Just what is it that makes today so familiar, so uneasy?
Lofoten International Art Festival 2013
6–29 September 2013
Opening: Friday 6 September, 5pm
Seminar: Saturday 7 September, 11am
Curated by Anne Szefer Karlsen, Bassam El Baroni, and Eva González-Sancho
Participating artists:
Bani Abidi, Sven Augustijnen, Ann Böttcher, Mircea Cantor, István Csákány, HC Gilje, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Shilpa Gupta, Leslie Hewitt in collaboration with Bradford Young, David Horvitz, Adelita Husni-Bey, Siniša Ilić, Adrià Julià, Mahmoud Khaled, Karl Larsson, Laida Lertxundi, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Nana Oforiatta Ayim, Oliver Ressler, Allen Ruppersberg, Walid Sadek, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Lisa Tan, Olivier Zabat, and Knut Åsdam
Speakers:
Matthew Fuller, Aaron Levy, Aaron Schuster, Tiago Bom and Ayatgali Tuleubek
Just what is it that makes today so familiar, so uneasy? intends to establish an aesthetic, intellectual, and political position by bringing the public and those shaping contemporary art discourse closer to a heightened and sensitive understanding of the conditions that shape our consciousness and existence today. LIAF 2013 will feature a balanced variety of art projects that create connections with each other and their surroundings, forming a circuit of intense emotions, ideas, and positions.
LIAF 2013 aims to create a reflection on how art can position itself as a vocabulary within societies in which the protocol of contemporary institutional art practice is built on the idea of instigating, designing, or manufacturing some form of antagonism through its programming. The scarcity of art institutional structures in Lofoten offers LIAF 2013 an opportunity to explore the current moment that can be described as a shift from a condition of successive crises followed by recoveries, to one where crises shape a new permanent condition. LIAF 2013 seriously considers this condition, immersing itself in the fabric of the local community, its domestic, commercial and public spaces while exploring the current moment’s global uneasiness.
The seminar on Saturday 7 September is a day of reflection on the questions that the curatorial concept raises. The speakers will deliver presentations focused on the interrelationship between permanent crisis, economy, media, art, and theory. The speakers were invited to select a keyword for their individual presentations, which would act as a link to the concept for LIAF 2013. The four keywords are Estrangement, Sleep, Stagnation, and Transition.
The seminar’s venue, a conference room on the top floor of a hotel, overlooks the different sites of LIAF 2013. These sites are a three-floor residential house and the bay of Smedvika in Kabelvåg, a hotel room, a garage, the Lofoten War Museum, a shopping centre, the local library, and cinema in Svolvær, an Am-Car Club, a former fish factory, a residential garage and an eighteenth-century wooden shed on the island of Svinøya.
