Lofoten International Art Festival
1 September – 1 October 2017
The North Norwegian Art Center (NNKS) and LIAF’s Artistic Advisory Board announced Heidi Ballet and Milena Hoegsberg as the curatorial team of LIAF 2017.
The curatorial team about the concept:
“We are very excited to curate the next edition of LIAF. The exhibition will propose a speculation about the near and distant future of the Lofoten archipelago, based on its position next to the Arctic and considering the fact that this is a territory of growing geopolitical importance. Continued melting of the ice caps in the Arctic will allow unprecedented access to underwater resources and will also open up an alternative shipping route that promises to shorten cargo travel between Hamburg and Shanghai by 30 percent. In this project the ambition will be to move beyond a perspective that gives primary importance to the land by acknowledging oceanic space as an essential site of connectivity for trade currents that have historically defined political and economic relations in the world. Lofoten is a key part of this territory.”
Heidi Ballet is an independent curator based in Berlin and Brussels. She is currently curator of the 2016 Satellite series at Jeu de Paume, Paris, and CAPC, Bordeaux, which includes solo exhibitions by Edgardo Aragon, Guan Xiao, Patrick Bernier and Olive Martin and Basim Magdy. Ballet is also preparing the research exhibition The Morality Reflex that will open at CAC Vilnius in September 2016. She curated the 2015 edition of Brussels Cologne Contemporaries and Let the Body be Electric, Let There be Whistleblowers, together with Anselm Franke, at Dan Gunn Gallery, Berlin (2014). Between 2013 and 2015 she worked as a research curator for the exhibition After Year Zero, presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2013) and the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art (2015). She was the assistant curator of the 2012 Taipei Biennial Modern Monsters, Death and Life of Fiction.
Milena Hoegsberg is Senior Curator at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (HOK), Oslo, where she curated solo projects with Torbjørn Rødland, Lea Porsager, Pia Rönicke, Ann Cathrin November Høibo and Omer Fast, and the group exhibition Arbeidstid, accompanied by the publication Living Labor. She is the co-curator of Yayoi Kusama: In Infinity (2016) and Human Space Machine: Stage Experiments at the Bauhaus (2014). Hoegsberg is the editor of publications such as Josef Albers: No tricks no twinkling of the eyes (2014), Bauhaus in Norwegian (2014) and Shaped by Time (2012). At HOK, she initiated the three-year exhibition archive project A Pendaflex for the Future, a curatorial residency with the aim to produce writing on historical exhibitions and new curatorial knowledge. She is currently working on a group exhibition exploring virtuality and materiality, co-curated with Alex Klein, which opens at HOK in February 2017 and travels to the ICA Philadelphia.
About Lofoten International Art Festival
LIAF is a biennial festival for contemporary art taking place in Lofoten, a cluster of islands located on the Northern Coast of Norway, just above the Arctic Circle. Since 1999, LIAF has presented works by international artists in a local and site-specific context. LIAF acknowledges the complexity of place and seeks to be a discursive, engaged and social platform for different positions creating dialogue between the local and global. Since 2009, the festival has been run by the North Norwegian Art Center (NNKS) and LIAF’s Artistic Advisory Board.
LIAF and NNKS receive operational support from the Arts Council Norway, the counties of Finnmark, Troms and Nordland, and the municipality of Vågan.