The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change
Part One: June 5 – August 22
Part Two: September 4 – November 21
Curator: Lisa Rosendahl
The 11th edition of the Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA)
Gothenburg, Sweden

Artists
Michael Baers, Evan Ifekoya & Ajamu X, Damla Kilickiran, Susanne Kriemann, Anna Ling, Ibrahim Mahama, Silvano Lora, Hira Nabi, Daniela Ortiz, Manuel Pelmuş, Tabita Rezaire, Jessica Warboys,Meira Ahmemulic, Henrik Andersson, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Gaëlle Choisne, Benjamin Gerdes, Cecilia Germain, Unni Gjertsen, Ayesha Hameed, HAMN (Nasim Aghili & Malin Holgersson), Salad Hilowle, Conny Karlsson Lundgren, Oscar Lara, Marysia Lewandowska, Erika Arzt & Juan Linares, Fatima Moallim, Jonas (J) Magnusson & Cecilia Grönberg, Pedro Neves Marques, M. NourbeSe Philip, Pia Sandström, The Situationist International, Shanzhai Lyric & Solveig Qu Suess, Lisa Tan, Lisa Torell, Alberta Whittle

Artistic proposals for Possible Monuments? by Hanan Benammar, Aria Dean, Ayesha Hameed, Runo Lagomarsino, Fatima Moallim, Daniela Ortiz and Jimmy Robert

Venues: Röda Sten Konsthall, Franska Tomten, Konsthallen Blå Stället, Göteborgs Konsthall, Franska Tomten, Museum of World Culture, The Garden Society of Gothenburg, Röda Sten Konsthall, Risö, Online


The Ghost Ship and the Sea Change relates to the historical layers of the city, asking how different ways of narrating its past might affect its future. Located at the intersection between the historical and the fictive, the biennial explores artistic practice as a method of critical historiography and change. Franska Tomten (currently Packhusplatsen), a plot of land in the city’s harbor that in 1784 was exchanged for the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy as part of a trade deal between Sweden and France, is used as the narrative point of departure for the biennial. How might it change the way we think about Gothenburg if we look at the city from the perspective of this particular plot of land and its colonial history?

Until the 1840s, Saint Barthélemy was governed by a Swedish administration as a hub for the transatlantic slave trade. In 1878 it was sold back to France. Reflecting on this history through the buildings and activities that occupy Franska Tomten today—a court of law situated in a former shipping palace, a casino, and a museum of migration housed in the harbor’s historical customs house—the past is made visible as an ongoing present. The interrelated flows of goods, bodies, capital, and ideology connected to the site span centuries and geographies: just as the writing of law is historically bound up with regulations of international trade, the global circulation of capital is directly connected to contemporary routes of migration.


Photo credit: Hendrik Zeitler