Institutional building blocks. A conversation with Evelyn Holm about the founding of Bergen Assembly

Sissel Lillebostad , Annette Kierulf

Kunstjournalen (KJ): How did the idea of a biennial in Bergen come about?

Evelyn Holm (EH): The idea arose when the City of Bergen put forward a new strategy for art – the old one from the 1990s was past its sell-by date. That was in 2005, if I remember rightly. One suggestion that was wheeled out again was for a festival of contemporary art, or of new art, as it was called at that time. When the idea was presented to the art community in Bergen in January 2007, it triggered a debate. One of the responses was a seminar in conjunction with the launch of Kunstjournalen that year, which explored the question of the kind of ambitions a biennial should have. City of Bergen was invited to take part. The discussions were pretty lively, to say the least, and at times downright irascible. Which is good, because that's how it should be. In 2007 we reckoned the first biennial would happen in 2009 (laughs). A biennial costing six or seven million [Norwegian kroner] was talked about.

KJ: With a curator, an administration and a staff?

EH: Yes, ideas about what the event should be were a bit vague. It was suggested that we might finding a curator capable of getting the whole thing up and running – a modest biennial first time round. We talked to quite a few people, but eventually realised that things were far more complex. It's not enough just to wish for something grand. If you look at what's happening in the arts in Bergen, theatre, music and literature included, each field has a fairly substantial event. We already have the Bergen International Festival, October Dance, the Meteor theatre festival, and Borealis for contemporary music. There's a superb poetry festival, Audiatur. There are some excellent initiatives in the field of visual art, but nothing to compare with these other events. The idea was that a biennial should fill this gap.

Of course, the debate raged on, because it wasn't as if the visual arts field simply said: "Yes! Now at last we'll have a biennial." It's a strong arts community we have in this town. It's very active, and they know what they're doing. We have many international contacts and institutions that have made their mark, although they're still struggling financially. Much of the discussion was about whether we should spend the money on a biennial, or strengthen the institutions that are already there. For their part, the politicians made it clear that strengthening the existing institutions was another discussion. The two issues were not to be mixed up. It wasn't as if we would have four million kroner, which is what the city eventually chipped in with, to distribute to the other institutions if we said no to the biennial. But that didn't mean it couldn't be discussed.

From the municipal side, we sought dialogue with many different players, including Bergen Kunsthall, who suggested that we start by organising a conference. One of the most important things we did was to back this idea of a conference, simply because we realised we were in an area that we knew too little about.

It was simply a question of whether we really should arrange a biennial. Or should we rather be doing something else? And if we were to go ahead with it, how should we tackle it? We needed to gain experience, in relation to both the art itself and the practical and organisational aspects.

Then we started several things in parallel. Among other things, we asked Bergen Kunsthall to arrange the conference. It was left largely up to them how they did it, but the agreement was that the conference should provide the town with a kind of compass for its future efforts to get a biennial going, if that was the conclusion. At the same time, we commissioned a study of various organisational and financial models, which was carried out by Petter Snare. He is now on the board, although at that point he was independent. In addition, Ctrl+Z Publishing brought out the book Lokalisert (Localised), which we also had some dialogue about.

The conference was an amazing experience for us. It was highly interesting and very intense. Representatives from a broad international field came together to discuss the issues with the local art scene. But the conference didn't come up with a conclusion.

KJ: If there was a conclusion, was it perhaps that one should have conferences of this kind more often than biennials?

EH: There was something of a euphoric atmosphere towards the end of the conference. People sat around saying: "Couldn't we rather have more of the same?" At the same time, we were very aware that the experience couldn't be repeated.

KJ: But at least there wasn't a negative conclusion.

EH: No, there wasn't. But I felt that we had to draw the conclusions ourselves. There was also the plan to publish a book in connection with the event, which has perhaps proved even more important than the conference itself. Because this was the first time so much knowledge and so many texts about biennials had been put together in one book. We're constantly getting enquiries about The Biennial Reader, so we're confident it'll remain relevant for years to come.

KJ: The original idea was for a biennial, but it turned into a triennial. That seems a sensible choice.

EH: Bergen is a small town. Our resources are good, but not massive. We have a very active art community and numerous venues relative to the size of the population.

KJ: After the biennial conference, was it just you and Henning Warloe who sat down to draw some conclusions, or was it a small group?

EH: I took on the practical stuff and coordinated the work, but the decisions were taken at the political level.

KJ: As you say, you've obviously consulted local expertise, probably other kinds of expertise as well. Following the conference, did you think: "What can we do here?"
 
EH: Yes, after the conference we gathered together all the advice we had received. The next date we focused on was 2011. By that point we could already see that 2009 was far too soon. In early 2010 we organised a meeting to which we invited some key figures from the arts field.

Both the politicians and the artists aired their views. The Bergen artists' blog Dokken diskuterer (Dokken discusses) actually came to the meeting with a manifesto, which made it clear that they weren't expecting us to arrange a biennial just to exhibit Bergen artists. That came as quite a surprise to us, because people often seem to exist in their own little bubbles. But that wasn't our experience here; people were casting their gaze further out.

At the end of the seminar, the feedback from those who had taken part and who represented much of the art scene was: "Get cracking! Don't ask us any more. There's been enough discussion." After that things happened pretty fast. A year later, we had already set up a limited company.

KJ: What is the rationale for choosing the limited company structure? Who owns the shares?


EH: The City of Bergen owns the shares. There's a share capital of NOK 100,000, a nominal figure. The City Council decided that the municipality should hold at least 51% of the shares. They could of course be sold or donated to the rest of the arts field, but we haven't got that far yet. I think the priority for most people is just to get the first event behind them.

It's all a question of establishing an organisation that is independent but which also has a good level of transparency. A civic organisation like this is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

KJ: But in setting up a limited company, didn't that mean you needed a board?

EH: Yes, we started by putting together an interim board. I was granted 30% leave from Bergen Council, and immediately began work as chairperson. The interim board worked out how the organisation should be built up. We wanted an artistic advisory board with an international composition. The members would be selected from the people who had participated in the conference, because they'd been part of the discussion and had also seen a bit of Bergen and knew what it was we wanted here.

One of the things biennials get criticised for is their festival character. A biennial springs to life, there's a great hullabaloo, and then it's gone. We decided our own biennial should have a discursive emphasis.

One of the things biennials get criticised for is their festival character. A biennial springs to life, there's a great hullabaloo, and then it's gone. We decided our own biennial should have a discursive emphasis. It should be concerned in some way with research – within the field of art, of course – and it should have an experimental slant. For example, we could have a flexible format that changes from one edition to the next.

KJ: But the actual structure and the core of the organisation would have a degree of stability, right?

EH: Exactly. We want it to remain stable for a while. We wouldn't replace the entire team all at once.

KJ: What you said about research, at what point was that decided? Is that a core – not value but – concept?

EH: Yes, this was decided early on, in response to the conference.

KJ: Do you conceive of research in the sense of a meta-biennial, in other words, biennial research?

EH: That's something we considered during the conference. After all, it became a kind of meta-conference. But we soon moved beyond that, because we can't hold a meta-biennial conference every other year. It wouldn't work.

KJ: In a way it's as if the conference laid the foundations for how you would conceive the biennial itself, although it isn't a competition.

EH: Which is what it did. It was reinforced by the advisory board, which consisted of seven people who had been at the conference.

KJ: But who voted?

EH: The interim board.

KJ: Which had how many members in all?

EH: Four – appearantly an absolutely awful number for a board, because it ought be an odd number.

KJ: But couldn't one of them have a casting vote?

EH: I should perhaps add that the board never voted on anything. There was consensus. The interim board consisted of Petter Snare, and besides him there was Morten Kvamme and one of the curators from the conference, Marieke Van Hal. We had decided that the board should have legal and financial authority; it should include a representative from the art scene and also an international name. I worked in a 30% position for Bergen Triennial Ltd. from 1st January through to 1st November 2011, at which point I took over as director and was no longer an employee of Bergen Council.
 
KJ: Did the interim board set up the artistic advisory board at the same time?

We invited them not just to select curators – which is often the function of such a committee – but also to advise us on the format and model.

EH: Yes, they were invited in the spring. We all met at the Venice Biennale, because everyone was there. They convened in September 2011. We invited them not just to select curators – which is often the function of such a committee – but also to advise us on the format and model. It was in the course of their first meeting that they came up with the model for Bergen Assembly. An Initiative for Art and Research.

The advisory board made a sketch and invited various curators, fourteen of them I think, to come up with project proposals. That was in September, by which time the project proposals ought to have been on the table long ago. It's not much fun to sit with the municipality breathing down your neck: "Has anything happened yet?" "No, nothing so far, nothing new to report yet." We invited the curators to submit their proposals, for which we paid them a modest fee. That was a reasonable way to do it. Even those who were not ultimately selected nevertheless made a tremendous effort. That's how we ended up with the duo we now have.

KJ: Was it the advisory board that chose David Riff and Ekaterina Degot?

EH: Yes. The executive board and the director were also involved in the interviews of those who were chosen.

KJ: You had an interim board, and it was they who set up the advisory board. When was the current board formed?

EH: They took over from the interim board in November 2011.

KJ: Is it a representative board?

EH: No, that's not how we did it. As I said, we stipulated the kind of competence the board should have.

KJ: But in purely formal terms, surely there's a distribution of tasks between the advisory board and the executive board when it comes to selecting curators?


EH: The executive board has nothing to do with it. You could say that the first board was a kind of lower level advisory board. That's why we talk of it as the interim board. The task was simply to work out the correct way to establish and develop the organisation going forward.

KJ: Right, because this was the first step in constructing an institution. You took a number of decisions about what the basic structure should be, and then defined the component parts.

EH: Yes. And in some respects that's where we are now. We've put a lot in place, but I feel that we're still in the phase of developing an organisation, building the institution, getting things running. My guess is it'll take a while yet before the whole thing is really solid.

KJ: Probably. Can you say something about what served as models? I dare say you've looked at quite a few. Because, like you said at the start, there are a remarkable number of biennials, as well as documenta. You've no doubt assessed the pros and cons of at least some of them?

EH: We still haven't found our model, and don't really want to in that sense. When the advisory board created Bergen Assembly, An Initiative for Art and Research, obviously they said, okay, an assembly, that's something that differs a bit from how one normally imagines a biennial or triennial. An assembly is something that comes together to find something out.

An assembly is supposed to reach a conclusion; it should aim for agreement. But that's not what happens in the art world. Art is not about consensus.

KJ: In settling on this model, was there something, Manifesta for example; one could point to as a source of inspiration for the process?

EH: The ones that have been sources of inspiration, without naming any single biennial, are those that have preserved the curatorial model and artistic independence, in contrast to the kind of leadership structure you have at Punkt Ø, where it's the director, Dag Aak Sveinar, who selects the curators for Momentum.

KJ: That's clearly an option you've rejected.

EH: There are so many different models. Another example is the Moscow Biennial, which has an artistic director who is directly appointed. Otherwise, we communicate frequently with the Berlin Biennale. In formal terms, the organisation there is somewhat different, because they're subsidiary to an institution, Kunst-Werke. The director of Kunst-Werke is also director of the Berlin Biennale, so in the broadest perspective they're different. But in other ways there are many similarities. They too have an advisory board, and perhaps that's the commonest model. But what format should we use, what should the content be, what should we focus on?

One thing that we established as important early on is that there must be artistic independence; otherwise there wouldn't be any point in it at all.

KJ: But it's very interesting that you invite curators to submit proposals, because that gives you a range of options to choose from.

We sent out an invitation to create an assembly, with an emphasis on research, on thinking about the future, rather than what's typically contemporary. And these were the themes the responses dealt with.

EH: I think that was important for the advisory board as well. They wanted to be able to see the depth of thinking. We sent out an invitation to create an assembly, with an emphasis on research, on thinking about the future, rather than what's typically contemporary. And these were the themes the responses dealt with. But what the advisory board will do next time, we don't know.


KJ: Did the press release describe this invitation process?


EH: An early press release mentioned the advisory board's initial invitation. But Degot and Riff's project evolved. Later, we put out a far more detailed press release, which effectively reflected the curators' research. They made several visits to Bergen, and had many meetings with the various institutions. The model that developed, with exhibitions at such a variety of venues – some of which are institutional, others artist run, all of them with different financial structures and formats – this was the result of how they encountered Bergen. They found it fascinating to see how things are organised here.

KJ: There's an expectation that you will establish a triennial that manages to focus on art as a space in which one poses questions.

EH: Yes, absolutely. Artistic research is a crucial keyword, and it's something we've also discussed with the art academy.

KJ: From an academic perspective, there's a subtle difference between what we call artistic development in our sector, and the concept of research. In our field we try to confine ourselves to a kind of conceptual clarification, because we don't want to compete with university research.

EH: Exactly. One could try it, but it would never work. They're protectionist.

KJ: They have a somewhat narrower understanding of what research involves. But you've applied a broader more generous concept.

EH: Although this is my subject area, it's not my job to impose a theoretical direction. I think the English word "research" gives a bit more latitude than the Norwegian term "forskning". That's why we made the conscious decision not to translate "research".

KJ: What does Bergen Assembly hope to achieve with its research?

EH: At the launch of our website, one of the members of the advisory board, Bruce Ferguson, described art as a liberation project that hasn't yet achieved its goal and for which research is the next step. That's his viewpoint. Whether it's shared by the advisory board as a whole; is hard to say. But we want to operate in an area where art is about methods that are being developed, but which cannot be described as scientific, an area in which art has been very active in recent years, and which is also very much about the development of text. Another theme that's been discussed is that discursivity isn't necessarily just a matter of text, but can also take place in other ways. What we have here are two curators whom we call conveners. It's an excellent English word, but unfortunately almost untranslatable. In any other language it loses its double meaning.

KJ: Okay, in Norwegian we'll stick to calling them curators.

EH: Artistic practice is very much about research. It's about exploration, a deeper kind of research; it's about finding things out, testing the world. In other words, a kind of methodology of probing that has nothing to do with science, but uses other methods. But how is this perceived by the art world, the people we work with?

KJ: It's certainly a locus for encounter and negotiation.

EH: Yes, it's a meeting point that we find very interesting. But how should we handle this in the future? In building up the organisation and the project, we want to make it possible to evaluate how we communicate; we should be able to assess the international response, and the interaction between the local and international environments. We'll talk with the institutions we work with and the arts field, possibly via a seminar next year, but nothing has been decided yet. How did people experience it, do they feel it worked, what was it like?

KJ: One very interesting parameter is the audience, which consists of many different groups across a very broad spectrum. It's quite a variety you're expected to serve, and that involves challenges.

EH: Yes, and the press is one example. The Assembly has just one Head of Communication, and she can't even speak Norwegian. In a way it's an interesting experiment, although the reason is that we don't have the money for two positions.

KJ: Do you have a press and communications plan that takes account of these different groups?

EH: Yes, we have some guidelines to address the fact that we deal with different audience groups, that there are various types of media, the local, national and international press, and so on. We've also set up a local communications channel, and there are various people we work with, so obviously we address all this in our planning.

KJ: What are your success criteria?

For any biennial, no matter how international it is, the biggest audience will always be local and national. It's understandable that arts circles are very concerned about what they get out of it and what sort of part they play in the whole thing, but the professional art world isn't our only audience.

EH: For any biennial, no matter how international it is, the biggest audience will always be local and national. It's understandable that arts circles are very concerned about what they get out of it and what sort of part they play in the whole thing, but the professional art world isn't our only audience.

We're planning an educational programme for secondary schools, which aims primarily to get 8th graders out to Bergen Assembly, every one of them. And in collaboration with Hordaland County we've created a programme for upper secondary schools. We also have plans for completely independent assemblies for adolescents and children, and of course there will be guided tours and extra events for anyone who wants to go deeper. So we're getting there and have some very good plans.

KJ: Yes, it sounds as if you're achieving quite a lot with the organisation you have.

EH: We've been putting our time to good use. Of course, all these things have to fit with the curators' ideas. We don't necessarily have to discuss every detail with them, but we couldn't for example put together an educational programme that's so full of our own creative ideas that they can no longer recognise their own project. Everything is dependent on the artistic concept, which has the last word. The only times I put my foot down is when we aren't meeting the expectations of our backers, or when I have to say "Hey, that's something we can't afford." Otherwise we're very independent.

KJ: It's good that you mention the point about time. Marcel Duchamp once said that his currency was time, not money.

EH: And that's very important. I'm glad it's a triennial we opted for.

 

Kunstjournalen B-post #1_13: Assembly, Momentum, LIAF