LOFOTEN ISLANDS.- Lofoten International Art Festival announced that Heidi Ballet and Milena Hoegsberg will curate the 2017 edition of this unique art biennial festival, which takes place in Norway’s remote Lofoten Islands; an archipelago in the Arctic Circle.
Helga-Marie Nordby, Chair, LIAF Artistic Advisory Board says: “We are extremely happy that Heidi Ballet and Milena Hoegsberg will curate LIAF 2017. Both have a solid background in developing visually strong and discursive projects. We really look forward to welcoming the world to Lofoten next year!”
Curators Heidi Ballet and Milena Hoegsberg say: “We are very excited to curate the 2017 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 edition of LIAF, 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”.
LIAF has taken place eight times since 1999, presenting new commissions and artworks by artists such as Gillian Wearing, Lawrence Weiner, AK Dolven, Ken Lum, Olafur Eliasson, Mari Slaattelid, Elmgren & Drageseth, Gardar Eide Einarsson, Pipilotti Rist, Geir Tore Holm, Eija Liisa Athila Jesper Just, Amar Kanwar, Tori Wrånes, Michel Auderer, Kjersti Andvig, John Giorno, Lene Berg, Lindsay Seers, David Horvitz, Mahmoud Khaled, HC Gilje, Karl Larsson, Shilpa Gupta, István Csácány, Lisa Tan, Tue Greenfort, Elizabeth Price, and many more.
Details of selected artists for LIAF 2017 will be announced next year.
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.
Previous curators have included Tor Inge Kveum, Per Gunnar Tverbakk, Vibeke Sjøvoll, Gry Ulrichsen, Göran Christenson, Maaretta Jaukkuri, Taru Elfving, Richard Borgström, Helga-Marie Nordby, Thora Dolven Balke, Linn Pedersen, Anne Szefer Karlsen, Bassam El Baroni , Eva González-Sancho, Matt Packer and Arne Skaug Olsen.
