Momentum 12 at Moss

Momentum 12
12^th Nordic Biennale of Contemporary Art, Moss, Galleri F15

Nestling at the end of the Oslo fjord, the town of Moss had long been home to the Momentum biennial before it decided to move to the Galleri F15, allée d’Alby, in Moss, close to the fjord and right in the middle of a protected area, a reserve of biodiversity and an island of greenery in a Norway already largely untouched by the ravages of invasive urbanisation and industrialisation; its five million inhabitants living in an area the size of Italy, 70% of which is covered in forest.

Now in its twelfth year, the Nordic Biennial team decided to take a step away from the individualisation of curators and the uniqueness of a theme – usually the hallmark of a biennial – by inviting Tenthaus, a curatorial collective whose geometry varies according to the project. This twelfth biennial was largely influenced by the many features that define the form and operation of this collective. “Together as to gather”, the title of the 2023 edition, placed the desire to gather at the heart of the collective’s concerns. What might at first appear to be an obvious idea – bringing together artists, curators, visitors and so on for a biennial – turned out to be infinitely more complex than its title suggested, with this first edition in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic bearing the scars of the recent confinement and the desire to overcome the trauma that this dramatic health episode had generated. 

Nestling at the end of the Oslo fjord, the town of Moss had long been home to the Momentum biennial before it decided to move to the Galleri F15, allée d’Alby, in Moss, close to the fjord and right in the middle of a protected area, a reserve of biodiversity and an island of greenery in a Norway already largely untouched by the ravages of invasive urbanisation and industrialisation; its five million inhabitants living in an area the size of Italy, 70% of which is covered in forest.

Now in its twelfth year, the Nordic Biennial team decided to take a step away from the individualisation of curators and the uniqueness of a theme – usually the hallmark of a biennial – by inviting Tenthaus, a curatorial collective whose geometry varies according to the project. This twelfth biennial was largely influenced by the many features that define the form and operation of this collective. “Together as to gather”, the title of the 2023 edition, placed the desire to gather at the heart of the collective’s concerns. What might at first appear to be an obvious idea – bringing together artists, curators, visitors and so on for a biennial – turned out to be infinitely more complex than its title suggested, with this first edition in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic bearing the scars of the recent confinement and the desire to overcome the trauma that this dramatic health episode had generated. 

If there was a ‘sonic’ atmosphere to be retained from this co-orchestrated symphony, albeit without a conductor, it would be that of marginalised, neglected, resolutely non-dominant narratives, which form the heart of ‘Together as to gather’. We need only cite a few examples to get an idea of this coherence in the absolute formal and media diversity that characterises Momentun 12, following the example of the Czech collective of women artists, WET, who reconstituted an abandoned basement (Cave) in the image of a refuge in which the collective likes to find all the elements of survival sheltered from suspicious eyes. For these 21st-century hobos – who re-enact, a few decades on, the rebellious and casual nomadism of their predecessors, even borrowing their favourite means of transport, the freight train – escaping the surveillance of an increasingly Orwellian society, by employing all the tricks of the resourceful trade, is an unspeakable source of daily joy and exhilaration. In another, less iconoclastic vein, but more directly in line with Tenthaus, where the sharing of practices and knowledge, horizontal learning and perpetual improvisation form the core of its philosophy, the Indonesian collective Gudskul produced a multidirectional and convivial installation right in the middle of Galleri F15. Other proposals were far more astonishing, like that of Thomas Iversen, who is interested in the ‘dandruffs’ on the city’s walls, collecting, filtering and purifying them, giving them a new life as pigment and printing ink. As for the duo Margrethe Pettersen and Line Solberg Dolmen, the porthole-shaped opening they had made in the buried stream that had previously flowed into the Moss fjord allowed the underground circulation of water to be visualised. This intervention, as light as it was relevant, brought home to us the richness of the water networks that human activity has rendered invisible and, at the same time, the absolute necessity of this awareness.

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Head image : Gudskul, Stitching Ecosystems: GUDHAUS (2023). Installation view from MOMENTUM 12: Together as to gather. Photo: Eivind Lauritzen  © 2023 Galleri F 15

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• By the same author: Yayoi Kusama : 1945 to Now at Guggenheim Bilbao, Thomas Demand, 2020 Verbier Art Summit, Anri Sala, Olafur Eliasson,