Biennials feel an understandable need to demonstrate that they are more than cogs in a global experience economy that whisks actors from the art world’s higher echelons (and their press entourages) around the world, allowing them to bandy about their progressive ideas in the safe confines of the art bubble while carving out lucrative careers. The trendiest solution at the moment is to give the curating job to a collective that has a credible commitment to more precarious levels of art production and ties to the Global South. Enter Tenthaus, the curators of this year’s Momentum Biennial in Moss, Together as to Gather.
The choice of Tenthaus was surprising – and not. Based in Oslo, the collective has been active on the local scene since 2009, arranging a busy exhibition programme in addition to other activities such as workshops and radio. Insofar as Tenthaus has an agenda, it builds on a commitment to an inclusive art scene. The collective’s identity typically informs its approach to the curatorial task at hand. For Momentum, it’s as if the collective tried to recreate its own process of organic formation as a template for the exhibition: instead of rallying around a central curatorial idea and designing the exhibition according to it, each of the collective’s members has independently invited one artist to exhibit.
To headline the biennial, Tenthaus has brought on board the Jakarta-based collective Gudskul, an affiliate of the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, which curated last year’s Documenta in Kassel. Just so, Documenta’s break away from what we could call the “charismatic curator model” haunts this year’s Momentum with more than a little insistence. Selection criteria based on prestige have been replaced with personal affinities between curator and artist. As nice as this sounds, it also creates problems. One of them is that it paves the way for a good-natured or naïve nepotism that results in the inclusion of artworks which, by all parameters, are quite – erm – bad. The process, of course, shrugs off such evaluative objections, instead recognising them as hand-me-downs from the old, exclusionary institution.
Even so, let it be said upfront: the overall impression of Together as to Gather is so consistently underwhelming as to be almost comical. In terms of organisation, the exhibition is divided into sections called “bubbles.” Perhaps to give a semblance of structure to the sprawling exhibition, with its total of ninety involved artists, collectives, and institutions – yet with no stated intention other than to highlight the polyphonic nature of the collective process. Or perhaps the bubble is a metaphor for the porousness and ephemerality this process produces? The biennial’s presentation materials contain hints of reflection on the choices made, including the distributed curation, but it is the demonstratively non-virtuoso and decentralised design of the exhibition itself that reveals Tenthaus as the initiators.
The heart of the biennial is a makeshift kitchen erected in the middle of the courtyard between the old buildings that surround Gallery F15, which houses the main part of the exhibition. The kitchen, named Gudkitchen (all works, 2023), is built out of leftover materials and fitted out with equipment donated locally. Here, Gudskul will, I am given to understand, arrange activities based on sharing economy principles. Food will be prepared together, services will be exchanged, and there will be karaoke. Gudskul has also set up a room inside the gallery as a makeshift lounge with second-hand furniture and some printed materials lying on a table. A screen on the wall shows a Fischli & Weiss-inspired video of balls rolling through makeshift track built inside a studio or office environment, triggering domino effects. In one corner is a remixed chess game for four participants where the goal is to assemble pieces from each of the four teams to form a new collective in the middle of the board. Cooperation is the theme here, for anyone still in doubt.
The fraternisation between Tenthaus and Gudskul is a prime example of what the biennial calls “collective stitching,” a newly minted term which seems to be no more complicated than a form of networking between collectives. Presumably, the same idea of larger social organisms being informally sewn together – and of art as the needle and thread for such integration – was the inspiration when Tenthaus invited the Gothenburg Biennial and The Autumn Exhibition (an annual exhibition taking place at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo) to contribute works to Momentum. The former provided a video by Luiz Roque on ballroom culture in Brazil (S, 2017), the latter supplied a brutal sculpture of stone, metal, and coloured glass by Marek Sobocinski (SLAVA).
In a corner room, the Taipei-based collective Fotobook DUMMIES Day (Liu Chao-tze and Lin Junye) has set up its Bread and Butter Bookshop, a collection of art books from Southeast Asia neatly presented for public inspection in shelves and display cases. Visitors are also invited to participate in conversations about photo books around a long table in the middle of the space. The outcomes of these discussions will form the basis for a publication to be produced during the exhibition period. A similar atmosphere holds sway on the second floor of the main gallery, where Tenthaus member Enrique Guadarrama Solis has converted a room into a printing workshop. Here, invited artists will create woodcuts and linocuts on The Machine, Solis’s beautiful self-made printing press. Workshop as performance, in other words: a social and creative process taking place in the exhibition, but only for qualified participants. Confusing.
Before getting that far, visitors can draw their own window on a white-painted wall in the stairwell (Gabo Camnitzer, 50 Million Windows). Across from this are stanzas of sensitive nature poetry written in florid letters against green. They are part of the work Conversations with what runs deep by Margrethe Iren Pettersen and Line Solberg Dolmen. A watercolour map on the nearby windowsill shows the way to a wooded area outside the gallery and guides visitors along a stream that was led through pipes during the 1950s. The artists have excavated parts of the stream and decorated it with small clay sculptures and other quirks. The map also includes instructions to ensure that participants derive maximum benefit from the nature trail. Stephanie Lüning’s Collectivity Painting I and II are created in collaboration with visitors using locally sourced pigments made out of, among other things, food waste from the gallery’s café. These have been turned into small ice cubes that can be placed on a large white canvas strung up on the lawn outside the gallery, where they melt and leave behind pale rosettes.
Within the framework of the traditional art institution, participation is quickly reduced to a gimmick. That is, it invites no genuine participation in creative or socially stimulating processes, but is merely a pro forma gesture (such as dropping a mud-coloured ice cube onto a white surface and watching it evaporate in the sun). In a critical commentary on the educational ambitions of last year’s Documenta, Kim West notes how the biennale did not facilitate relationships of sufficient duration and depth for an ordinary visitor to experience anything that could be termed learning in the strict sense, a discrepancy which went largely unrecognised by the organisers. Learning is not a stated aim of the processes we are invited to take part in at Momentum, but its problems are related; the curators ignore the mismatch between the audience’s and the artist’s incentives and prerequisites for participation. And it is difficult to not get embarrassed by the childishness of some of the situations. To what imaginable desire are these offers to leave trivial traces in the exhibition appealing?
However, the shift from audience to participant is not a consistent premise for the works in the exhibition. Most are made by artists who neither belong to a collective nor work with relational formats (at least not here). Several work with marginal cultures or with experiences of marginalisation. Nayara Leite’s In Search of Rainbow takes us on a journey through north-eastern Brazil in search of rainbow flags protesting former President Jair Bolsonaro’s homophobia. But all she finds are Brazilian flags flying from balconies or hanging from windows, signalling, the narrator helps us understand, the country’s increasingly nationalist sentiment. One single rainbow flag is the fruit of her discouraging journey. The clash between national and queer identity is also at stake in Jaanus Samma’s National Utopia, which consists of garments associated with queer culture – jockstraps and harnesses – embellished with embroidery inspired by Norwegian folk costumes and made by artisans in Estonia.
A pungent smell pervades the room occupied by the collective WET’s installation Hop out spot. The walls are covered with bioplastic, plants, and textiles. A kaleidoscopic video projected onto the wall documents the trio’s journey from the Czech Republic to Norway as stowaways, as hitchhikers, and on foot. Accompanying the work is Wetget, a zine with pictures, stories, tips, etc. from the journey. WET stress-tests the idea of a parallel economy that appropriates existing infrastructure, a notion closely related to the reuse and recycling ideal that surfaces in various places across the biennale. Explicitly so in the invitation to take part in a survey aimed at mapping the biennial’s ecological footprint, and less obviously in Thomas Iversen’s project Byens flass (City Dandruff), where he has made pigments from residue that has fallen off façades around Oslo. The results are a wall-mounted grid of circular prints named after the buildings from which the pigments were harvested, and a didactic presentation of the material’s path from found object to image.
Morag Keil has attached huge autostereograms – two-dimensional patterned images that hide a 3-D scene – to advertisements in the centre of Moss (Untitled [billboard] 1–9) and put some smaller examples on serving trays in the café at Gallery F15 (Untitled [trays] 1–10). Keil’s images replace the low-key, procedural, and underground production otherwise upheld by the biennial, with a conspicuously appealing gesture. The autostereograms’ challenge to vision, as well as their atypical placement, highlights our perceptual transaction with the image and brings the economy of observation, which the biennale otherwise tends to ignore, into focus.
Of course, models for creating and maintaining local communities founded on ideals of social and ecological sustainability, of which Gudskul and Tenthaus are examples, and for global associations of such initiatives, are not without interest. Perhaps they are models for the social organisation of the future. Even so, pointing out the aesthetic shortcomings – I am tempted to say narcissism – of this neo-relational form still feels reasonable. The virtuoso culture that places the unique individual at the centre obviously favours a type of exclusionary production that harmonises suspiciously well with the market’s need for a steady influx of names worth investing in. But there are also other reasons why that model thrives within the art space, which is an arena where the attention of many is directed at the activity of a few. Without a selection mechanism that ensures the symbolic value of art, the choreography for engaging with it quickly collapses. Tenthaus’ Momentum makes the resulting vacuum palpable: the centre has been evacuated, and what is left is – bluntly put – an object that emphatically assures us that there is nothing to see.
Translated from Norwegian.
