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October 18, 2019 – Review
10th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, “Part of the Labyrinth”
Frida Sandström
“When I was nine years old, the world was as old as me […] As I turned ten, all of a sudden it aged ten million billion years.” The Danish poet Inger Christensen (1935–2009) engaged with time and language as constructs. In her prose poem “Part of the Labyrinth,” she paraphrased Descartes: “I think, and therefore I’m part of the labyrinth.” The 10th Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), which borrows its title from Christensen’s poem, centers on the inextricable future of history. Programing both for the current and the next edition of the biennial, curator Lisa Rosendahl has initiated a two-year contestation of the 400th anniversary of the city of Gothenburg, the concluding exhibition of which will be held in 2021. Linking demographic segregation with the discrimination of memory, this pair of consecutive, interrelated biennials examines how the city of Gothenburg can be read as an imprint of Sweden’s colonial unconscious.
In 1784, King Louis XVI of France ceded the South Caribbean island Saint Barthélemy to Swedish rule in exchange for a plot of land in Gothenburg’s port, and securing free trade between both countries. With its dissonant array of archival photographs and abstract prints mounted on …