’The Museum of the Sun’ is a reincarnation of Galleri Espolin, housing a collection of the 20th-century Lofoten artist Kaare Espolin Johnson, who suffered from cataracts and sight loss. Yet Mikalsen’s resolve is more hopeful: how ‘when objects are burnt and disappear, they can start anew or become something else’, she says.Įlsewhere, images emerge from the darkness. Reinterpreting a Sámi weaving method for making belts, Mikalsen’s ‘fire-braid’ installation is fueled by a multi-layered understanding of the role of fire in her community and its history: the World World Two destruction of her family’s land, the burning and erasure of Sámi cultural heritage, and the historical ‘vete’ system of coastal bonfires as warnings of a coming threat. “Everything was ruptured”.īassam Al-Sabah’s video piece, Dust, 2017, installed in the upstairs corridors of the Haunted Schoolįire, as a source of fear but also comfort and healing, haunts the work of Elina Waage Mikalsen, in Áhcagastá - Tales of the Ember, 2022. “The world was on fire”, the artist recalls of that summer of 2020. Meanwhile in a solo presentation at the ’Museum Under Destruction’ (the elementary school building due to be razed), LA artist Jennifer West turns to another ruin, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, documenting its demolition against a backdrop of social uprising. Thus moving image and its history become a wellspring for the ‘cinematic’ in various dimensions: from Sille Storihle’s meta-narrative film on the power play of ‘The Group Crit’, 2022, as side-splitting as it is unnerving, to an outdoor mural of collaged fax imagery (‘Panels for the Walls of the World’, 1970-2022), in homage to multimedia pioneer Stan VanDerBeek. LIAF being ‘nomadic’, the curators’ ultimate decision to set the festival in and around the town of Kabelvåg was both for its historical potency - as the place where Kurt Schwitters was confined during the Nazi occupation of Norway - and also for its film school, Nordland Kunst, to whom the entire festival is dedicated. Stan VanDerBeek Panels For the Walls of the World, Phase 1, 1970-2022, pasting the exterior of the Blue Black Box festival venue Through three chapters of their own (Venice, Oslo, then Lofoten), LIAF 2022 remaps a new archipelago of literary, political, and geographical references, with 37 artists in tow. The fact that Shelley went on to set the first chapter of Frankenstein in the arctic midnight, had not escaped LIAF’s Italian curating duo, Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. Themed ’Fantasmagoriana’, the 2022 edition’s guiding star is the anthology of German supernatural tales chosen as writing inspiration by Byron, Shelley, Polidori and Clairmont during their infamous gathering at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in 1816. It’s storytelling which steers the ship of contemporary culture in Lofoten, an archipelago in Norway’s Arctic Circle, host since 1991 to Scandinavia’s longest-running contemporary biennale, the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF). The historic harbour of Kabelvåg, the oldest town in the Lofoten archipelago, and backdrop to five of the six venues for the Lofoten International Art Festival 2022
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