Bergen Assembly 2025: across, with, nearby
Bergen, Norway
September 11 – November 6, 2025
Opening programme: September 11–14
Conveners: Ravi Agarwal, Adania Shibli, and the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS)
en.bergenassembly.no/
What does it mean to cultivate a sense of neighbourliness nearby and from afar? In what sense can love act as a public force, capable of countering social, ecological, economic, and political injustices? How can we challenge pedagogy that flattens diverse worlds, cultural differences, forms of knowledge, engagement, and ways of being?
These guiding questions frame the fifth edition of Bergen Assembly, which opens this September under the title across, with, nearby. Convened by artist and environmental activist Ravi Agarwal, novelist and scholar Adania Shibli, and the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS), the 2025 edition invites audiences to approach such questions alongside others—and to share in processes of learning across, with, and nearby.
“We intend to cultivate a series of collective and intimate responses to the paralysing uncertainties and cruelties inflicted in our time. By embracing curiosity and a spirit of collaboration, guided by new and abandoned insights alike, we seek to forge paths through the abyss into reflective and creative kinds of uncertainty.”
Bergen Assembly places emphasis not on exhibition as a mode of display but on the experiential, envisioning a “communal, living, and evolving process of artistic and knowledge formations through practices of sharing rather than showing.” Emerging in part through the Cross Course programmes initiated by the convenors, this edition embraces practices that foreground relationship-building, reciprocity, and mutual care.
across, with, nearby brings together a diverse constellation of artists, authors, archivists, activists, architects, and other practitioners whose work engages in forms of shared learning and relational processes. “If knowledge can move through lived experiences and reciprocity,” the convenors note, “it is vital to acknowledge any accompanying uncertainties, intimacies, and fragilities.”
“We therefore propose situations of engagement based on trust and mutuality as a way of co-creating. These unfold in the shape of works that can be viewed and listened to, and which also take the form of invitations to collaborative performances and spaces of hosting, gathering, and neighbouring.”
Informed by the poet Aimé Césaire’s concept of “poetic knowledge,” the 2025 edition privileges forms of knowing that unfold across time, between people and places, and resist strict categorisation or exclusion. It calls attention to what is already present but often unacknowledged, opening space for new shapes of understanding—both in Bergen and beyond.
Contributors and Sites
The programme features projects by a wide range of contributors, including:
Ken Are Bongo & Joar Nango, Susan Philipsz, Koki Tanaka, Jana Winderen, Vikrant Bhise, Marcus Coates, AgriForum (with Gram Art, Kåre Alexander Grundvåg, and Matskogen), Clara Hastrup, Iver Jåks, Sajan Mani, Gruppe 66, Karen Werner, Singing Wells, Karan Shrestha, Tomas Espedal, Tora Sanden Døskeland, Leander Djønne, Shahram Khosravi, Lars Korff Lofthus, Maaza Mengiste, Einar Økland, Christine Otten, Elsebet Rahlff, Agnes Ravatn, Philip Rizk, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Layli Long Soldier, Elin Már Øyen Vister, Maasai Mbili Artist Collective, Floating University, Communist Museum of Palestine, Tenthaus Art Collective, Nepal Picture Library, PARI Archive, Norwegian Queer Archives, Monica Ursina Jäger, Nabil Ahmed/INTRPRT, Jakkai Siributr, Sarah Kazmi, Prabhakar Pachpute, and others.
These projects will be activated across multiple sites throughout the city, including Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen School of Architecture, Bergen Public Library, Bergen Cathedral School, Grand Hotel Terminus, Rommet at USF, Textile Industry Museum, and the Literature Boat Epos.
This edition of Bergen Assembly continues the triennial’s ongoing commitment to interdisciplinary experimentation, cross-cultural dialogue, and collaborative learning as a response to the urgencies of our time.
To read more about Bergen Assembly and keep up with all its programs follow their social media and website.
