Bergen Assembly is a platform for the arts devoted to supporting and exploring continuous artistic work, as part of which it develops an in-depth project that takes place in the city of Bergen every three years. Conveners join each edition and consider new ways to conceive of Bergen Assembly, allowing each iteration to take on distinctly different formats and ideas.

For this upcoming edition of Bergen Assembly, Agarwal, Shibli and BAS are invited to reflect on the possibilities and impossibilities of the transformative shifts that inform our lived experiences and artistic practices. They aspire to engage in conversations that recognise a common desire to address the growing dissonance within their fields.

Samtal Jameer, Samtal Jameen (Equal Terrains, Equal Selves) “aims at a radical re-thinking of human and non-human relationships. It seeks to expand the idea of democracy and sustainability through understanding the complexity of such lived relationships and the idea of justice and agency in a multispecies world and the un-alienated life.”

The ecological crisis today is foundational and multidimensional. Solving it demands that our gaze be turned inwards in order to examine our notions of power and ethics, and necessitates a sharing of perspectives and multiple ways of relating. With a regional focus on India, the Anthropocene India initiative began in 2018 and aims to better understand these complexities, while offering a critique of the widely discussed Anthropocene concept. In a series of ongoing events, it seeks to dissolve boundaries by creating conversation that cuts across traditional disciplinary categories of knowledge making, bringing together artists, cultural practitioners, natural and social scientists, policy people, activists and thinkers.