Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2022, LIAF is the longest-running contemporary art biennial in Scandinavia. The 2022 edition of the nomadic festival was curated by the Italian duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. It took place at the North Norwegian Art Centre in Svolvær, which has produced the festival since 2009, and at five different sites around the town of Kabelvåg. Kabelvåg is located between Svolvær and Henningsvær in the wondrous Lofoten islands. The curators selected it as a host for the biennial because it is the home of the Nordland Art and Film School, which offers excellence in moving image education, and also because it was the place where Dada artist Kurt Schwitters was confined during the Nazi occupation of Norway.
Instead of starting with a concept, LIAF 2022 – Fantasmagoriana originated with the sharing of an oral tale, which put forward an archaeology of the Arctic region as a landscape for ‘Gothic’ literature. Through its sharing, this narrative became a tactic for transmitting tacit knowledge, where information about natural, fictional, and political events could weave freely into new maps, which in turn evolved and adapted within the contexts in which the invited artists operate.
This catalogue recounts the three chapters in which the show was articulated between Venice, Oslo, and Lofoten Islands. It documents the works of the 36 artists invited and collects texts by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, Helga-Marie Nordby and Marianne Hultman. A short novel by Kurt Schwitters is also translated for the first time in English and Norwegian.