BEK symposium: “The Only Lasting Truth is Change”
Published
BEK launches a new durational symposium, “The Only Lasting Truth is Change”, unfolding in Bergen, Norway across Autumn 2021, and investigating future configurations of art, technology, nature and power.
With contributions from:
Anna L. Tsing, Mark Fell & Robin Mackay, Jackie Karuti, Signe Lidén, Geir Tore Holm, Hanan Benammar, Sara Eliassen, Lars Holdhus, Tenthaus, Rian Treanor and others.
This long form symposium employs the lenses of Digitalisation, Time, and Justice to examine the potentiality of art practice in an ever-changing world. Together with artists and scholars, “The Only Lasting Truth is Change” will ask what an artwork can be and what an artwork can do in a world that cannot and should not return to «normal» post-pandemic; that is plagued by climate crisis and social injustice; and is wrestling with the yet unknown challenges of biopolitics and surveillance. How can rapid digitalisation avoid a growing distance towards physical encounters and embodied experience? Can new data technologies be more equitable and culturally attuned? How can art practice change its perspectives of time, sharing, and co-inhabiting? What new communities, infrastructures and economic mechanisms can be envisioned from a position of solidarity and care?
From natural farming and agroforestry to radical potentials of crypto economy, from non-linear self-organising scores to uncontrollable effects of feral ecologies, and from speculative weather instruments to the insuperable void between theory and practice – BEK invites you to join our inquiry from September through November, with workshops, radio shows, diagrams, recipes, films, maps, interventions and talks.
Details on the programme will be published at www.bek.no throughout Autumn. For now, save the dates for the symposium´s core event 19.-20. November!
The symposium “The Only Lasting Truth is Change” borrows its title from the seminal science fiction writer Octavia Butler´s Parable of the Sower (1993). It is organised by BEK with support from Norsk kulturråd, Fritt Ord, Bergen kommune, and in cooperation with Ekko, Østre, and KORO’s project STUDIO. Graphic design by Vera Gomes.