Residence-in-Nature, Mammas hus i Lainio 2018-2019

Program Litteraturbussen 2 mars, Luleå-Lainio-Luleå
09.00 Start Norrbottens museum, Luleå
Läsning av medverkande författare under resan
Ca kl. 11.30 Kaffepaus och bensträckare
14.00 Ankomst Lainio och tidig middag
15.00 Läsning av medverkande författare, musik och visning av utställning i Marttigården.
17.00 Avfärd Lainio
Ca 22.00 Ankomst Luleå
(Med reservation för ändringar.)

Bussresan är kostnadsfri, deltagare betalar mat och fika själva till en kostnad av ca 250 kronor. Frukt och vatten finns med på bussen.

Vi kan erbjuda 30 platser med anmälan till lena@lainio.nu. Sista anmälningsdatum 20 februari, först till kvarn gäller.

Medverkande under dagen:
Regina Veräjä, författare och journalist
David Väyrynen, författare
Carina Henriksson, operasångerska, musiker och skribent
Lena Ylipää, konstnär

Residence-in-Natures utställning består av två delar, en utställning på Marttigården och en på Norrbottens Museum. Utställningarna ingår i Luleåbiennalen genom Residence-in-Natures medverkan. På Marttigården blandas färdiga och pågående arbeten med befintliga bonader, bilder och bruksföremål.

Medverkande konstnärer: Johanna Gustafsson Fürst, Ingvild Holm, Hans Isaksson, Åsa Jungnelius,Oscar Männikkö, Olof Marsja, Esko Männikkö, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, Lisa Torell och Markus Vallien.

Grafisk form Jonas Williamsson och talskrivare Lars-Erik Hjertström Lappalainen

Information om Residence-in-Nature finns här: http://residence-in-nature.se

Samarbetspartners och finansiärer: Norrbottens museum, Luleåbiennalen, Resurscentrum för Konst i Norrbotten, Lainio Hembygdsgille, IASPIS, Region Norrbotten och Kulturrådet.

Art in Dark Times: On the Conditions for Gathering, Thought and Action
15-17 February 2019

The Luleå Biennial: Tidal Ground coincides with the darkest period of the year, and therefore we have taken the darkness of the region as both a necessary and generative premise for our work and thinking. The biennial asks questions about what “dark times” may be said to entail: that social and political forces are also going through a period of tidal movement? Or that darkness is an ever-present condition for us to navigate? During the last weekend of the exhibition, the biennial invites artists, activists and thinkers to reflect on the political darkness that surrounds us, its geography and specific historical contexts, as well as the necessity of transnational alliances and friendships. The conference takes place at “Blackis” Folkets Hus (People's House) in Svartöstaden and Folkets Bio (People's Cinema) in central Luleå. On Saturday a party has been arranged in collaboration with Föreningsgatan 7.

RSVP here

Participants: Federica Bueti (writer and critic, Berlin), Övül Durmuşoğlu (curator, Berlin), Ayse Gülec och Fritz Laszlo Weber (Unraveling the NSU Complex and the Society of friends of Halit, Kassel), Stefan Jonsson (professor, Stockholm), Michele Masucci (philosopher and activist, Stockholm), Oscar Männikkö (artist/Boden against racism), Gergely Nagy (artportal.hu, Budapest), Nataliia Neshevets (VCRC, Kiev), Didem Pekün (artist, Istanbul/Berlin), Igor Stokfiszewski (Krytyka Polityczna, Warsawa), Kim West (critic, Stockholm).

Friday 15.12, 10.00-17.00 A Changing Art Field: Survival Strategies and Antifascist Resistance
At ”Blackis” Folkets Hus, Svartöstan

Participants: Dmitrii Bezouglov (Smena/The Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Yekaterinburg), Ida Börjel (poet, Malmö), Ayse Gülec och Fritz Laszlo Weber (Unraveling NSU Complex & the Society of friends of Halit, Kassel/Bremen), Michele Masucci (philosopher and activist, Stockholm), Oscar Männikkö (artist and activist Boden mot rasism (Boden Against Racism) & Ali Ghezeire (activist, Luleå), Gergely Nagy (artportal.hu, Budapest), Nataliia Neshevets (VCRC, Kiev), and Igor Stokfiszewski (Krytyka Polityczna, Warsawa) and more.

During the first day of the conference, a networking event has been arranged for art-workers and activists from different parts of Europe who employ anti-fascist strategies in order to sustain the operation of their respective initiatives. Friday’s programme has been organised together with the AOOO network, Arts Organizations Out of Office, established by Art Lab Gnesta and Konstfrämjandet (The People’s Movements for Art Promotion) to gather self-organising actors in the North that are engaged with contemporary art. By meeting, exchanging experiences and knowledge, the network will be able to find new strategies, create resistance and work pro-actively against both abstract and practical threats to our organisations.

The day will take as its starting point a number of presentations by speakers engaged in relevant issues across the European art scene, followed by a conversation moderated by the philosopher and activist Michele Masucci. How have the political developments of the last few years affected our conditions for working in the field of art, and how might this be related to other political restrictions? How can we, as art-workers, learn to handle or even curb that development? Which alliances do we need to establish, not only to ensure the free agency of art but the democratic rights of everyone?

→09:30 Breakfast
→10:00 Introduction Sebastian Dahlqvist Caroline Malmström (AOOO), Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari (The Luleå Biennial: Tidal Ground)
Michele Masucci (Moderator)
Tomas Örn (Artist, Intresseföreningen Svartöstaden)
Oscar Männikkö and Ali Ghezeire (Boden/Luleå Against Racism)
→10:40 Igor Stokfiszewski (Krytyka Polityczna, Warszawa) 

→11:00 Nataliia Neshevets (VCRC, Kiev)
→11:20 Gergely Nagy (artportal.hu, Budapest)

→12:40 Panel discussion
→12:10 Lunch
→13:30 Ayşe Güleç and Fritz Laszlo Weber (Unraveling NSU Complex & the Society of friends of Halit, Kassel och Bremen)

→13:50 Tigran Amiryan and Lucine Talalyan (Queering Yerevan, Yerevan) 

→14:10 Dmitrii Bezouglov (Smena/The Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Jekaterineburg) 
→14:30 Panel discussion
→15:00 Coffee break
→15:30 Open discussion moderated by Michele Masucci
→17:00 Reading by Ida Börjel (Poet, Malmö)
→18:00 Dinner
→20:00 Bus trip to The Blood of Stars (2017), an installation by Raqs Media Collective in Mjölkuddsberget

Saturday 16.2, 13.00-19.00 Catastrophe and (in)visibility
At ”Blackis” Folkets Hus, Svartöstaen

Participants: Federica Bueti (writer and critic, Berlin), Övül Durmuşoğlu (curator, Berlin), Ayse Gülec och Fritz Laszlo Weber (Unraveling the NSU Complex and the Society of friends of Halit, Kassel), Stefan Jonsson (professor, Stockholm), Didem Pekün (artist, Istanbul/Berlin), and Monika Szewczyk (curator, Berlin).

The artist Didem Pekün’s film Araf (2018) is one of the works in the Luleå Biennial and will provide the framework Saturday’s conference programme. 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. Araf traces paradoxes through Nayia’s displacement and her return to her home country post-war – that of a constant terror and a standstill.

In relation to the emergence of fascism, the light of distance can help make a historical occurrence seem more easily discernible, but what do we see in the middle of an ongoing eruption? Catastrophes carry different temporalities – so how do we handle those that happen in slow transitions and shifts rather than explosive ones? A historical catastrophe can be silenced, hidden in landscapes without traces or monuments, in archives empty of information and in memories that remain private. And the catastrophe that is happening just now may be, in its ongoing shape, outside of language, and it can paralyse our ability to take action. Using Araf as springboard, Saturday’s presentations and performances will be centred around questions of the visibility or invisibility of a catastrophe in its afflicted landscape and society. What types of new understanding may be generated by art? What significance is attributed to it during dark times?

In the evening a party is hosted at Föreningsgatan 7, 22:00–02:00. Live: Noise Against Fascism (live at 22:00), Karl Sjölund & Henrik Söderström, DJ: Sissel Wincent.

→10:00–13:00 Time to visit the biennials exhibition venues in Luleå: Konsthallen i Luleå (Kulturens hus), Norrbottens museum and Galleri Syster
→13:30 Araf: The River 
→13:40 Introduction, Emily Fahlén and Asrin Haidari 
(Luleå Biennial: Tidal Ground) 
→14:00 A Soliloquy: 3 Thoughts on Inhabiting ’Araf’, Didem Pekün (artist and academic)
→14:30 Against Structural Ignorance: Collective Mourning and Memory as a political act, Ayşe Güleç and Fritz Lazlo Weber (Unraveling NSU Complex & the Society of friends of Halit, Kassel och Bremen)
→15:30 Coffee break
→15:50 Araf: The Walk 

→16:05 I Want to Feel: the Emotionality Threshold of Politics, Övül Ö Durmuşoğlu (curator, Berlin)

→16:50 Darkness into Darkness: From Neoliberal Austerity to Fascism – and the Intervention of Critique, Stefan Jonsson (author and professor, Linköping)
→17:30 Coffee break
→17:50 Araf: Purgatory 
→18:10 Spell Buildning, Federica Bueti (curator, Berlin)
→19:00 Dusk Listening for a People’s Music, Monika Szewczyk 
(curator, Berlin)
→20:00 Dinner
→22:00 Bus from Blackis departs to Föreningsgatan 7 for an afterparty: Noice Against Fascism, performance Karl Sjölund och Henrik Söderström, dj Sissel Wincent

Sunday 17.2, 13:00–16:00 The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts
At Folkets bio, Luleå

Participants: The study group on ”The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts” in Stockholm: Jörgen Gassilewski (author and poet), Martin Högström (poet and translator), Emma Kihl (artist and researcher), Christoffer Paues (artist), Kim West (critic and researcher), and Ellen Wettmark (cultural theorist and public servant).

”Popular Fronts”: this was the name of the political coalitions of left and liberal parties which were established in Europe and elsewhere in the late 1930s, in order to form united blocks against the rise of fascism. The most important ones were the French Front Populaire, in government between 1936 and 1938, and the Spanish Frente popular, which was overturned by Franco’s military coup in 1936. But popular fronts also existed in the UK, Austria, the US, and Chile, all responding in different ways to the Comintern’s endorsement of the popular front strategy at its seventh world congress in 1935.

How should we relate to this history today, as we are once again facing the rise to power of the extreme right, in Europe and beyond? How should we understand these attempts at achieving unity in resistance now, thirty years after the end of ”actually existing socialism”, and in the midst of a historic crisis for European social democracy? In the early fall of 2018 we set up a study group on ”The Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts”, in order to discuss texts and artworks, policy visions and cultural initiatives relating to the period of the popular fronts. Since then we have met bi-weekly to talk about, among other things, texts by Simone Weil and films by Jean Renoir, the expressionism debate and working-class pageantry, the Ciné-Liberté association and popular educational reforms.

What we have been seeking is not a simple analogy, a confirmation that today is just like then, that we are witnessing a ”return of the 1930s”. Instead, we have been seeking to confront two historical moments, looking for differences just as much as for repetitions. Our idea has been that, if we compare the present with the past, then perhaps we can see more clearly the specifics of the present. And if we look at the past from the perspective of the present, then perhaps we can discern some possibilities, or even responsibilities, that the past passes on to us. Is there a tradition of anti-fascist unity with which we might still identify ourselves? An aesthetics of resistance that we might still draw upon? This seminar will present some provisional speculations derived from this ongoing and open-ended work.

— The Study Group on the Aesthetics of the Popular Fronts

→10:00–12:30 Bus trip to A Sense of War (2018), an installation by Karl Sjölund in Rödbergsfortet (Boden). Bus departs from Elite Stadshotellet Luleå
→13:00–16:00 Seminar by the study group on The Aesthetics of the 
Popular Fronts, Stockholm
→13:00 Introduction, Kim West
→13:30 For the Popular Front (on an image in progress), Christoffer Paues
→13:45 Sweden During the Popular Front Years, Ellen Wettmark
→14:15 Coffee break
→14:30 Poetry During the Popular Front in the US, Martin Högström

→15:00 Nature and the Popular Front in the US, Emma Kihl

→15:30 The Popular Front: Brecht, Montage, and the Debate on Realism, Jörgen Gassilewski
→16:30 Joint walk from Folkets bio to the south harbor to experience Dirghtamas (2018), an installation by Vishal K Dar

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. In the next room three irises are hovering, detached from the body. Since the 60’s Ulla Wiggen have fascinated it’s viewers witth her intricate paintings of circuits, cables and, in later years, details from the human body. During the Luleå Biennial she participates with five late works, at Luleå Konsthall and Galleri Syster. Sunday, February 10, the biennial invites you to a public conversation based on Ulla Wiggen's artistic practice. The conversation is led by the art historian Katya Sandomirskaja who, in her master’s thesis "Hybrida kretsmaskiner", studied "conditions, tensions and connections between the electronic, mechanical and biological found in Wiggen's works.". She is currently project manager at the Museum of Movements, a new national museum of migration in Malmö.

Luleåbiennalen 2018-2019 tar plats på flera olika platser i Norrbotten. I Jokkmokk landar biennalen mitt i Ájttes permanenta utställning, med samtida konstverk i form av video, måleri och skulptur, som på olika sätt är i dialog med den omgivande kontexten. Biennalens utställning på museet kopplar upp mot frågor gemensamma med Sapmis geografi och mångbottnade historia: om en förändrad natur och om förflyttningens självvalda eller påtvingade rörelse.

Den 7 februari kl 14:00 ger biennalens konstnärliga ledare Asrin Haidari och Emily Fahlén en guidad visning av utställningen.

Konstnärer i utställningen: Isak Hall, Susanna Jablonski, Hanni Kamaly, Hiwa K, Lap-See Lam, Nikos Markou, Neda Saeedi.

By invitation of the Luleå Biennial, Filmform presents a film program with five titles from their own collection. The program relies on issues related to the inevitable presence of history at certain localities. Places that only exist in the memory and the spiritual wounds after a bygone society, a political project or a lost utopia. The films in the program vary in terms of length, form as well as content, but have in common that the places they depict so clearly appear as palimpsests, where layers of stories and experiences overlap and are constantly overwritten.

Featured films:

The Return of the Buffalo, Claes Söderquist, 1970/2012, 19:00 min

The ‘Indians of All Tribes’ group occupied Alcatraz prison, which closed in 1963, from 1969 to 1971 in order to build a cultural and educational center. When Söderquist visited the island in 1970, the occupants had built up a functioning society with jobs, family life and schools. The text ‘Indian America Land’ was posted on the outside of a building. In a voice-over, school teacher Bob Bradley discusses political inequality, social problems and the difficult situation for the Native American population in the USA, as well as the background for the occupation. The Return of the Buffalo is a stylized and unique documentary (the only filmed material from the occupation), a black-and-white depiction in which architecture, former prison buildings, politics, music and dance are interwoven with local radio, conversations and discussions into a focused whole. The film became the starting point for Söderquist’s Alcatraz – The Return (2013).

Desert, Jessica Faiss, 2002, 05:00 min

This video was filmed in Egypt, from a bus. We can see a dark road, and the bright sand around. It is a never ending loop. We never reach any goal. The window is dirty and creates an blurred mask on the movie. We can get associations to a traditional landscape painting, while the camera is hardly moving at all. The colors are moderate and I slowed down the rhythm of the trip

Cecilijas hus, Katarina Eismann, 1999, 22:00 min

This documentary portrays Cecilija, her years of youth and her family. It centres around her parents’ house outside Sarajevo, which was ruined by the actions of war. The house is located next to the airport. This area was strategically important and the frontline was drawn staight across their garden. In the film, Cecilija is wandering amongst the ruins of her home, telling stories from her past and about how her father built the house, slowly but steadily. Family members, neighbours and soldiers contribute with their memories of Cecilija’s House.

Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No.2, My Lindh, 2018, 03:06

Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No. 2 shows a vast forest where the various layers move slowly in lateral directions, while the wind blows in the trees and the sun is lowered behind the tree tops. The mighty landscape gives almost the impression of being a living creature.

The Pool, Sara Jordenö, 2004, 21:27 min

The Pool has the format of a compilation film and film essay. The film tells the stories about two cases of erasure – the US bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq and the destruction of an outdoor pool in cold-war Moscow, where homosexual women were cruising each other. The pool is now gone and only exists through memory of a woman that once visited it. Similarly, we learn about the bombings in the Middle East through visit at the place of their simulation: a test bombsite in the Californian desert. Constantly shifting between locations and their meditations, the film never visits the ‘real’ place.

Programme:

The Return of the Buffalo, Claes Söderquist, 1970-2012, 19:11 min
Desert, Jessica Faiss, 2002, 04:19 min
Cecilijas hus, Katarina Eismann, 1999, 21:20 min
Nordic Panoramas, Landscape No.2, My Lindh, 2018, 03:05 min
The Pool, Sara Jordenö, 2003, 23:04 min

Total screening time 71 min

Filmform is a foundation dedicated to promotion, distribution and preservation of Swedish art film and experimental video. Filmform is the oldest existing organization in Sweden devoted to film and video art, often engaged as an advisor to museums, galleries, universities and festivals. Filmform is supported by the Ministry of Culture through the Arts Grants Committee and the Swedish Arts Council.

www.filmform.com

On Saturday, February 2, biennial artist Anja Örn and poet Pernilla Berglund meet in a presentation based on their ongoing artistic and poetic works. 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. The work 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? In Pernilla Berglund’s poetry language and place continuously both constitute and unravel the other. No meaning is self-evident. The poems attempt to approximate a particular experience of language and place only to since rephrase their premises. In February, Berglund's third collection of poems Rätten, will be released by Teg Publishing. In October she was part of the Lulu Journal with poems from Fälla, 2015.

The exhibition is open at four occasions: 2/12, 27/12, 20/1, 17/2.
Opening hours: 12-15 (tour starts at 13:00)
Address: Boden SO, 961 44 Boden.
Entrance is free

The fortresses at Rödberget, Pagla, Mjölsjö, Degerbergs 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 ruins. 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 his work, Sjölund examines the tragic logic of war, and its phantasmagorical dimensions. With artefacts related to Swedish military history, archive material, video, sound and found objects, Sjölund has constructed a kind of theatre of things. A music piece collaged from concrete and organ-composed fragments resounds throughout the various rooms. 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 underpin the war-complex: the logic of the arms race, tinnitus in the moments after a bomb blasts, the image of the enemy.

Karl Sjölund (b. 1986) is an artist and musician based in Boden and Stockholm.

For more info contact info@luleabiennial.se

The Blood of Stars är en platsspecifik installation i Mjölkuddsberget i Luleå. Verket bjuder in besökaren att fundera över relationen mellan närvaron av järn, en rest från universums födelse, slumrandes djupt nere i jorden och dess resa genom blodkärlen hos varmblodiga däggdjur. Samtidigt så uppmärksammas relationen mellan gruvdrift, global militarism och fysiska förändringar av det norrbottniska landskapet. I installationen fångar Raqs Media Collective stjärnljus i en döende rens öga, smyglyssnar till extraktionens logik inuti en järngruva och utforskar tunnelsystemet i en underjordisk försvarsanläggning som hållits varm i väntan på en nukleär vinter.

Installationen reaktiveras genom ett samarbete mellan Statens Konstråd och Luleåbiennalen. Verket nyproducerades inom ramarna för Statens Konstråds utställning Brytningstider 2017, som curerades av Lisa Rosendahl.

Raqs Media Collective bildades 1992 i Delhi och består av Jeebesh Bagchi (f. 1965), Monica Narula (f. 1969) och Shuddhabrata Sengupta (f. 1968).

Mjölkuddsberget användes som militär fästning under andra världskriget, men byggdes senare om till ledningscentral. Idag är anläggningen privatägd.

Location: Folkets Bio, Nygatan 1, Luleå
Wednesday 12.12, 19:00
Free of charge!

As part of the Luleå Biennial 2018: Tidal Ground, three of the video works in the biennial exhibition is screened in the cinema. Pre-Image (Blind as the Mother Tongue) (18 min) by Hiwa K, Who is afraid of ideology? (22 min 20 sec) by Marwa Arsanios and What the Sun Has Seen (7 min 35 sec) by Agnieszka Polska. In collaboration with Folkets bio (The People's cinema).

Hiwa K
Pre-image (Blind as the Mother Tongue)
2017, HD video, 18 min

“The last time I saw my mother to say goodbye, 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.

Marwa Arsanios
Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part 1
2017, HD video, 22 min 20 sec

Who is Afraid of Ideology? Part I 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.

Agnieszka Polska
What the Sun has Seen
2017, HD video, 7 min 35 sec

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.

Agnieszka Polska (b. in Lublin, 1985) is an artist based in Berlin.

Location: Elite Stadshotellet, Storgatan 15, Luleå

Accompanied by a free pamphlet with text and images by Jaakko Pallasvuo

RSVP required:
https://bit.ly/2OdfPjX

The Luleå winter was hot and humid. Gaseous. The sun was covered by the clouds. Sometimes at night the moon would peek through vast expanses of cloud cover, and they would sleep and sweat in its light.

It was always hot and humid, and all the old things were dead.

New species of medusas, insects, virulent diseases and bean stalks flourished. Plants grew thick, pale and moist in the warm darkness. The darkness of the new middle ages was the darkness of the womb.

The raves took place in the darkness of the moist hot pulsating humid overflowing pale sweaty forest. They drank Kombucha, moonshine, urine and spring water.

The ravers wore plastic and iron. Elaborate party dresses and cloaks from old Ikea bags were combined with the crude spiral-shaped iron accessories forged by the local blacksmith.

(Jaakko Pallasvuo)

https://www.country-music.co/
https://soundcloud.com/country-music-label

Photo by Ari King

The exhibitions will expand from Norrbotten's varied landscape and history. The visitor will encounter works dealing with the memories and wounds of the landscape, lost waterfalls, ideological archives, and militarised zones. A main theme for the biennial is the concept of darkness, both literally – since the biennial coincides with the darkest time of the year – but also metaphorically, with its focus on politically dark times as well as darkness as a potential place for thinking, dreaming and projecting. The biennial has invited roughly 40 artists, eight of which contribute with new commissions.

The opening weekend of the Luleå Biennial 2018

PROGRAMME: SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 17
12:00 The exhibitions at Luleå Konsthall, Norrbottens Museum
and Galleri Syster will open their doors
14:00 Inauguration speeches and performances at Luleå Konsthall,
biennial artists will be present
15:30 Performance by Residence-in-Nature at Norrbottens museum
16:30 Presentation of Vishal K Dars installation Dirghtamas in Södra Hamn
17:00~19:00 Drinks and snacks at Galleri Syster
21:30 Afterparty

PROGRAMME: SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 18
12:00 Introduction and artist presentations at Luleå Konsthall
14:00 Guided tour of the group exhibition at the Ájtte – Mountain- and Sami museum. Bus leaves at 10:30 from Kulturens Hus, and is back in Luleå around 18:00. For more info and registration please email info@luleabiennial.se

13:30~17:30 Bus excursion to Mjölkuddsberget (Raqs Media Collective) in Luleå, Havremagasinet (Susanne M. Winterling) and Rödbergsfortet (Karl Sjölund) in Boden (registration: (link: info@luleabiennial.se text: info@luleabiennial.se))

Opening hours

Saturday
12: 00~17:00 Luleå Konsthall
12:00~17:00 Norrbottens museum
12:00~19:00 Galleri Syster
11:00~13:30 Mjölkuddsberget
12:00~16:00 Havremagasinet
00:00~00:00 Kiruna Konstgille

Sunday
12:00~16:00 Luleå Konsthall
12:00~16:00 Norrbottens museum
12:00~16:00 Galleri Syster
12:00~16: 00 Mjölkuddsberget
12:00~16:00 Havremagasinet
12:00~16:00 Rödbergsfortet
13:00~16:00 Ájtte – Mountain- and Sami museum
00:00~00:00 Kiruna Konstgille

At Kiruna Konstgille, the video work Blue and Red by Zhou Tao will be shown throughout the biennial exhibition period. 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.

During the opening, the third issue of the Luleå Biennial's monthly online journal, the Lulu-journal, will be released. The issue, named "The Pit", is dedicated to the conversations around the mining town Malmberget and its evacuation. Guests editors are the artist Ingela Johansson and the art historian Masha Taavoniku. Featuring: Agneta Andersson, Lena Ewert, Ove Haarala, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Olivia Plender, Margareta Ståhl and Lena Ylipää.

During the weeks before the official inauguration of the Luleå Biennial on November 17, the biennial will open up it's other exhibition spaces in Norrbotten. On October 30, it's time for the group exhibition at Ájtte in Jokkmokk.

Ájtte exhibits objects and craftsmanship that tell stories about Sapmi's history and culture. The permanent exhibition is built as a reindeer pasture, where you enter the exhibition through a long aisle, which leads to the round centre of the exhibition, and then back out to the other rooms of the museum. Here you will find animals, nature and culture from the entire fell district. The artists of the biennial will be exhibited inside the museum's permanent exhibition in dialogue with its thematics and objects. During the opening, the artistic leaders of the biennial will do a presentation of the exhibition.

In dialogue with Havremagasinet's exhibition Digital Landscapes, the biennial will show a solo presentation by the artist Susanne M. Winterling. In her mainly time-based works, Winterling plays with our expectations and preconceptions about what is organic and what is chemical, what is nature and what is culture. Over several years she 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. In the body of work on display at Havremagasinet, predetermined ideas about the distinctions between what is human, natural or inanimate, can be reconsidered. 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.

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

Premiere for the new Biennial bar at Norrbottensteatern!
Student ID = special prices in the bar.

"It has not always been a given to me that it is possible to write about Norrbotten. It was only as a young adult that I understood that you can write about any reality, even ours. That it is allowed to take our existence and seriously or lightly as any other. An experience from growing up in Norrbotten is that our places were not mentioned. They were not on TV, our roads were not written into books, and our voices were not amplified. Not that it’s much to whine about. There are other positions that are even more marginalised, but ... that it how it was.And at a time when cities and countryside are falling apart, it becomes especially important to render such images. It is an antidote to the lack of historical awareness that comes from no one talking about why we are here and why it looks the way it does.

In this issue we have collected a selection from the catalog of Teg Publishing. They are all different expressions that do not really have much to do with one another, but they resonate with us, and maybe with others, too.

Contributors for the Lulu-journal #2:
Pernilla Berglund, poet
Po Tidholm, journalist and writer
David Väyrynen, poet
Sara Parkman, folk musician
Sven Teglund, artist
Clara Bodén, documentary filmmaker

Editor: Jonas Teglund, Teg Publishing
Graphic design: Aron Kullander-Östling & Stina Löfgren

Lulu-journal
The monthly journal will provide insight into the research process of the biennial in the form of articles, archive material, and artworks. Every issue takes a public artwork in the region of Norrbotten as its point of departure. The journal is available in Swedish and English.

Between two private residences on Kungsgatan 32 in the centre of Luleå is a memorial to the five people who fell victim to the attack on the communist newspaper Norrskensflamman on the 3rd of March 1940. In flames of steel, the Piteå artist Toivo Lundmark has found a form that functions as a “pictorial reminder of this tragic event in the history of the city.”

Like Lundmark’s artwork Freedom, Thought, Life, we let the first issue of the Lulu-journal remember and reflect on the attack against Flamman – an act of terror with no equivalent in the history of Sweden. 

With contributions by Edith Hammar, Judith Kiros, Ida Linde, Ulf Oldberg,
David Väyrynen, Kerstin Wixe, among others.
Editors: Asrin Haidari & Emily Fahlén
Graphic design: Aron Kullander-Östling & Stina Löfgren

Lulu-journal
The monthly journal will provide insight into the research process of the biennial in the form of articles, archive material, and artworks. Every issue takes a public artwork in the region of Norrbotten as its point of departure. Lulu-journal #1 reflects on the history of fascism in Norrbotten during the 1930’s and 40’s. The theme for the first issue revolves around one of the cruelest and overlooked events in Swedish history: The attack on the editorial office of Norrskensflamman the 3rd of March 1940 and the establishment of Swedish detention camps during World War II. The journal is available in Swedish and English.