Lofoten International Art Festival 2013 curators announced
6 September–22 September 2013
North Norwegian Art Center
Box 285, 8301 Svolvaer, Norway
T +47 76 06 67 70
post [at] liaf.no
Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) is a festival for contemporary art taking place in spectacular Lofoten, a cluster of islands located on the North West Coast of Norway, just above the Arctic Circle every second year. The festival presents works by international artists in a local and site-specific context and seeks to be an open, experimental, and including meeting place for artists, audience, and locals. LIAF acknowledges the complexity of place and seeks to be a discursive, engaged, and social platform for different positions creating dialogue between the local and global.
The curatorial team for LIAF 2013 will be Anne Szefer Karlsen (NO), Bassam El Baroni (EG), and Eva González-Sancho (ES).
Anne Szefer Karlsen is a curator from Norway and currently Director (2008–2014) of Hordaland Art Centre (Bergen, Norway). During the last ten years she has co-founded structures like Flaggfabrikken – Centre for Photography and Contemporary Art (2002–2008) and Ctrl+Z Publishing (2006–) where she still acts as an editor. At the moment she is co-editing the third anthology in Open Edition’s Occasional Table-series together with Stine Hebert (following Curating Subjects, ed. Paul O’Neill and Curating and the Educational Turn, ed. Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson). In addition to series of exhibitions and seminars for the Art Centre, she has also curated exhibitions for other art spaces, such as Bergen Art Museum, L’appartement 22, and Oslo Fine Art Society. Her interests are in collaborations with artists and curators as well as developing the language that surrounds art productions of today, linguistically, spatially, and structurally.
Bassam El Baroni is a curator and art critic from Alexandria, Egypt. He is the Director of the non-profit art space Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum (ACAF) and was co-curator of Manifesta 8 (2010) in Murcia, Spain. Other projects include the ongoing online collaboration The ARPANET Dialogues, with Jeremy Beaudry and Nav Haq; the publication Fifteen Ways to Leave Badiou (2011); and the exhibition Trapped in Amber, co-curated with Helga-Marie Nordby at UKS, Oslo (2009). He is currently a PhD researcher in the Curatorial/Knowledge program at Goldsmiths, University of London and is curating the group exhibition When it Stops Dripping from the Ceiling (An Exhibition That Thinks About Edification) to open at the Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, in June 2012.
Eva González-Sancho is an independent curator based in France. She was Director and Curator at FRAC Bourgogne (Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain, Dijon, France) from 2003 to 2011 and at Etablissement d’en Face Projects (Art Projects Office, Brussels, Belgium) from 1998 to 2003. Her interests revolve around the many issues being raised by public space, as well as the perception and function of space as evidenced in exhibition projects. Her projects also enter into relationships with language and text, questioning issues of awareness, self-perception, and self-consciousness in a given place, or in the readings of History. She defines her curatorial work as focusing on ‘Non-Authoritarian’ art practices, those which offer the public an extremely broad margin for manoeuvre and interpretation, non-spectacular approaches that acknowledge the viewers individuality and responsibility.
Lofoten Art Festival was initiated in 1991, as a local biannual art exhibition with a broad range of expressions and with a regional profile. From 1999, the festival was given an international profile changing the name to Lofoten International Art Festival, including both national and international artists. LIAF has taken place 7 times since 1999, presenting artists like Gillian Wearing, Lawrence Weiner, AK Dolven, Ken Lum, Olafur Eliasson, Annika Larsson, Ole Jørgen Ness, Spencer Tunick, Mari Slaattelid, Elmgreen & Dragset, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Pipilotti Rist, Geir Tore Holm, Eija Liisa Athila, Torbjørn Rødland, Jesper Just, Simen Dyrhaug, Amar Kanwar, Tori Wrånes, Michel Auder, Kjersti Andvig, John Giorno, Lene Berg, Lindsay Seers, and many more.
Previous curators have been Tor Inge Kveum (NO), Vibeke Sjøvoll (NO), Gry Ulrichsen (NO), Göran Christenson (SE), Maaretta Jaukkuri (FIN), Taru Elfving (FIN), Richard Borgström (SE), Helga-Marie Nordby (NO), Thora Dolven Balke (NO), and Linn Pedersen (NO).
LIAF 2013: 6–22 September
Image above:
Photo: Jason Havneraas.
