Among the heirlooms left by my grandfather Aasmund are a few telegrams that he thought were worth keeping. These include the message he received on 8 May 1945 at 17:00 GMT, after five years as a war sailor, announcing that the Germans had surrendered unconditionally and a ceasefire was ordered from 22:01. Grandfather was younger than I am now when he died, and I never had the chance to meet him, but I know that his work as a telegraph operator in the merchant fleet supporting the Allies during the Second World War involved many sleepless nights on watch, ready to receive or send vital messages.
Many lost their lives at sea on fishing boats in peacetime, too, especially due to storms. The need for safety at sea is one of the reasons why, in 1906, the northern Norwegian island community of Lofoten was the second in the world – after Italy – to establish a wireless telegraphy station, known as a spark telegraph station. In this year’s edition of the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF), headlined Sparks, curator Kjersti Solbakken – who was recently appointed director of Bergen Kunsthall – takes her point of departure in this local piece of communications technology history, an aspect usually under the stewardship of Sørvågan Museum. A small selection of photos and notices from the museum have been borrowed for the occasion and are presented on a wall in the North Norwegian Art Centre, the headquarters of the festival’s organisation. However, the telegraphy aspect does not constitute a thematic framework; rather, it illustrates the overall sensitivity to and interest in the local area as well as the desire to facilitate international connections, which characterises the biennial as a whole.
Outside the art centre, this year’s nomadic biennial extends across several other exhibition venues in Svolvær, with satellites in Bodø, Harstad, and Sørvågan – and online, in the form of a collaboration with the journal Metode. Being located in a region with relatively few established exhibition spaces for art, LIAF has a tradition of using a variety of places that happen to be empty, and the seemingly constant supply of such premises hint at a community in a state of change. This year, large parts of the exhibition are set at Kraftholmen, a former workshop due to be converted into offices.
There is a preponderance of local – Norwegian and Sámi – projects, and the biennial combines a focus on younger artists with a small solo show at Svolvær Art Society dedicated to the relatively unknown Norwegian textile artist Birgit Hagen (1912–2004). Offsetting this, several of the international contributions are the result of collaborations that have taken place over extended periods of time and involve many participants. These include the New York/Hong Kong-based artist Wong Kit Yi’s Made for Telefishion, a critical-political karaoke soap opera inspired by a residency at Sørvågen Radio and created as a co-production between The Kitchen in New York and the North Norwegian Art Centre, as well as productions created in collaboration with the Japanese collective SIAF LAB and musician You Nakai, and with a group of artists representing the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Art (LoCA) in Zambia.
The latter artists’ group – which includes Anawana Haloba, Kabila Kyowa Stéphane, Banji Chona, Bwanga “Benny Blow” Kapumpa, and the duo Listening at Pungwe (Memory Biwa & Robert Machiri) – shows an installation that directly engages its surroundings on Kraftholmen. In Memories of the Unbridled River (2024), the distance between Livingstone and Lofoten – which comes to more than 9,600 kilometres as the crow flies – is minimised, partly by a sound work, partly with the installation of small video screens in the middle of four windowpanes offering views of the harbour and the fjord. The effect is reminiscent of layers upon layers of windows on a digital screen. But the view that surrounds the videos is three-dimensional, very real and changes with the weather, time of day and activity on site. Most of the footage is archival material about the damming of the Zambezi River and the creation of the artificial Lake Kariba in the 1950s, a project carried out to establish a hydroelectric plant that still accounts for the majority of Zambia’s (inadequate) production of electricity. One of the films shows animals being rescued in the area submerged by the dammed-up water. In an artist conversation with the LoCA group, Chona compared the Kariba plant with the Alta hydroelectric power plant in the North of Norway, describing them as examples of “hydrocolonialism” with similar consequences for Indigenous People and nature.
One of the four videos stands out: it is a short black and white film showing a kaliloze, a type of ritual weapon owned by the Livingstone Museum. Partly made of bones, it resembles a gun but involves no bullets or gunpowder. According to folk belief, the kaliloze can be used by a ng’ara (shaman) as a spiritual and potentially lethal weapon, especially as protection against witches. LoCA’s tongue-in-cheek presentation – which invites visitors to donate their bodies for the production of kaliloze guns – also promotes the idea of using kaliloze as weapons in a (presumably anti-colonial) revolution.
The video work Sáhtána Álbmot / Devil’s Kin (2024) by joiker and musician Victor Bomstad and artist Magnus Holmen also appropriate the idea of popular spirituality as something potentially threatening. In the evocative and darkly humorous video, they ironically appropriate a belief widespread among the clergy of earlier times, namely, that Sámi spirituality is a manifestation of devil worship and witchcraft. During the opening, they performed a powerful live version of the piece in a former workshop hall converted for the occasion into a spacious and high-ceilinged, if rather too chilly, festival arena.
Among the festival’s most prominent Sámi participants is Hans Ragnar Mathisen, a doyen within the field, who was recently awarded the Arts Council Norway honorary prize. He is perhaps best known for his meticulously elaborate maps of Sápmi featuring Sámi place names – and no indication of national borders. Mathisen, who also goes by the names Elle-Hánsa and Keviselie, shows an array of woodcuts and a couple of pictures cut out of reindeer leather from the period 1973–2003, most of them smaller works based on Sámi symbols. The work Ratkin IV / Reindeer Roundup IV (1983) is particularly interesting with its many amusing details – including one of a reindeer throwing a human into a cooking pot. For those of us already familiar with the oeuvre, it is nice to have access to these works, all of which are on loan from the collection of the Sámi museum Árran Julevsáme guovdásj in Hamarøy. However, for those viewing his art for the first time, this selection of older works does not quite do the still-active artist justice.
While the creation of the telegraph is presented as an unequivocally positive innovation for its time, there is little other technological optimism to be found at LIAF. Several pieces, such as the documentary works by Astrid Ardagh and Elisabeth Brun, both from Norway, address problematic aspects of technological developments. In the film essay Big Tech Blues (2024), Brun tackles the conflict that arose when Elon Musk bought her old primary school in the northern Norwegian village of Strengelvåg to use as part of his SpaceX Starlink programme. In the film, Brun’s grainy childhood memories are contrasted with polished SpaceX visions for an ever-expanding business in space, representing vastly different views of what is important in life. While the film does not disclose this, the local population actually won the battle against the noisy and potentially radioactive centre, thereby throwing a spanner, however tiny, into the tech billionaire’s huge works.
Ardagh’s film On Air (2024) addresses the vulnerability of modern communication technology, presenting the idea that knowledge of and access to older technology can be a safety net for us. On 24 February 2022, the same day that Russia began its full-scale war against Ukraine, a Russian cyber-attack hit Northern Europe. One of the results was that satellite connection to the meteorological stations Bjørnøya and Hopen on Svalbard was disconnected for two weeks, during which two amateur radio operators – representing a group of retired telegraph operators who have kept in touch and exchanged everyday small talk using radio and Morse code for thirty years – created an emergency connection enabling the isolated local community on Svalbard to communicate with the outside world.
The word “telegraphy” is from the Greek and means “to write from afar,” and in several of the projects on display writing holds a central position. This certainly holds true for the American poet Cuthwulf Eileen Myles, who contributes the text installation Cuthwulf Eileen Myles considers the poem to be a tiny institution (2024). In addition, they held daily readings in the first week after the opening. The exhibited texts, scribbled down by hand, appear as a work in progress offering poetic notes on recent events, many of them a response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Rather than “polished” poems, the pieces come across as excerpts from an actively writing and fighting life.
The only oil painting presented at the biennial is by the Norwegian artist Ilija Wyller. The work tidal tangents – reflexive sun distractions (2024) was created especially for the disused small Methodist church in the centre of Svolvær and takes the central position normally occupied by the altarpiece. The painting picks up several of the colours from the church’s interior – burgundy, light blue, and brown – and observers might easily form the impression that it has always been there, so well does it fit in with its surroundings. The subject is an abstracted landscape that appears to be in motion, reaching upwards. The church was also the setting of the Oslo-based American artist Elise Macmillan’s experimental, yet moving concert and sound installation Surprised Everytime (2024), combining sounds from self-constructed magnetic tape instruments with elements of folk-inspired Hardanger fiddle music.
Industrial buildings or not, architecture is not what draws tourists to Svolvær, but rather Lofoten’s spectacular nature: the sea and the mountains. After spending some time at the art festival, you can easily feel a little trapped indoors, so it was a relief to come to an undeveloped part of Svinøya to experience a version of the fifty-year-old work Island Eye Island Ear created in collaboration with the aforementioned SIAF LAB and Nakai. The performance was based on a concept by the composer David Tudor (1926–1996), a piece originally intended for an island in the Stockholm archipelago that was never realised during his lifetime.
It consists partly of sound art: loudspeakers dotted around the landscape play sounds that are difficult to distinguish from those naturally occurring in the place. I was able to identify loud birdsong and something which might have been sounds from ships; it was as if the sounds of the place were reflected and amplified. Correspondingly, pieces of mirrors arranged around the landscape reflect the visuality of the place. The work also includes a number of kites with long tails, although the wind was not strong enough to fly them when I was there. Overall, the work creates an intensified sense of presence, and at the same time Island Eye Island Ear represents a connection to another time. A historical presentation of the work – from its conception in 1974 to the preparations for the showing at Svinøya – is also at the The North Norwegian Art Centre; a version was also shown during the Sapporo International Art Festival in Hokkaido, Japan earlier this year.
This year’s LIAF features collaborations that point ahead in time, too. I am thinking especially of the aforementioned LoCA from Zambia. There is a long-standing special connection between Norwegian and Zambian artists, which is much due to the project Art Academy Without Walls (1996–2006), a collaboration between the Oslo National Academy of the Arts and The Visual Arts Council of Zambia. Several Zambian artists have studied and settled in Norway, among them Victor Mutelekesha, who in 2023 opened the art centre and residency programme Lusaka Contemporary Art Center (LuCAC), and Anawana Haloba, who started LoCA. Several artists based in Norway and the Nordics have already been residents at LuCAC, and LoCA’s participation at LIAF serves to further strengthen this connection. The artist group’s visit to Lofoten is also part of preparations for a festival in Livingstone – or, as the group members prefer to call it, Maramba – scheduled to launch in 2026.
If Sparks can appear a little wavering and nostalgic in the face of an uncertain future, this year’s LIAF nevertheless comes across as a good argument for the need for international connections, especially those forged outside the international power centres. Today’s crises and challenges are global, and perhaps it is not too much of an exaggeration to say that just as telegraph contact was vital to life at sea in the past, it is now equally vital that communities such as Lofoten – and the art world in general – do not stumble into the pitfalls of narrow-minded protectionism.
