Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art

Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art of 2011 is held September 10 – November 13, 2011.

Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art has been arranged every second year since its start in 2001. Since 2006, the Biennial is hosted by Röda Sten – Center for Contemporary Art and Culture.

Official web page: http://goteborg.biennal.org

PREVIEW
Welcome to the preview of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art 2011! On Friday, September 9, the Biennial offers a preview of the exhibition. The curator, Professor Sarat Maharaj and his team of Co-Curators, Professor Gertrud Sandqvist and the Curators Dorothee Albrecht and Stina Edblom, will present their ideas behind the biennial. Several of the participating artists are also on site.

We’ll go by bus to the four venues and refreshments are offered during the day. Pandemonium – Art in a Time of Creativity Fever, is inspired by John Milton’s epicParadise Lost (1671). Pandemonium is the castle built by Lucifer and his band after they had been booted out of heaven. It is the base camp from which they plot against the ‘old order’. But it is also a platform from which they seek to launch the project of another creation, a new kind of world albeit a ‘devilish’ one.

Wary of ‘paradises lost’, of utopias that have turned sour or gone of the rails, the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art sounds today’s turbulent world for new possibilities and perspectives, alternative forms of life and living that are brewing up. What form of creativity, art and thoughts are emerging in the aftermath of the radical social changes taking place today?

This year’s biennial has taken the form of a process, with space for in-depth reflection and knowledge production. The performance program City Excavations initiated the biennial in June and served as a platform for artistic explorations of the city of Göteborg and its history. A number of Summer Academies on the Biennial theme have been established in collaboration with the School of Photography and the School of Design, to further engage in the ideas and research connected to the biennial theme.

Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art and Röda Sten Art Center will receive a new permanent piece by the Norwegian artist, Olav Chrisopher Jenssen, the sculpture Lingaphone. It will be installed and inaugurated during the biennial period.

Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art is organised by Röda Sten Art Centre, and is financed mainly by the City of Göteborg’s Cultural Affairs committee, Region Västra Götaland and The Swedish Arts Council.

This is the 6th biennial since the start in 2001, and it will be held 10 September – 13 November, 2011.

PREVIEW 9 SEPTEMBER
09.00 – 9.30 Register at Röda Sten Art Centre

09.30 – 11.00 Introduction by the curatorial team, Röda Sten Art Centre

11.30 – 13.00 The Gothenburg Museum of Art and Göteborgs Konsthall

13.00 – 14.00 Lunch at the Restaurant of Göteborg City Theatre

14.00 – 15.00 Bus trip to Uddevalla

15.00 – 16.30 Uddevalla, Konsthallen – Bohusläns museum

16.30 – 17.30 Bus trip back to Göteborg

BK Contemporary Photoreport:

  

Dave Hickey with Sari Carel for zingmagazine.com

Sari Carel: Often you discuss in your essays and writings a principle shift that occurred in American culture and economy as well as in the Art World starting in the early '70s. You describe this change as having considerable influence on the course of Contemporary Art since then. What are the origins and consequences of this paradigm shift? 

Dave Hickey: The art world tends to be driven by its market, and throughout the '50s and the '60s it was a relatively small art world with dealers and collectors and one or two small museums. It was during that period that the most powerful and permanent American art in this century was made—from Abstract Expressionism and Pop, to Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. It was, in a real sense, a great Mediterranean moment created by 4000 heavily medicated human beings. And then in the late '60s we had a little reformation privileging museums over dealers and universities over apprenticeship, a vast shift in the structure of cultural authority.

All of a sudden rather than an art world made up of critics and dealers, collectors and artists, you have curators, you have tenured theory professors, a public funding bureaucracy - you have all of these hierarchical authority figures selling a non-hierarchical ideology in a very hierarchical way. This really destroyed the dynamic of the art world in my view, simply because like most conservative reactions to the '60s it was aimed specifically at the destruction of sibling society - the society of contemporaries.

Photo of Dave Hickey by Peden+Munk

 

 

 

The art world from the late eighteenth century to the present has worked in a language of generations. Artists worked with their peers and among them to overthrow and supplant the generation in power. Then suddenly in the '70s you have artists who, rather than overthrowing their seniors, are pleasing them in order to get grades and public funding. That is exactly what my problem is with serving on National Endowment panels. I did it, and participated in it, but I have to admit that this is the first time in the history of American Art that an older generation has the authority to decide which works of the younger generation are privileged. This slowed down the style wheel to a virtual stop, and created a culture of mentors and protegés—a hierarchical, parental structure that would last as long as the National Endowment and the big museums and foundations had absolute power, say from '72 to '88. During this time, it was almost impossible for anything to change, because our culture is composed of a public academic and museum sector that changes slowly, and after the fact, in 30 year cycles, and a private gallery and magazine sector that changes rapidly, sometimes overnight. In the last ten years the academics who have been retiring from American universities are Abstract Expressionists and Formalists hired and tenured in the late '60s, just as these practices lost public credibility. They are being replaced with Deconstructionists who are already out of date, and who will be in power for the next 30 years, talking about stuff that is already over now. 

Here you will find more:

http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing14/hickey/