In 2009 the City of Bergen commissioned a international conference to ask whether Bergen should establish a biennial. The conference's conclusion was that the international biennial form had become standardised in ways that worked against curatorial work, and that something else was required. The Bergen Assembly is what came of that conclusion.
The Bergen Assembly's founding institutional history is structurally distinctive within the international biennial form: the institution exists because the 2009 conference that the City of Bergen commissioned to advise on whether to establish a biennial concluded that the answer was no — that the international biennial form had become standardised in ways that worked against curatorial work, and that Bergen should establish something else instead. The Bergen Biennial Conference was organised by Solveig Øvstebø (then director of Bergen Kunsthall) and Marta Kuzma (then director of the Office for Contemporary Art Norway), and convened international curators, critics, and institutional figures across a five-day institutional argument about what the post-1990s proliferation of the biennial form had produced and what it had not. The Conference's published proceedings — The Biennial Reader (Hatje Cantz / Bergen Kunsthall, 2010), edited by Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal, and Øvstebø — remains the principal English-language reference on the post-1990 biennial conversation.
The substantive Conference conclusion was that the proliferation of the biennial form across the post-1990 international art conversation had produced a standardisation of the form — predictable curatorial premises, comparable institutional architectures, similar relationships to cultural-tourism economic outcomes — that worked against the curatorial work the form had been founded to enable. The question was what an institution founded in 2009–2013 could do that would not reproduce that standardisation. The institutional answer the Conference produced, and that the City of Bergen accepted as cultural-policy direction, was the Assembly: a triennial rather than a biennial, organised by a different curatorial convenor each edition, with discursive programming integrated into the visual exhibition, and a structural commitment to institutional experimentation rather than continuity of curatorial premise.
The 1st Bergen Assembly opened in August 2013 under conveners Ekaterina Degot and David Riff — the Russian curatorial pair whose subsequent institutional positions (Degot as director of Steirischer Herbst, Graz, from 2018; Riff continuing curatorial practice across European institutional contexts) extend through the post-2010 European biennial conversation. The 1st Assembly was titled Monday Begins on Saturday — a curatorial conceit drawn from the Strugatsky brothers' 1965 Soviet science-fiction novella of the same title — and engaged the post-Soviet institutional and intellectual conversation that the Degot-Riff curatorial position had developed across the 2000s. The 1st Assembly was a four-month programme of exhibitions, performances, and discursive events across the Bergen contemporary art infrastructure, and established the founding institutional premise.
The 2nd Bergen Assembly (2016) was convened by freethought — a six-member curatorial collective comprising Irit Rogoff, Stefano Harney, Adrian Heathfield, Massimiliano Mollona, Louis Moreno, and Nora Sternfeld, whose subsequent institutional position within the post-2010 international curatorial-and-academic conversation about infrastructure and collective practice has extended the Assembly's institutional argument. The 2nd Assembly engaged the concept of "infrastructure" as institutional argument — the post-2010 academic literature on the question of what infrastructures the contemporary art form depends on and what infrastructures it might produce. The freethought collective's continuing institutional position as a point of reference in the post-2015 international curatorial-collective conversation is the subsequent institutional record of the 2nd Assembly.
The 3rd Bergen Assembly (2019) was convened by Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler (co-directors of the Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, since 2005) under the title Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead. The 3rd Assembly engaged the post-2010 European cultural-political conversation about historical memory, political-historical continuity, and contemporary art's relationship to historical-political conditions. The 4th Bergen Assembly (2022) was convened by Yasmine d'O. — a fictional curator personifying the curatorial collective that the Assembly had assembled — under the title Yasmine and the Seven Faces of the Heptahedron. The fictional-curatorial-author construction extended the Assembly's continuing institutional experimentation with the form of curatorial authorship itself, and was the most institutionally experimental of the four editions to date.
The 5th Bergen Assembly (2025) was convened jointly by Ravi Agarwal, Adania Shibli, and the Bergen School of Architecture — a curatorial configuration that extends the Assembly's continuing institutional experimentation with the form of curatorial authorship. The continuing institutional argument — that the Assembly format constitutes curatorial experimentation that the standardised biennial form cannot — has held across twelve years and four prior editions, and exceeds in institutional weight what the Conference's 2009 critique had projected. Whether the Assembly format constitutes the alternative to the biennial form the founding institutional argument claimed, or constitutes a variant within the international biennial form that the post-2010 international biennial conversation has absorbed, is a continuing question.
The institutional architecture
The Bergen Assembly is organised by the Bergen Assembly Foundation, a non-profit institutional body established by the City of Bergen, the Hordaland County Council, and the principal Bergen contemporary art institutions (Bergen Kunsthall, KODE Bergen Art Museum, Hordaland Kunstsenter, BIT Teatergarasjen). Continuing institutional support comes from the City of Bergen, the Hordaland County Council, the Norwegian Arts Council, and private and corporate philanthropic partners. The Bergen Kunsthall is the continuing principal institutional anchor across all five editions to date.
