INTRODUCTION

Fotogalleriet's Artistic Director Antonio Cataldo and the European Kunsthalle Artistic co-Director Rike Frank will give an short introduction.

OPENING PRESENTATION

Will be held by curator Kathryn Weir about the political ecology dimension of her curatorial practice departing from the projects: ‘Cosmopolis #2: Rethinking the Human’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2019), where Munem Wasif’s ‘Seeds Shall Set Us Free II’ was first presented, ‘Rethinking Nature at Madre Museum in Naples’ (2021) and ‘Green Snake’ at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong (2024).

Kathryn Weir’s curatorial and writing practice engages with critical thinking on technology, class, race, gender and political ecology. She is the Co-Artistic Director, Lagos Biennial 2021-2024, and teaches Curatorial Studies at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Rome. Her research and teaching practice engages with art’s new pedagogies and its expanded geographies and histories, focusing also on intersections between critical theory and artistic experimentation. She previously directed the MADRE museum in Naples (2020-23) and the multidisciplinary programmes at the Centre Pompidou (2014-20), where she created Cosmopolis, a platform for research-based, socially engaged and collaborative practices, and the festival MOVE: performance, dance, moving image. From 2006-14, she was head of international art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane, and a member of the curatorium of the 5th, 6th and 7th Asia Pacific Triennials, as well as curating 21st Century: Art in the first decade (2010-2011).

CONTRIBUTING NOTES

Researcher Pierre du Plessis will look into plant and fungi movement, forging tracks for humans, animals, and more-than-human organisms departing from the encounter of the Kalahari Desert Truffle and contemporary practices of gathering these organisms. Du Plessis will look at it from a feminist conceptual reading of the gatherer through the lenses of The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula Le Guin.

Pierre du Plessis is a Researcher at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo. He is an environmental anthropologist and multispecies ethnographer whose research has focused on the skilled practices of tracking and gathering as methods and analytics to describe more-than-human landscapes. His current research examines more-than-human landscape transformations that emerge with the growth and development of industrial beef production in southern Africa and Europe.

Curator and writer Adam Kleinman, will talk around the figure of the German Nobel Prize winning chemist Fritz Haber (1868-1934), points out how the same technology that feeds can also kill, referring to the history of the development of modern fertilisers and the gradual infiltration of toxic, nitrogen-derived products in the crops, in the land, in our bodies, and the waters.

Adam Kleinman is dedicated to curating exhibitions, programs, and events that inspire trust and mutual understanding through the presentation of art reflecting the daily realities and lived experiences of both individuals and communities. His aim is to cultivate diverse avenues of access and enhance the joy of everyday life by bringing people together to share relevant ideas articulated with power. Previously, he held positions such as Lead Curator for North America at KADIST, Editor-in-Chief and Curator at (FKA) Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, and Agent for Public Programming at dOCUMENTA (13). Currently, as the Director of Kunsthall Trondheim, he continues his mission to foster meaningful engagement with the arts.

FILM SCREENING: REETU SATTAR

Shabnam (2023) by Reetu Sattar, explores the historic and continuing relationship between East Lancashire and Bangladesh in a textile tug-of-war. The film revolves around the delicate muslin produced in Dhaka in the 17th and 18th centuries, highly prized by the British fashion market. It involves the migration of textile workers to Lancashire in the 20th century and back to present-day garment workers in the same city in Bangladesh.

AN ADRESS BY THE ARTIST

Munem Wasif will adress his practice and its relation to the research-based organization UBINIG, founded by a group of activists in 1984 to support the new agricultural movement, Naya Krishi Andolan

Munem Wasif's image-based works explore the notion and forms of trace. His complex installations often mix photographs with moving images, archive documents or collected paraphernalia to reveal notions of impermanence and insecurity. His working methodology based on long-term immersion, close contact with his subjects and systematic repetition to convey layered, sensitive and sometimes contradictory observations on complex issues such as food sovereignty, labour exploitation or borders and migration.

His work exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Victoria & Albert Museum, Musee De elysee, Dhaka Art Summit and Sharjah, Singapore, Taipei, Gwangju, Lyon biennale. Munem Wasif received Robert Gardener fellowship in 2023 to work on the critical history of indigo in Bengal. The artist lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

Q&A

Munem Wasif, Adam Kleinmann, Kathryn Weir & Pierre Louis Du Pleissis in conversation, moderated by Lara Okafor.

The day will end with a performance by dancer and choreographer Harald Beharie.

Undersang (work in-progess)

Harald Beharie shares a work-in-progress excerpt from the work ‘Undersang’.

Undersang is a work that takes the form of a performance ritual in the forest (Lillomarka), the production is a collaboration with Black Box Teater and Dansens Hus, Oslo May 30 - June 2.

Harald Beharie (he/they) is a Norwegian-Jamaican performer and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway. Harald's choreographic practice navigates through a sphere of ambiguity and imagination, characterized by themes such as construction and deconstruction, hope, uncertainty, indifference and intensity. They have a special interest in "DIY" and the vulnerability of being in the unknown. In an attempt to dissect established corporeal narratives, their work celebrates a spectrum of embodiment - from the pathetic to the ecstatic, the coincidental to the jubilant, from the wobbly to the tenacious, while promoting a conscious naivety and queer playfulness. Harald's work has received nominations for the prize from the Norwegian Critics Association for the performances "Shine Utopians" with Louis Schou (2020) and for the solo work Batty Bwoy (2022). In 2023, Batty Bwoy also won the Hedda award for "dance performance of the year."

WILD SEEDS: THE UNPLANTED AND THE UNCULTIVATED. A SERIES OF GATHERINGS CHALLENGING AGRARIAN ASSUMPTIONS

Seeds Shall Set Us Free, an exhibition by Munem Wasif, investigates food systems, wild and uncultivated seeds, and plants that have a more holistic relation to people and bodies, especially connected to oral histories and Indigenous knowledge. We gather around a series of interdisciplinary programs in connection with the exhibition, which is currently open in Oslo. Departing from artistic and curatorial methodologies, we move across the fluidity of learning and exchange to evoke ecologies of survival, sustenance, and ritualization of collectivity, where seeds play a significant role in repositioning our historical time.

Modernity and progress pushed the boundaries of the cultivable but also broke relations of seasons and ritualistic gathering in favor of mass production and loss of regard to the land and livelihood. We focus specifically on the relationship between Asia and the Arctic and draw from Indigenous knowledge to look at how agriculture has attempted to serve exploitative practices of land grabbing when we look, for instance, at the Sámi people and their livelihood in the Arctic territory and the Garo people in Bangladesh. From music, foraging edible plants, using and abusing fertilizers for military use first, and the toxication of land later, we reclaim a different relation to nature and the body. This allows us to reorient technology, social value, and the world from an artistic perspective and challenge notions of universality and modernity from within and outside the exhibition space, and its sphere of influence beyond its framing of Modernity’s promise of bettering living conditions while bringing with itself a flattening of experience and impoverishment of nutrients.

“Wild Seeds: the unplanted and the uncultivated, a series of gatherings challenging agrarian assumptions” brings together practitioners from different fields in Oslo over different days and weeks to explore the potential of changing our relation to food and seeds and find new ways and relations between humans and more-than-human beings.

The programs depart from "Seeds Shall Set Us Free", a solo exhibition by Munem Wasif. The exhibition and its related events have received funding from Arts Council Norway and The Gwaertler Grant.

Rike Frank works as a curator and writer and teaches exhibition histories and curatorial practice. She is Executive Director of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme, as well as co-director of the European Kunsthalle.

Antonio Cataldo, PhD, is a curator, a scholar, and, since August 2018, the Artistic Director of Fotogalleriet in Oslo. He currently also chairs the Association of Norwegian Kunsthalles.

Miki Gebrelul is a Curator and Head of Exhibitions at Fotogalleriet. Gebrelul is a recent graduate with MA in Gender Studies and Philosophy from University of Oslo, focusing on queer individuals and groups with minority ethnic backgrounds.