EXHIBITIONS THE BERGEN ACCORDS
ORAIB TOUKAN, ANETTA MONA CHIşA & LUCIA TKÁčOVÁ AND EYAL SIVAN CURATED BY SARAH RIFKY
GUIDED TOURS IN THE EXHIBITION
Friday May 13th 12 PM
Sunday May 29th 2 PM
Wednesday June 8th 5 PM
Curator Sarah Rifky writes: In principle, “an accord” is a mutual agreement, between two or more parties. The agreement is in essence, a political one; it connotes “the social accord,” the instant we give up our sovereignty as citizens to a government or other authority, in the name of maintaining social order through “the rule of law.” Arguably, the (art) institution is a legal body that functions within similar parameters of publicly endowed trust, between written and unwritten agreements. It exists through structures of governance; it is accountable to its representative boards, be they elected or appointed, rendering the institution, through common understanding, accountable to its audience, its public.
Within these edifices of contracts and common agreements, a cluster of questions starts to amass: What types of participation are condoned, accepted, supported and allowed within the institution? Can mutual understanding be fortified through a breach of trust or displacement of expectation? Can curatorial and artistic tactics of engagement with(in) the institution reveal not only its politics, but elucidate a particular political condition? What tools are at our disposal, as visitors, as guests to the institution, as parties within an implied accord, within the actual, social and discursive spaces the institution has founded?
The Bergen Accords are playfully named after the nuances and failures of the 1993 Oslo Accords – a political accord that has become normalized in our cache of historical understandings, as it has recessed in local and global memory, together with its array of annexes, secret and lost documents, and back channel negotiations – suspect of the unsettled status-quo of peace procedures between Israel and Palestine, almost two decades later.
As a site-specific preamble to the accords, Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová stage their living sculpture If not Us, Who? If not Now, When? at Torgallmenningen square, simultaneous to the May 1st manifestations, celebrating the International Worker's Day or Labour Day. The “sculpture”, a frozen street demonstration, crowned with blank banners and empty posters, recalls popular revolts and mass protests; it is activated by passers-by who throw coins into a bowl, animating the protestors. The demonstration, controlled by a financial transaction—frame-by-frame—alludes to deficit and recession, demonstration governed by income, whilst signaling to the governing of public space: stated and unstated means of control, to which we consent through performing our social, economic and political roles, everyday.
The Bergen Accords as an exhibition, is a shorthand, for a series of invitations, conversations, procedures, considerations, promises, agreements, transactions and manifestations implied within its presentation, and that form site-specific tangents of thoughts and questions in relation to the place where it is held.
Oraib Toukan and I enter into an unwritten accord through which we negotiate her response as exhibition. The first conversations witness a negotiation of our positions in relation to the hosting institution, the constructed white cube of the Center, as well as the proposition of The Bergen Accords as an exhibition, event and site for negotiation.
What results is This one is for the birds: an exhibition negotiating lines of flight and loops of referentiality departing from the precept of the accord. Objects to her are indexical; they encrypt relations to their environment, to each other and to the implicit structure, and details, of accords. Toukan interrupts the determinateness of the architecture of the exhibition space by displacing an entire wall from its original position to reveal the original foundation beneath. She has invited students at the architecture program of Birzeit University in Palestine to conceive 'A table that negotiates a negotiating table'. Instruments behind classic negotiation sites during the Oslo Accords, Jericho Accords and others are revisited; be it walks in nature, ping pong matches inside the UN General Assembly horseshoe table, or the given bouquet of flowers.
Toukan also makes two further insertions in the enclosing space. Five copies of the formative 2008 essay Postscript to Oslo: The Mystery of Norway's Missing Files by Hilde Henriksen Waage in the Journal of Palestine Studies are placed within the bookshop of the Art Centre, and 17 Chairs for 17 Board Members are borrowed from artist’s studios in Bergen and replaced with chairs from the Center. The chairs are a site of negotiation for the Board of Representative meeting discussing the inital stages of the Name Change Act for the Hordaland kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre).
In March 2011, a curatorial proposition for a real legislative procedure towards the change of the legal name of the Hordaland kunstsenter (Hordaland Art Centre), was presented to the board of the Art Centre, soliciting their support, as a first motion, to rule in favour for a Name Change Act and, that recognizes the curator's invitation of twenty-six international artists and curators* to propose new names for the institution, towards the act's consideration by the annual meetings in 2012 of the two artist organisations which own the Art Centre and potentially by the following Board of Representatives’ annual meeting to be held in May 2012.
The Name Change Act is a real procedure, which complies with the statutes of the institution. It is a true investigation of artistic and curatorial freedom, and sutures the institutional and exhibition histories of the Art Centre, through allowing traces of the exhibition to enter the institutional archive, through the archive of institutional board meetings, and by giving visibility to standard procedures, such as handshakes, or chairs.
By virtue of the curatorial freedom, afforded to me as guest-curator of The Bergen Accords at the Hordaland Art Centre, I affirm the good will of my intentions, through all choices undergone hitherto towards the successful completion of this project, both within the time frame of the exhibition, and beyond.
Sarah Rifky
* Alex Ceccetti, Boris Ondreika, Carey Young, Dora Garcia, Eriola Pira, Francesc Ruiz, Galit Eilat, Hassan Khan, Iman Issa, Jens Maier-Rothe, Khaled Hourani, Laura Carderera, Maia Gianakos, Nathalie Melikian, Ozge Ersoy, Pablo Leon Dela Barra, Qinyi Lim, Raimundas Malasauskas, Sophia Al-Marei, Tisha Mukarji, Uriel Orlow, Vít Havránek, Wael Shawky, Xenia Nikolskaya, Yael Bartana and Zbyněk Baladrán.
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The exhibition is produced by Hordaland Art Centre.
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Oraib Toukan, was born in Boston, USA, and raised in Amman, Jordan. She holds a Masters in Fine Art from Bard College in New York and a Masters in Information Systems from the London School of Economics. Toukan often combines found text, photo and video within installation environments that use ‘mimicry-as-a-method’. Participation, referentiality, and institutional interventions under the radar, are typical of her practice. Recent exhibitions include NGBK/Kunstraum Bethanien Berlin (2010); The Serpentine Gallery Map Marathon (2010); the Irish Museum Of Contemporary Art (2010); InIva London (2010); Liverpool Biennial City States (2010); and the 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009). Toucan is based in New York and teaches at Bard College within Al Quds University in Palestine.
Anetta Mona Chişa, born in Romania, and Lucia Tkáčová, born in Slovakia, have been working in collaboration since 2000. They work across a variety of media including video, drawing and sculpture, often employing performance, intervention, language and game tactics in their acts. Their recent exhibitions include Figura cuncta vedentis at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna; How to Make a Revolution at MLAC, Rome; andThe Making of Art at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. They are representing Romania in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).They both graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. Mona Chişa and Tkáčová, currently live and work in Prague.
Sarah Rifky was born in Cairo, Egypt. She holds a BA in Visual Art and Mass Communication and an MFA in Critical Studies from the Malmö Art Academy, Lund University. Rifky has been Curator of the Townhouse Gallery since 2009, and Adjunct Lecturer of Art History and Theory at the American University in Cairo. Her projects include Invisible Publics (2010), The Accords (2011) and the forthcoming CIRCA, Cairo International Resource Center for Arts. Rifky lives and works in Cairo.
Malak Helmy is an artist working between Cairo and San Francisco. Her research surrounds the relationships between constructions of language and place. Through video, writing and collective ephemeral projects, she investigates ways of building, moving and organising formal and urban structures through logics of bilinguality, diglossia and translation. She received her MFA in Social Practice from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2010 and her BA from the American University in Cairo in 2005.
---------PUBLIC EVENTS
If not Us Who? If not Now, When? (2010-2011) by Anetta Mona Chişa and Lucia Tkáčová is a frozen street protest, animated by the public. This Living Sculpture will be staged close to Sjøfartsmonumentet (The Maritime Monument) on the main square Torgallmenningen in Bergen, on Labor Day, May 1st, 2011 at 2.00PM.
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The Specialist (1999) directed by Eyal Sivan (Documentary, 128 minutes, b/w, 35mm) will be screened at Hordaland Art Centre as part of The Bergen Accords on Thursday, May 19th, Tuesday, May 31st and Thursday, June 16th 2011. All screenings start 7 PM.
Inspired by Hannah Arendt's controversial book “Eichmann in Jerusalem, report on the banality of evil,” Eyal Sivan presents the “The Specialist,” a documentary film, drawn entirely from 350 hours of rare footage, edited to present the incredible trial of a most ordinary man, Adolf Eichmann, the chief of SS transportation who was largely responsible for the logistics of the "Final Solution." The trial takes place in Jerusalem in 1961.
The Specialist is a straight-forward and matter-of-fact presentation of the modern criminal. It is about obedience and responsibility, the terror of ordinariness to the ends of indifference towards facing evil, while being confronted with the confused rage of witnesses testifying against a perpetrator of the Third Reich.
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ABOUT THE 35-YEAR PROGRAMME AT HORDALAND ART CENTRE
2011 marks the 35th year of the Hordaland Art Centre, and we are creating a programme exploring ideas of histories and futures based on different thematics and institutional frameworks.
Do we need to re-lecture the past? How do we prepare for the future? These are two immanent questions to ask in the present. Is it possible to act as if the present is suspended above both history and future? Or is it lurking below both? Maybe is it weighed down by history at the same time as it is longing and striving for the future? These and other related questions will be asked in this one year programme containing six exhibitions, several lectures and seminars, as well as text production and publications.
This anniversary programme intentionally avoids the institution’s self-mythologising approach, but rather focuses on the idea of history and future as the present’s support structure. Nostalgia and hope are two component of how we long for what has been and what is to come, and can act as poetic notions to understand the present.
