Singing Wells to feature at Bergen Assembly

We are very excited to announce that Singing Wells is featuring in the fifth edition of the Bergen Assembly. 

The result of over 10 years of collaboration between the Abubilla Music Foundation and Ketebul Music, Singing Wells is the world’s largest collection of traditional East African music in the world. 

This year the Singing Wells archive - and the diverse musical traditions, artists and stories within it - were featured at Sharjah Art Foundation’s Biennial art festival through an immersive exhibition-installation. 

Now that installation is heading to Norway, to be featured in the fifth edition of the Bergen Assembly - a festival of contemporary art, events and cultural exchange that takes place every three years. 

The title of this edition of the Assembly is across, with, nearby. 

Here’s what this year’s Assembly has in store: 

“What does it mean to cultivate a sense of neighbourliness nearby and from afar? In what sense can love act as a public force, capable of countering social, ecological, economic, and political injustices? How can we challenge pedagogy that flattens diverse worlds, cultural differences, forms of knowledge, engagement, and ways of being?

The fifth edition of the Bergen Assembly invites you to participate alongside others in approaching these questions and to share in processes of learning across, with, and nearby. We intend to cultivate a series of collective and intimate responses to the paralysing uncertainties and cruelties inflicted in our time. By embracing curiosity and a spirit of collaboration, guided by new and abandoned insights alike, we seek to forge paths through the abyss into reflective and creative kinds of uncertainty.”

The fifth edition of Bergen Assembly is being jointly convened by:

Ravi Agarwal (India, 1958), an artist, environmental campaigner, writer, and curator. He addresses entangled questions through an interrelation of art, research, and activism, focusing on the subject of nature and its futures.

Adania Shibli (Palestine, 1974), a writer of novels, plays, short stories, and narrative essays. Shibli has also been engaged in academic research and teaching including at Birzeit University, Palestine (2012–2018).

Bergen School of Architecture (BAS). Its curriculum is grounded in Oskar and Zofia Hansen’s ideas about Open Form and the didactic methods developed at Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts from the 1950s to 1980s. Open Form encourages inclusive processes and ambiguous designs, developing spatial and temporal situations with diverse forms of collaboration and collective action.