Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever

Bergen Kunsthall’s new live programme strand Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever takes queer realities and ideas of the ephemeral as its departure point. Across four projects—a performative boat cruise titled Cruising Utopia, and live works by Stine Janvin & Ula Sickle, Tygapaw, and Eve Stainton—we will explore the possibilities of alternative world-making, thinking through movement and live practices. The experiential, more sensory character of this art form, and its ephemerality, opens new contemporary perspectives on intersectionality.

A moving target, the ever-changing idea of queerness is hard to aim at. To move, to dance, to flounder is to shake off labels—challenging viewers’ expectations and pre-assumptions of the straight linear narratives—and reshaping the overall understanding of what is considered possible.

The series is curated by Nora-Swantje Almes.

Cruising Utopia: Queer Futurities
Sunday, June 26, 3–6:30pm

Bergen Kunsthall invites audiences to board M/S Midthordland to join our journey to a “queer time and place” (Jack Halberstam). Cruising Utopia is a curated cruise with performances, readings and music—experienced on the boat and alongside the shores of Bergen and its surroundings—using the city as its backdrop.

“We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future”, writes José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia (2009). In movement, while “cruising,” we aim to playfully raise questions on queer lived experience, discuss the use of the label “queer,” challenge what is read as queer aesthetics and approach queerness as a fluid concept.

With: Miriam Kongstad, STASIS, Ebun Sodipo, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Deborah Findlater & Kiera Coward-Deyell, Monica Mirabile, Nayara Leite, Kaeto Sweeney

Related events:

Talk: Queer methodologies in curating and art
Tominga Hope O’Donnell, Sara Sassanelli and Naeem Dxvis
Saturday, June 25, 2pm
Bergen Kunsthall and online

Club: Cruising Utopia, conceived by Naeem Dxvis
Saturday, June 25, 11pm
Bergen Kunsthall, Landmark

Upcoming for Knowing We Won’t Have Each Other Forever:

Stine Janvin and Ula Sickle: Echoic Choir
Friday, August 26 and Saturday, August 27

A new collaboration between vocalist Stine Janvin and choreographer Ula Sickle, Echoic Choir evokes the ritual of coming together on a dance floor around music in the late hours of the night. Relying on the power of acoustic voices and spatial resonance, the project aims to create a collective and immersive sensorial event, by placing the performers and the audience in a shared space, like a rave or nightclub. Sound, choreography and the visual aspects of the work, such as light, create a strong synesthetic experience for the audience. 

Tygapaw: Live
Friday, September 16

Dion Mckenzie known as TYGAPAW, is a Producer, DJ and Artist, originally from Mandeville, Jamaica, and based in Brooklyn, New York. A polymathic artist injecting their Jamaican heritage into techno, TYGAPAW operates at the intersections of their musical and cultural roots.

Eve Stainton: Dykegeist
Saturday, November 12

Dykegeist is a choreographic work from Manchester-born London-based artist and performance maker Eve Stainton—with a live sound world conceived by musician Mica Levi. Dykegeist unravels and complicates the archetypal narratives assigned to the lesbian predator creature. During the current of the evening, aesthetics will shift between a supernatural gothic thriller, a 90’s sci-fi spider lair, a haunted Manchester club scene, an abstract and warping horror-scape, a social situation to discuss threat/the phobic/ consent/ otherness, choreography and suspended encounters, gateways gravel grunge, emptiness and charged-ness.

Supported by Norwegian Ministry of Culture and Equality, City of Bergen, Vestland County, Arts Council Norway, Maritime Tours A/S, The Bergesen Foundation

Thanks to Follese Heimbygdlag, Husmannsplassen i Træ, Badeplass og Museum