For the fourth edition of Bergen Assembly, curator Yasmine d’O. invites the public to follow another Yasmine, a fictional character on her quest for a mysterious form, a seven-sided solid body called the Heptahedron.

Her search is based on a play written by the French author Thomas Clerc after a performance by Saâdane Afif that took place in Marrakech in 2014. The idea sparked by this performance has since migrated from Morocco towards northern Europe. Having encountered different contexts and people along the way, the story has been enriched and transformed to evolve into an assembly in Bergen.

The quest of the Heptahedron is guided by seven enigmatic characters that Yasmine encounters along the way: the Professor, the Bonimenteur, the Moped Rider, the Fortune Teller, an Acrobats, the Coalman and the Tourist. These seven characters lend their names to seven exhibitions spread across different venues in the city of Bergen from September 8th to November 6th, 2022. Each character-exhibition brings together three distinct artistic positions, offering a multiplicity of perspectives on the issues raised by their puzzling titles.
 

The Professor

To think is to say no.
— Alain*

The Professor, in order of appearance, is the first character encountered in Yasmine’s quest for the Heptahedron. Standing in a blue smock, hidden behind small, round, silver-rimmed glasses with an index finger raised to the sky, the Professor is doubtful. “Times are dark,” says the Professor. He adds in a learned tone, “It is more necessary than ever to question the choices that have resulted in the advent of an unequal society, and even more so, a society incapable of preserving its future.” Yet there is an idea that bothers him. Deep inside, the Professor wonders if he is not some kind of lobbyist in charge of perpetuating the foundations of a blindly conservative model of society. He asks himself, “Am I the custodian in charge of maintaining, at all costs, the shaky old edifice of the status quo, despite common sense?” The Professor’s thoughts are bleak, but hope is reborn when remembering the fundamentals of the profession: education should drive the mechanisms that help our societies to evolve for the better and he is the keystone of this transmission process. The Professor must provide emancipatory knowledge, allowing students to transgress the established order and, ironically, to transgress what they’ve been taught.

So how can the Professor help to sharpen the minds that will give the world another narrative? Do they have to teach disobedience? Can we really learn to disobey?

To bring the Professor’s character to life, and to help overcome these dilemmas, this exhibition brings together the works of George Grosz, Lili Reynaud Dewar and Gruppo Petrolio, and the selfportrait class of artist and professor Lars Korff Lofthus.

Rendez-vous at the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, UiB (KMD), and to find out more about what goes on in the head of this character read Side Magazine, The Professor.

— Yasmine d'O.

* Alain, Propos sur les pouvoirs (Remarks on Power) §139, 1924.