There are exhibitions created by artists that are opposed to situating exhibitions in discursive, historical or theoretical contexts and platforms in order to explain them. One of these is Bergen Assembly 2022, directed by the artist Saâdane Afif (Vendome, 1970), who invites the viewer to be a co-creator of an investigative process, rich in fictional playfullness and without a pedagogical co-narrative. Saâdane Afif and Yasmine D’O ask the viewer to cooperate with what the Frenchman calls a “necessary effort.” What are the keys to this riddle?

Vª Biennale de Marrakech, Morocco, 2014. The origin of this story is in the performance Souvenir: La leçon de géométrie. Every afternoon, Saâdane Afif offered a geometry class in Jamaa El Fna, the city’s central square. After the class, everyone received a cardboard geometric figure. In the plaza, the public and vendors would speculate, negotiate, and plan common lives for their fate.

Bergen Assembly: Yasmine and The Seven Faces of the Heptahedron is the name of this performance’s continuation in the present. Saâdane Afif, convener or congregante, invites an enigmatic character to curate the event, based on the work Yasmine D’O, a dialogue by Thomas Clerc. “Yasmine is Yasmine d’Ouezzan, princess, billiards player and first woman to win the 1932 French women’s billiards championship,” he explains. “But Yasmine is also really three people: The original, the billiards champion, who we discovered in the Museum of Photography in Marrakech. Another, the one that we find in the play by Thomas Clerc and which inspired us. While the other one is the curator of this Bergen Assembly,” he explains.

The plot is translated into a tour of different venues that bear the names of the characters. Yasmine must search for the final form of the heptahedron in meetings with different characters. Thus, a kind of psychogeography and initiatory journey unfolds within the city of fjords: the professor, the huckster, the moped rider, the fortune teller, the acrobat, the coalman and the tourist.

Vista instalación “Art from the Depths of the Mines”, vernaculars sculpture for miners, “The Coalman”, 2022 at Gyldenpris Kunsthall, Bergen. Courtesy Collection Yasmine d’O. © Bergen Assembly 2022convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d’O. Foto: Thor Brødreskift.

The Coalman is in Gyldenpris Kunsthall. During the opening, Afif inaugurates the pavilion and asks the public why Yasmine is not there. Someone says that he saw Yasmine at the train station: “She told me she couldn’t stay and she left a letter for you.” Saâdane Afif reads it aloud. On the floor, a line of something like coal or tar and on the wall a text: Nothing More, by Augustin Maurs. The Berlin-based sound artist reads the phrase at different speeds, deconstructing meanings: “Nothing More. No thing more. No. Thing. More. More Nothing. More…” According to the artist, the project “explores the voice as a resource for expression and transformation, from intonation and speech to singing and political discourse, evoking the work of Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, in which he proposes that the voice is the most authentic texture of the social. The coalman is a space that emerges from the darkness, it is manual work that has disappeared.

Premiere “NOTHING MORE for voices and organ”, by Augustin Maurs with Volve Vokal, at Domkirken Bergen, Sep 9, 2022. Part of “The Coalman”, 2022 at Gyldenpris Kunsthall, Bergen Courtesy the artist, Volve Vokal choir. © Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d’O. Foto: Nicolas Rösener

A speaker on the floor plays Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon, by Claude Debussy, 1917, a piece that is played on a white grand piano. There are also wood and glass cabinets with the collection of charcoal sculptures by Yasmine d’O. They were made by miners in different places in Europe between the 1960s and 80s. The works reproduce machinery, situations, union symbols, and also the FIFA Cup.

“Evenings Lit by the Burning Coals: Claude Debussy’s Last Composition for Piano, The Coalman”, 2022 at Gyldenpris Kunsthall Bergen. Courtesy Denis Herlin © Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Foto: Thor Brødreskift

Meanwhile, in the Academy of Art, Music and Design, we find The Professor, a space where hierarchies are dismantled and in which artistic and pedagogical freedom is experimented. Jörg Heiser reflects there on the piece Selbstportrait als Warner, 1927, which shows Grosz with a short index finger as a warning sign, making fun of himself as a teacher. On one side, the piece Gruppo Petrolio by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, a work that turns failure into success: students carry out research for a feature film in 2010, tutored by a teacher played by the artist. The research is an alibi for attacks on mining companies. The exhibition space is a small-time bar. On the walls, on each of the seven video screens, we see two hours of discussions and production: students converse, analyze, conspire while drinking beer, eating pizza, smoking. Perpetuum mobile is a play that is a comedy of education and resistance based on Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini (1977).

Gruppo Petrolio’s exhibition The Professor, 2022 at The Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, UiB (KMD) Bergen. © ADAGP and Bergen Assembly 2022, convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine ´O. Foto: Thor Brødreskift

In The Moped Rider we find a series of works in which “with the tools of analogical thinking, (the moped ride) points out unsuspected relationships between things related to chance.” Here in Bryggens Museum we see works by Katia Kameli, Shirin Sabahi, and Denicolai & Provoost. Katia Kameli presents Stream of Stories about the mythical Persian and Indian origins of La Fontaine’s fables, demystifying the songs of animals and morals to deduce and demonstrate that everything comes from translation.

Katia Kameli’s exhibition Stream of Stories, The Moped Rider, 2022 at Bryggens Museum. Courtesy the artist, courtesy pending. © ADAGP, Bergen Assembly 2022, convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Shirin Sabahi, an Iranian, shows Borrowed Scenery, composed of glass cabinets with objects such as coins, shells, combs, etc, and two video projections, both in adjoining rooms. One is a visit to Japan by the sculptor Noriguki Haraguchi, who in 1977 mounted Mind and Matter at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, a metal bathtub filled with used lubricant. Sabahi recalls when she and a friend saw the work (shown at Documenta 6 in 1977 and later acquired by the Iranian museum) as children, wondering if it was a solid, reflective mass. The other video consists of the recreation of Haraguchi’s work, pouring used motor oil into a pool in the Tehran museum. A group of people recall their memories of the original work while pulling out objects that visitors have thrown in it for decades, believing in its power to grant wishes. Characters retrieve the past by unraveling.

Shirin Sabahi’s exhibition, The Moped Rider, 2022 Bryggens Museum. Courtesy the artist © VG Bild-Kunst, Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Thor Brødreskift.

In Eyeliner, Denicolai & Provoost present a collection of objects usually placed at eye level in showcases and windows, amulets-bridges between private and public life, past horizons and narrative presences.

Denicolai & Provoost’s exhibition Eyeliner (Bergen), The Moped Rider, 2022 at Bryggens Museum. Courtesy the artists. © Bergen Assembly 2022 convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

In The Tourist, we see a work of translation and spatial transformation: La Cantina by Sol Calero. The Kafé Mat & Prat cafeteria is converted into a space of tropicalist nostalgia and greeting. The Cantina is evidence that the processes of design, coexistence and listening have concrete effects that go beyond language or geopolitical borders in the context of global tension.

Sol Calero, La Cantina de la Touriste, at Kafe Mat & Prat, Bergen. © Bergen Assembly 2022, convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Nicolas Rösener

Instead of illustrating, the curating of d’O (“Because Yasmine exists,” explains Afif) creates a series of clues, a dilemma for us replicants. What for? Well, the game’s rules depend on chance and are as ephemeral as the riddle that gives them life.

Dominique Gonzalez-Forester’s exhibition Exotourisme, The Tourist, 2022 at Permanenten, Bergen. © Bergen Assembly 2022, convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Bergen Assembly, until the 6th of November in Bergen, Norway

(Front pic: Sol Calero, La Cantina de la Touriste, at Kafe Mat & Prat, Bergen. © Bergen Assembly 2022, Convened by Saâdane Afif and curated by Yasmine d´O. Photo: Thor Brødreskift)