Frieze review of LIAF

Postcard from the Arctic Circle: Lofoten
International Art Festival 2013
OCTOBER 14,
2013
by Katya García-Antón
Knut Asdam's 'DS (Hole, Figure 2)' (2013) at the Lofoten International Art Festival, Norway. Photo: Kjell Ove
Storvik
It took three plane-rides and 16 hours of travel from my base in Zurich to reach Svolvær, the
administrative capital of the Lofoten Archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic Circle, and headquarters to
the 8th edition of the Lofoten International Art Festival. LIAF 2013, a project with 25 international
artists which curators Eva González-Sancho, Anne Szefer Karlsen and Bassam El Baroni titled ‘Just what
is it that makes today so familiar, so uneasy?’ proposed a reflection upon our current global turbulence
as a condition of permanent crises and stagnation. By twisting the title of Richard Hamilton’s 1956
collage ‘Just what is it that makes today so different, so appealing?’ the curators critiqued the
consumerist optimism Hamilton’s work heralded, and contrasted it with today’s fractious times.
A region of peculiar ecological, historic and economic configurations, the Lofoten Archipelago provided
a spectacular and intriguing location for an art biennial. Thanks to the warm Gulf Stream that rushes
past its craggy coast, Lofoten enjoys the largest positive temperature disparity in the world relative to its
northern latitude. The sea is teeming with life – especially cod, which has fuelled the local economy for
centuries – and boasts the largest deep-water coral reef in the word. It is little wonder that the place is a
UNESCO World Heritage Site and is considered the third most appealing set of islands in the world.
Yet despite its seductive billing as an Arctic paradise, the archipelago sits upon a crucible of disquieting
forces. The currents that foster its marine abundance also fuel an infamous whirlpool – the largest in the
world, from which the term ‘maelstrom’ was born and which inspired Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story
‘A Descent into the Maelström’. The region’s geo-strategic coordinates have led to a painful history of
occupation, collaboration and revolt: during World War II it was occupied by the Nazis, bombed by the
British, and today NATO jets rumble across its skies. Last but not least, the rich oil reserves recently
discovered off its coast are the source of a heated national debate regarding its now almost-certain
exploitation, potentially fracturing a society polarized by those eager for new jobs and those fearing
ecological disaster and loss of tradition.
Istvan Csakany, ‘A Sudden Gust of Motivation’ (2012). Installation in Anne Grethe’s garage. Photo: Kjell Ove
Storvik
It is within this uncertain conjuncture that I was surprised to find the term ‘exhumation’ used by Esther
Ramón to describe her specially commissioned project Digging (2013). The Spanish poet’s curated
selection of poems inserted in the public arena were inspired by Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus
Heaney’s weaving of past and present in his 1966 poem ‘Digging’. Ramón’s proposal encapsulated some
of LIAF 2013’s most pressing questions: namely, a consideration of our times as a corpse to be exhumed;
this process as a key to developing future and brighter horizons; and the complexity of space as the ideal
framework for such an analysis. ‘Writing like exhumation, art like exhumation, if you will … cutting to
the core of society’, stated Ramón. She selected poems by 10 fellow Spanish poets as discursive
companions to works by some of the most memorable artists in the biennial (Knut Åsdam, Anne
Böttcher, Adrià Julià, Lisa Tan and Olivier Zabat) and published in the Lofotposten (digital) newspaper
as an invitation to readers ‘to find their own “diggings”, to penetrate the art works, themselves, their
society, their world.’
Interested in the psychological import of public space, Åsdam’s new sculptural commission DS (Hole,
Figure 2) (2013) was composed of large-scale metal fences threaded through each other at graphic
angles, resulting in a visual irritant and physical obstacle to the surroundings. Located in the empty
crater of a burnt-down building at the heart of Svolvær, the work faced the port – the city’s imperilled
lifeline. Åsdam’s intervention evoked a micro-macro sense of today’s global impasse, caught between a
traumatic past and an unresolved future. Ramón’s poetic offering to Åsdam’s work was called Digging
Fire, a bittersweet poem by Pilar Fraile about ‘a world permanently on fire that, paradoxically, cannot be
destroyed.’
Ann Böttcher, ‘Transit Portal’, (2013). Photo: Kjell Ove Storvik
Two of the most enigmatic pieces in the biennial, the result of Böttcher’s reflections on site, memory and
landscape, were inserted with finesse into Svolvær’s public library and the local war museum. In the
first, delicate pencil drawings of pine trees hung from modest bookshelves (Transmigration, 2013).
They illustrated those growing next to the Gestapo’s old headquarters directly visible from the library’s
window. Böttcher was inspired by Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1960) in which the author
assigned various nations a botanical motif and described Nazi Germany as an army of pine trees
spreading across Europe. The second venue, the Lofoten War Museum, would need a review of its own.
Its founder, William Hakvaag has been collecting Nazi memorabilia in Norway for decades, yet his
literally overflowing museum and the personalized commentary next to each piece – mannequins in
uniform, weapons, a stuffed moose, a Goebbles puppet, a rare set of Nazi Christmas balls, and beautiful
aquarelles of Snow White’s dwarfs supposedly made by Hitler, who was a huge Disney fan – are
anything but a glorification of the war. Rather, the museum stands as a sort of homely yet eerie purge
space, where the prising of objects away from their often-incidental keepers has removed none of their
original ominous theatricality. It is with this in mind that Böttcher produced a handwoven tapestry
shaped like a local cannon base, Transit Portal _(2013) – perhaps an echo of an older generation of
female artists in Norway who explored issues of socio-political import through weaving, and whose
oeuvre has been largely ignored to date. Yet the wall-hanging was primarily conceived as a potential
portal for what Hakvaag described with jolly conviction as the plasmic traces of Nazi soldiers killed in
action that at times haunt his home and his museum. Ramón’s offering to Böttcher’s work was called
_Digging Passage (2013), a poem by José Miguel-Ullán, which asks, ‘Where does that path lead, ce
passage qui épouse la forme du visage, in the interminable descent at the height of an ascending secret?’
Pedro Gomez-Egana, ‘The Maelstrom Observatory’, (2013). Photo: Kjell Ove Storvik
LIAF was a biennial intended to address the complexity of place at a time of stagnant global crisis, and
to a large extent it lived up to its promise. The choice of locations was non-spectacular in the face of
Lofoten’s awesome nature, and many were sought out within familiar spaces synergic to their discursive
intricacy. Aside from those works already mentioned, this was also the case of the haunting sound and
sculptural installation by Pedro Gomez-Egaña, The Maelstrom Observatory (2013), housed in a
weathered fisherman’s hut and inspired by Poe’s story. Overall, LIAF was at its most poignant when
presented within the public realm, and when collective and individual narratives traversed each other.
At a time of deep global despair, by affirming the need to think within an intimate and often poetic scale
LIAF 2013 provided building blocks for more ambitious universal reflection and for this it should be
congratulated.
Katya García-Antón is an independent curator based in Zurich, Switzerland. She is the curator of the
current Sylvia Sleigh exhibition in CAAC Sevilla, Spain (and founding curator of its European tour in
2012–13). She is preparing an international symposium on Urban Tropicality in collaboration with
Dorothee Richter in the ZHDK Zurich for 2014.
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