iaspis.

In a diary entry dedicated to thoughts on the intestine, Ingela Ihrman writes about the flora of the sea and that of the stomach, and about how, for her, gutweed (Ulva intestinalis) makes the link between the two – a slimy return to the sea and to the algae that have managed to retain the sun’s power so that other forms of life may benefit from it. It is about being a landscape, and being in landscape; about belly fat and crude oil – deposits of energy stored in the earth and in the body form the the basis of an extensive artistic exploration that begins in the bowel – a sore spot, and with Wind Within (2018) the Luleå Biennial stages its second outcome. From the study of algae and seagrass on the Koster islands in Bohuslän and a still burgeoning relation to the permacultural activities there, the project now moves into its visual phase, where the gutweed takes the sculptural form of hanging, sprawling bodies. The work may be read as an artistic quest for a new way of relating to both the body and the earth, in which we are encouraged to listen to our intens- tines and allow the stomach to assume its rightful place. Ihrman inspires us to think of ourselves as microscopic infinities: “The stomach is like the cosmos. Both are impossible to grasp, in spite of the fact that the stomach is inside of us, and we are inside of the cosmos.”

In line with Ihrman’s previous works, the barely fathomable aspects of nature are channeled through our own bodies. The work relates to “dark ecology,” a notion that covers all of nature’s more obscure processes – those that take place in microscopic dimensions, in the dark, in the deep, in the repulsive. As a counterpoint to the green, idealised ideas of nature that humans have learned to understand, invariably with ourselves at the centre of the action, dark ecology changes the perspective.

During the Festival of the Night in Korpilombolo, Ihrman will participate with her performance Queen of the Night, on December 1, 2018. Queen of the Night is a performance staging the flowering of a special cactus. As part of The Festival of the Night the public is invited to witness this brief and strange event. Queen of the Night (Selenicereus grandiflorus) is a type of cactus that used to be a common house plant in Sweden. Its buds open late in the evening, only to blossom for a single night (there might be years in between each occurrence, and it is always unpredictable). As the cactus blossoms, it emits a scent reminiscent of orange flowers or vanille. In her work, Ingela Ihrman is interested in ethnobiology, the scientific study of the human relation to nature, and the histories, attributes and myths we project onto it. Her method is at once poetic, absurd and pensive. Traditionally, the flowering of the Queen of the Night is an occasion around which you gather your neighbours. The darkness and slow return of the light, sets the stage for a collective experience of unfolding and withering. Here, the night becomes a magical space, and the blossoming of the flower a condensed life cycle for us to observe.

Ingela Ihrman (b. in Kalmar, 1985) is an artist based in Malmö.
Thanks to Malmö Konstmuseum.

In Isak Hall’s quiet and enigmatic abstract landscape, shades of ultramarine and ochre transpose us into outer space, somewhere ruled by entirely different laws of physics. Using renaissance techniques, he explores painting’s ability to either let different colours become one – let them slide in and out of one another on the same surface, or separate them with a layer of varnish so that a luminous lighter hue emerges from the dark background. His brushwork spans from sheer and veil-like to an impasto stroke of solid mass protruding from the base.

However, while these classical techniques used to depict the sparkle of jewellery, the Virgin Mary’s blue robe or the shimmer of a knight’s armour, Isak Hall applies them only in their own service, beyond religious traditions and ancient myths. Northern Transcendence was made in the summer of 2017 in his studio in the north of Västerbotten. All the elements found on earth are out there as reminders that we are one with them: the mountains, the rivers, the forests – and all the beating hearts.

Isak Hall (b. 1978) is an artist based in Stockholm.

These lowest depths, these deeps takes the sea’s many layers of significance as its point of departure. The video is a fragment from Louis Henderson’s extensive film project Overtures, a ghost story about the Haitian revolution of 1791, that led to the abolishment of slavery and the first free black state in the Americas. The leader of the revolution, Toussaint Louverture, was taken captive by Napoleon’s troops in 1802, and imprisoned in a medieval castle in the French Jura mountains, where he died a year later. The film plays out between two distinct parts of the story, and depicts a transitional scene and the route across the ocean from Haiti to France. From the waterfalls of the Jura, in French rivers to the Atlantic, Louverture’s restless ghost returns to the Caribbean. A mix of on-site recordings, archive material and an diverse soundscape make for a hybrid experience that reflects the fractured state of the ghost. The sea is a carrier of history, language and culture. A symbolic place between the worlds of the dead and the living. With João Polido Gomes (sound) and Philippe Cuxac (animation).

Louis Henderson (b. in Norwich, 1983) is an artist based in Paris and Berlin.

Susanna Jablonski in interested in the concept of entropy; the inevitable and gradual decline into disorder of a condition or system. It is through entropy that we determine the direction of time. Throughout her work, she bends and tests the boundaries of her materials. The objects that emerge feel at once strange and familiar, and often thematise how memories are stored in the body. In After Nature a willow slowly and corporeally twists into a foggy winter landscape. It is a dream-like animation wherein the physical properties of the tree dissolve, while, remaining firmly rooted, it stretches across an infinite length of time. It’s a movement that recalls the ageing of the body and the passing of time. After Nature is exhibited in Gamla Hallen, the entrance to the permanent display at Ájtte. The video is presented alongside a flock of grouse flying over a tent – a shelter from the winter’s cold and the harsh northern winds.

Glass is a recurring material in Susanna Jablonski’s work. At once fragile and severe, Jablonski is fascinated by its inherent ambivalence. How thin can you get the glass without it cracking, how solid before it bursts? In the blue room of the Konsthall is Thursday, a rose-coloured dreamy sculpture mounted to the wall. It initiates a compelling game with our perception and demands that we adjust our eyes. What is it that we are seeing? Here, the fragile form becomes absurd, drawing a picture of an inner landscape, a temporary organ that emerges during pregnancy: the placenta as mediator between mother and foetus. Take a closer look, and a white finger appears to protrude from the wall, as if the wall contains hidden body parts waiting to carry us. The gesture is two-fold: on the one hand, the heavy material is upheld by the finger, while on the other, the finger threatens to puncture its surface. Here is a delicate balance between making and breaking.

Susanna Jablonski (b. 1985) is an artist and composer based in Stockholm.

In Lap-See Lam’s works Beyond Between and Gwái, she picks at the idea of authenticity. The desire to consume that which is “strange” or “foreign,” from food to images, is turned on its head to become a mirror of ourselves. Like antique sculptures or artefacts in museums are sometimes reconstructed, and have their missing parts returned to them, Lam has collected objects from a soonbygone culture of Swedish Chinese restaurants. In Beyond Between, a 3D-milled reconstruction is made into a prosthesis. The seams are laid bare in the construction of the fantasy. The pagoda-style roof – typically found outside, on temples, or in “China Town” areas – is often found in Sweden as part of restaurant interiors. Lam lifts the roof off the environment, and then back again. This reconstruction is also a kind of reincarnation, which makes possible its new function as commemorative object. It becomes something that is worth remembering. At the same time, the digital process entails a degree of simplification, a loss of detail familiar from the continuous transformations of history. The roof becomes a ghost moving into a speculative future. It continues to be defined, not by its function, but rather by how we relate to it.

In Gwái, this ghost returns as image; a hovering object. It exists in limbo, perhaps stuck there, or moving towards the periphery, the future. The furniture is covered, as if people have moved away. The chair is empty, but recalls the shape of a body. It could be that here is an image of the migrant as a kind of ghost in the West. A figure who moves through the dark, dragging along their historical baggage, infiltrating the contemporary. The ghost also stands in for the systems that are not visible, the stories that are not told, the infrastructures of migration, and the geographies of Chinese restaurants. It outlines the contours of our projected fears. When it appears, it is to reveal the viewer, rather than itself.

At Ájtte - Mountain- and Sami Museum, Lap-See Lam is included with another sculpture; Mother of Lightning.

There is a six-centimetre difference in height between the artist Lap-See Lam, her mother and her grandmother – a relation reflected in the work Mother of Lightning, in which three yellow flashing neon lights are mounted onto a large mirror surface. In her practice, Lam examines her own family history, and how a Chinese diaspora found their place in Sweden in the 1970s and onwards through the establishment of Chinese restaurants. But Lam’s work is not limited to the biographical. Using fiction as her tool, and the particular interior design of the restaurants as her formal language, Lam makes visible how an abstract place becomes tangible through appropriating the image of ‘the exotic’ Chinese restaurants are not authentic representations of the Chinese landscape or culture, but a western projected idea of the east. The sculpture also refers to the Chinese legend of Dian-Mu, the goddess or mother of lightning. A key figure in the creation of weather phenomena, she uses mirrors to make lightning. By directing the bolts, she lets her husband Lei-Gong, the god of thunder, know which people or evil creatures to punish. The goddess makes sure that thunder never strikes the innocent.

Myth, projection and migration histories are all recurring themes in Lap-See Lam’s artistic practice. She is interested in the gaps that occur between generations, and reflect on identity and belonging in relation to knowledge, memories and mythologies. In this work, we meet our own gaze, and, as our figures lit up by the harsh glare of the flashing lights, become active parts of the story.

Lap-See Lam (b. 1990) is an artist based in Stockholm.
Thanks to Macromould modell & form and Restaurant Waldorf in Luleå.

“The last time I saw my mother to say good- bye, I said that now I am leaving for good, and we might never see each other again.” In the film Pre Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue), the artist Hiwa K traces his own flight through Europe, from Başur in Kurdistan, across the Turkish border, the Greek mountains, and from there onto the sea. By re-walking this route (an archeological method for countering amnesia), long lost memories come back. His journey took place mostly at night, and from the ship’s cargo hold he remembers the darkness that made him blind, “blind as the mother tongue.” When his sense of time becomes distorted, his stomach is his only clock. This story of migration is given shape through the senses, seeing and hearing and their absence. Hiwa K made a sculpture out of variously angled mirrors, which he carries on his head throughout the film. This strange object functions like an extension of the body and its senses. In the mirrors the artist sees his own reflection, just as he sees the reflection of the spaces he traverses: green meadows, tarmac roads, viaducts and a refugee camp in the port of Athens. While the people passing by watch the precarious balancing act, careful to step out of the way to make space, the artist just continues walking, and never stops.

Hiwa K (b. in Sulaymaniyah, 1975) is an artist based in Berlin.
Thanks to gallery KOW Berlin.

Lanky sculptures with spindly legs and crooked silhouettes move through the rooms. They drag their legs behind them, and give in to their own weight as they convulse in a spontaneous, uncontrolled flow. The hard polished material recalls the architecture of confinement: gates, checkpoints, and enclosures for cattle. Their blunt and incomplete shapes give an at once threatening and fragile impression. “Colonialism equals thing-ification”, writes the poet Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism originally published in 1950. In her artistic practice, Kamaly is also concerned with the devaluation of the subject, and how representations of the human body are derived from colonial and racist oppression. The sculptures portray bodies that have transitioned into abstract objects, but still bear the marks of history – for it is history that has caused their transformation. They are each named after a particular person who fell victim to colonial violence at the hands of police, military or private individuals. Together, they form a kind of memorial to the violence, while also illustrating the colonial gaze that made that violence possible to begin with. Kamaly’s work makes visible the metamorphosis of dehumanisation; from person to threatening creature; from subject to object.

Hanni Kamaly (b. in Hedmark, 1988) is an artist based in Malmö.

Rahkkan (Crackled) is made out of a flour sack left behind by German soldiers in the north of Norway in the 1940s. Onto this coarse, battered material Britta Marakatt-Labba has embroidered images of a pack of reindeer, weaponry, and a special postage stamp. The work testifies to changes in ways of life, including the forced dislocation of Sami people that happened as part of the German occupation of Norway. The motif is based on Marrakatt-Labba’s own family history, in which her father, a reindeerherding Sami, continued to bring the herd to the Tammok valley during the summer. He did this despite the fact that the Norwegian fields were no longer safe territory, scattered as they were with landmines – the field and the herd’s regular pattern of movement began to crack. Even today, artefacts left by the Germans serve as reminders of the war, rising to the surface during the frequent flooding of the rivers. Accompanying the embroidery is a passport distributed among Sami people in the border region. It came with a let- ter from the county of Norrbotten urging citizens not to help the Norwegian resistance movement: “It is strictly forbidden in any way to assist the Norwegian refugees in crossing the border to Sweden.” History and events continue to repeat.

Britta Marakatt-Labba (b. in Idivuoma, 1951) is an artist based in Övre Soppero.

Nikos Markous’ portraits of the river Kifissos are on display at three of the biennial’s venues. They are picturesque photographs of dim unpopulated landscapes, with the water’s silver glimmer as their protagonist. Markou, whose background is in mathematics, uses photography to enter into a negotiation with the Greek landscape. Kifissos runs through all of Athens, springing from the Penteli and Parnitha mountains, it is the city’s longest body of water. During the Roman era, aqueducts were constructed across the banks of the river, and over time Kifissos became a natural way of draining rain water from the city. In the middle of the 20th Century, as Athens was expanding, the river transformed drastically, invaded by motorways, sewer systems, and industries constructed at its banks without permission. Today, the river runs underneath, or adjacent to, all of the city’s major motorways, hidden and repressed by layers of concrete. But to the north of Athens it bursts back into view; here, the landscape appears again pristine, unchanged by the passing of time.

Nikos Markou (b. 1959) is an artist based in Athens.

Olof Marsja’s artistic practice is full of centipedes, fur-clad miniatures and flying beasts as if lifted from a parallel universe. They are spectators without eyes peering out from the shadows and corners of the room. The foot is a recurring sculptural form in Marsja’s repertoire, a kind of tragicomic figure that seems to have been left behind all alone after some turbulent event. At the same time, however, it stands firmly on the ground, liberated from the heavy body it once carried. Liddu’s foot is made out of slate, pool sliders, stainless steel, aluminium, cherry wood, reindeer horn, as well as two ribbons, one woven by Marsja’s mother, the other by his grandmother. Marsja uses an assemblage technique in which differently connoted materials rub off on one another. He combines elements that resonate with his own personal history, like reindeer horn, fur, leather and burl, with ones that come with no particular association or sense of responsibility attached. The reindeer horn becomes a toe that brushes against a marble foot from an Italian renaissance sculpture, though they never quite merge. The fragmentary becomes instead an end in itself, and an aesthetic tool with which to demonstrate a certain movement. Objects and things are joined only to fall apart, and then be put back together in new ways. The figures seem to have agency of their own, posing the question: what happens if you think about us as alive; think about us as autonomous?

Olof Marsja (b. in Gällivare, 1986) is an artist based in Gothenburg.

Araf is an essayistic road movie and diary of a ghostly character, Nayia, who travels between Srebrenica, Sarajevo, and Mostar in Bosnia. She has been in exile since the war, returning for the 22nd memorial of the Srebrenica genocide. The event is commemorated by a long procession through the mountains. Relatives, some of whom have still not been able to identify the bodies of their family members, walk together through the lush natural landscape. A particular blue butterfly is said to mark the locations of the mass graves, which can otherwise be hard to find, hidden as they are in the greenery. The river is described as the city’s silent witness, harbouring the memories of the war.

Nayia’s diary entries are interwoven with the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, the latter of whom crashes to his death after having flown too close to the sun in the primordial act of hubris. But Nayia also attempts to think of Icarus otherwise, to see a if a different future is possible for us, devoid of individual ambitions. Icarus is also the title awarded to the winner of a bridge diving competition in the narrator’s hometown. In quiet scenes, the diver is filmed on the bridge preparing for the fall. As these narratives overlap, a temporal shift occurs. In the Koran, Araf is the name of the place between heaven and hell, but in the film its significance is irrespective of religion; a limbo between movement and stasis, a state of being exiled, it is “permanent temporariness,” as stated in the voice over. Araf thus traces these paradoxes through Nayia’s displacement and her return to her home country post-war – that of a constant terror and a standstill, and the friction between displacement and permanence.

Didem Pekün (b. 1978) is an artist based in Istanbul.

During the darkest months of the year, Katarina Pirak Sikku promenades through the fells and forests west of Jokkmokk. She takes in the dark landscape, and looks for colours in the dimness as she walks over ice and marshes. Her wanderings through woods and frozen waters prevail also in the drawings she makes back at her studio, savouring the feeling of the landscape in her mind, still surrounded by darkness. This process is intuitive; a creative force dedicated the personal and non-discursive. For she never looks at the landscape naively, but always as a parallel to her many years of investigation into the race-biological studies of Sami people during the first half of the 20th century. Working with interviews, and archival material from the Institute of Race Biology, Pirak delegitimises its research by connecting it to her own cultural history as a Sami. Guorosvuođa ája (Spring of Emptiness) and Sjävnjásj (While the Darkness Last) are related to what Pirak Sikku calls “different kinds of ice-experiences,” meaning to “carefully test the boundaries of where you can set foot without soliciting cracks. The history of race biology is full of such cracks and you must step cautiously, or you can get terribly hurt.” Nature is presented as an archive of memories that are at once beautiful, painful and mute.

Katarina Pirak Sikku (b. 1965) is an artist based in Jokkmokk.

The Sun as a witness to what happens on Earth is the focus of the film What the Sun has Seen. What unfolds before its eyes both climate change and war, but also epic beauty, impossible to put into words. Tears flow when the Sun looks into the innocent eyes of the Earth. We meet it in all its turbulent emotional states: love, sorrow and despair.

Polska’s animated sun refers to Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Angel of History, which he formed late in his life, before committing suicide as he fled the Nazis. His angel is an involuntary fixture in the sky, pushed forward by a strong wind from paradise. It moves in reverse, with its back turned to the future, eyes fastened on what has passed behind it. As such, it bears witness to the tragedies of history with no option to intervene, forced as it is into continuous movement. The film contains a bizarre mix of digitally manipulated imagery. A floating cigarette butt, Ayn Rand, remorseful and in tears; rotting fruit and vegetables; an underwater city; all in a steady flow we recognise from the infinite scroll of the internet browsing, or flicking through TV channels. Polska’s Sun sings an ambivalent serenade to the Earth and its people about heaven or paradise. We will make it to there before it’s too late. Everything will be fine. But perhaps it’s not quite true; perhaps the Sun only says these things to comfort us.

The work is on view at the city library, second floor.
Agnieszka Polska (b. in Lublin, 1985) is an artist based in Berlin.

The Blood of Stars invites its public to think about the relation between the presence of iron, a residue from the formation of the universe, sleeping deep inside the earth, and its course through the veins of warm blooded mammals. Meanwhile, it also registers the relationships between mining, global militarism and physical changes to the landscape of Norrbotten. Raqs Media Collective catch starlight in a dying reindeer’s eye, eavesdrop on the logic of extraction inside an iron mine and explore the tunnels of an abandoned subterranean military facility kept warm in preparation for a nuclear winter. The installation is reactivated through a collaboration between the Public Art Agency and the Luleå Biennial. The work was originally commissioned by the Public Art Agency as part of the 2017 exhibition Brytningstider, curated by Lisa Rosendahl.

Raqs Media Collective was formed in 1992 in Delhi and consists of Jeebesh Bagchi (b. 1965), Monica Narula (b. 1969), and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (b. 1968).

Residence-in-Nature, Mammas house in Lainio
What she Could – She did (1889)
It's never late to give up (year unknown)
A rock that you always spit on gets wet (year unknown)
Come and go, but do not settle (year unknown)

Starting in Lainio, a town in the Jukkasjärvi part of the municipality of Kiruna, Residence-in- Nature has arranged a cross-disciplinary artistic project that invites creators from different backgrounds to work with and in the space during a set period of time. Together, the group will examine questions related to the historical and contemporary significance of winter, darkness, ice and snow, farming traditions, geographical boundaries, and mechanisms of history-making. The project spans the duration of an entire year, interacting and integrating with the seasons and the different conditions they offer. The artistic works in 2018~2019 will be connected to existing formal and informal social structures in Lainio and its surroundings, among them Marttigården’s open-air museum where the town’s inhabitants gather around recurring activities such as making reindeer soup, art workshops, ice drilling competitions and traditional flour grinding. Norrbottens Museum is set in relation to the local context. It is an institution where objects and artefacts, voices and stories are preserved, mapped and represented, where cultural heritage is made accessible and history is written. What happens when activities in Lainio merge with those of the museum, or when artefacts from their collection are moved to Lainio? Following two research visits in June and August of 2018, the third work period of the group will commence during the Luleå Biennial, first opening at Marttigården in Lainio on 10 November, and thereafter on 17 November at Norrbottens Museum in Luleå.

Participants: Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Esko Männikkö, Markus Vallien, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, Olof Marsja, Oscar Männikkö and Ingvild Holm. Artistic directors: Hans Isaksson, Lisa Torell och Åsa Jungnelius.
Graphic design: Jonas Williamsson.
Text: Lars-Erik Lappalainen.
The group consists of photographers, artists, farmers, carpenters, designers, glassblowers, per- formance artists, painters and ceramicists from Tromsø, Luleå, Boden, Månsamåla, Kiruna, Stockholm, Østfold, Gissamåla, Stockholm and Oulo.

Residence-in-Nature was initiated in 2013 by Åsa Jungnelius and has, together with participants, developed into a long-term, contextspecific, flexible art project. The aim is to develop new ways of organising artistic collaborations with municipalities, institutions and local communities.

At Norrbottens Museum, Residence-in-Nature presents 10 newly produced art works.

A massive wall stands in the way of the visitor. An animation of a herd of sheep wading through a pond only to be relentlessly swallowed into its depths is projected on to its concrete surface. Neda Saeedi’s Garden of Eden Moving: A Petrified Tribe looks at events of modern history in relation to the Bachtiaris tribe, and the how its nomadic culture and way of life dramatically changed when the Iranian state elected to contain them within the boundaries of Shooshtar-e Noe. The town was constructed around the industrial production of sugar with fields of sugarcane planted directly adjacent to it. This is where other local people, as well as the nomads residing throughout the region, were to work. The establishment of this town was part of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavis’s, 1963 modernisation reforms known as ‘the White Revolution’. The reforms included the industrialisation of the countryside, as well as an attempt to ‘civilise’ the nomadic groups – otherwise in constant motion – independent of state institutions. The way of life and social structures used to be determined by the livestock, the sheep – the animals that provided food, and, vitally, milk, but also materials for clothes and other artefacts. In the last decades, the sugar factory has been leaking toxic waste, with the result that one of Iran’s primary wetlands now is something more like a wasteland. Desertification, extinction of species and more frequent sandstorms are among the consequences.

Saeedi works with highly symbolic materials. Control, the significance of the cattle and the double nature of the sugar are all central to the work, which touches equally on issues of pollution and ecology, and the formal aspects of architectures of confinement. The figures, made out of candied sugar, recall its addictive sweetness, but also its significance in relation to deforestation and colonialism. In an audio component of the work, we hear a personal saga reminiscing about the cycles of nomadic life: “For us, migration was life. Reproduction. Movement was survival. No beginning, nor an end. Our life had no past, no present, neither a future. Migration was space-time continuum. Migration was us. Movement was us.”

Neda Saeedi (b. in Tehran, 1987) is an artist based in Berlin.
Thanks to KKV Luleå and Resurscentrum för konst Norrbotten.

The fortresses at Rödberget, Pagla, Mjölsjö, Degerberg and Gammeläng together constitute the expansive fortification of Boden. Here, the artist and musician Karl Sjölund has created a site-specific installation about waiting for a war that never commences.

Boden is a town, which, in every way, has emerged as an effect of the military strategies of centuries past: should a Russian attack on Sweden occur, it would be necessary to go through Boden (to avoid ending up either at the bay of Botten or lost in unruly mountain terrain), but such an attack never happened, and military-technological development would since render the speculations around which the fortifications at Boden were designed obsolete. Now, most of this vast defence complex is in abandoned. The ramparts, slinging like a river through the forests surrounding the town, are overgrown with moss, fungi and stalactites. And since the obligatory military conscription was discontinued in 2010, the ever-shrinking professional forces have been left to fight the still absent war on their own.

In Sjölund’s work, he examines the tragic logic of war. With video, sound and found objects, he has constructed an installation throughout the hallways and rooms of the Rödberg fortress. Archive material related to Boden’s military history becomes part of a collage of real and composed soundscapes from the fortifications, and recordings of popular tales of the mountain’s dormant armies and epic expositions. The work is an attempt to reproduce the aspects of war that pertain to the senses; the more abstract or psychoacoustic phenomena, and the fantasies necessary to wage a war: the logic of armour, tinnitus after the detonation of a bomb, the image of the enemy.

Karl Sjölund (b. 1986) is an artist and musician based in Boden and Stockholm.
Thanks to Sally Sundbom, Ralf Adolfsson, Acusticum, Resurscentrum för konst Norrbotten, Norrbottensteatern and Teg Publishing.

The blue glow of LED-screens lights up the people’s faces in Zhou Tao’s Blue and Red. We cannot see what they’re looking at, only their reactions to it. At a square in Guangzhou, modern technology meets a public that is both so human and perpetually conditioned. At the squares in Bangkok, protesters meet the riot police. But we don’t see the protesters, so much as the silence that surrounds them. Waiting, resting, the tents that people live in temporarily. A massage given to a tired back. And then, suddenly, blood.

We then see the red soil of a mining district in the countryside. White bags become a kind of human presence amidst the desolation. Tao’s work is a poetic contemplation without text or explanatory voiceover. The people are smaller than their surroundings, filmed from above, somehow superfluous. They are lit up and through by a harsh light that push into their homes, tents and faces. The private and the public coincide in such a trivial way that is, nonetheless, unusual to see depicted. The encounter of urban and rural settings is typical of Tao’s work. Here, the territory is both an economic resource and a shared point of access. It is what we all stand on, but does that make it a sufficient foundation for solidarity between us?

Zhou Tao (b. 1976) is an artist based in Guangzhou.
Thanks to gallery Vitamin Creative Space.

The majestic drawings of Alexandros Tzannis build spaces. They invite the onlooker to walk into and between them. Hung on steel structures, the paper bends like a wave over the frame. The motifs are abstract, drawn movements in detailed layers that, when looked at more closely, resemble maps or topographic figures. The drawings are made with blue and black pen, and, in certain places, the bleeding point of the pen has pushed the paper into relief. The work is part of the series Blue Black Layers Over the White Cities for which Tzannis has drawn, among other places, his hometown Athens – its layers of emotion, history and crisis veiling it in darkness. In his work, an interest in archeology and its methodology meets the allure of gloomy visions of the future, and science-fiction iconography. Tzannis’ work is often installed as mise-en-scéne. Objects one might find on construction sites or in industrial yards, make up ambiguous portraits of our time. For the biennial, Tzannis has expanded the series with an additional four drawings. These are inspired partly by Luleå’s steel industry and the tall silhouettes of its factories, and partly by the summer landscapes of his childhood on the island of Serifos. There, what’s left of the iron and mining industry recalls the struggle, resistance and defeat of the workers’ movement. The drawings contain references to the colour palette of steel extraction: the grey metal, the glowing red of transformation, and the white smoke emanating from the material as it cools.

An additional drawing will be exhibited in the lunch restaurant Malmen at SSAB Steel mill in Luleå.

Alexandros Tzannis (b. 1979) is an artist based in Athens.
Thanks to SSAB and KKV Luleå

To be able to fully understand human life is an absurd thought. How cells have found new paths with new functions and have turned us into perceptive beings, able to feel pain and desire. The visible evidence itself, what was discovered at the invention of the microscope, hardly made it more intelligible. Blood red branches swaying like seaweed in plasma and lymph fluids. Passages that connect everything inside us into a network no less overwhelming than infinity.

Two brain halves rotate clockwise on the wall of Luleå Konsthall. These paintings resemble medical illustrations – the cross section of the brain exposes the different parts like a network of branches. While medical science has mapped much of the brain, the greater part remains unknown territory, and researchers estimate that we will not be able to grasp it fully within our lifetime. It is the same age-old questions that continue to baffle science: Is it possible to see the soul? Why do we dream? And why do humans feel the urge to express themselves through art?

In Ulla Wiggen’s precise acrylic paintings, the eye is detached from its biological context appearing instead as a kind of mysterious, hovering sun sign. The works were painted in 2017~2018, but Wiggen’s interest in the intricate circuits and connections through which abstract sensations emerge was sparked already in the 1960s. The eye is the bodily organ we most rely on when orienting ourselves through life. All different sequences of light flood through the adjustable orifice of the pupil to collide with an inner sensory system that interprets millions of signals every second. We ‘see’.

There are many obvious similarities between artificial technology and the human senses. The eye, our own organ of surveillance, is increasingly used to survey us too. Iris-scanning is no longer science fiction, but occurs increasingly in our day to day lives as well as in many professions. What information is gathered, how it is used, and who owns it, however, remains opaque.

Ulla Wiggen (f. 1942) is an artist based in Stockholm.
Thanks to gallery Belenius and Stockholms kulturförvaltning.

What do dinoflagellates, green sea turtles’ move ments in the sand and the shells of crabs sound like? In the darkness of Havremagasinet’s basement, you are able to listen to the rare sound of music made by marine imaginary, crafted in the form of an opera. A 3D sculpture of a microscopic organism glows with neon blue light. A wall drips with magnified condensation, on which are shown microscopic water organisms at even greater magnification. A pair of hands, detached from the body, rolls its thumbs in a loop – the hands’ skin is no longer a barrier between the interior and exterior, instead it fuses with an environment of streams, organisms and toxins such as rain from Chernobyl, microscopic creatures and luminous plankton.

Susanne M. Winterling’s artistic practice is a negotiation between representation and reality. In her mainly time-based works, she plays with our expectations and preconceptions about what is organic and what is chemical, what is nature and what is culture. Over several years Winterling has studied dinoflagellates, a species of microscopic organism which are found in both lakes and in seas, some glowing all seasons particularly in tropical areas. When stimulated – for example by movement made by boats or swimmers skin – the dinoflagellates create a blue luminescence which is visible at night. Winterling is interested in this reflective effect of human touch, in relation to the surface of the sea as well as the digital screen, both movements of the hand generating reactions and light. Using the language given by digital technology, Winterling opens up possibilities which bring us closer to natural systems, seen through the prism of the oceans’ smallest inhabitant.

Vertex (Metabolic) is also shown at Galleri Syster

Susanne M. Winterling (b. in Rehau / Oberfranken, 1970) is an artist and professor based in Berlin.
Thanks to Christian Sardet.

The power of falling water is infinite, yet controllable. Northern Sweden’s wealth of moving water is what has made the country one of the world’s foremost when it comes to using clean and renewable energy. But this has a price. During the 19th century, the rivers were expanded to an industrial scale. The natural waterfalls were manipulated with dams and enormous concrete reservoirs. The lives and habitats of animals as well as humans were changed, disturbed or even eradicated. Sacred ground was cleared with modern machines. Who remembers the waterfall that was closed off, or the stream that was silenced? The artist Anja Örn lives near the Lule river – a river of enormous mass, which once billowed forth. Maps are routinely redrawn, leaving no traces of what used to be.

In Memory of a River shows Örn turning to art history to find documentation of the lost waterways – only there have images of them been preserved. But who was it that portrayed the rivers; whose gaze is the source of our collective memory? Artists of the turn the last century travelled to Sapmi to depict the great rapids and waterfalls. Artistic representations functioned as national tools of their time, but also as a last archive of memories. The National and Nordic museums in Stockholm house art and photography by, among others, Axel Sjöberg, Helmer Osslund, Olof Hermelin, Fritz von Dardel, and, finally, Lotte von Düben. Together with her husband, she travelled to the north of Norrland to photograph the region and its people. At a time when violence was tolerated in the service of a higher purpose, their gaze was a colonial one. But von Düben also directed her lens away from the people, and towards the landscape, using a stereo camera to produce three-dimensional images of the waterfalls. In her pictures, Örn sees an appeal that differs from the sublime grandeur of most depictions of nature from that time. Through film and sculptures of imaginary streams, Örn reflects on works from art history, trips to silent waterfalls and contemporary research and cartography concerning the region’s waterways.

Anja Örn (b. in Stockholm, 1972) is an artist based in Luleå.
Thanks to Berta Morata at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Natural Resources Engineering (LTU) and KKV Luleå.