GIBCA is one of Sweden’s biggest art events taking place every two years in Gothenburg, invites one or several internationally practicing curators each edition. For 2015 Elvira Dyangani proposed A story within a story…, examining ways in which systems of power have used tactics of amnesic oblivion and silence as a political strategy.

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This Biennale looked at work by artists who interfere with history-making and focus on socially engaged projects, which interrogate notions of collective memory and publicness from transnational and transhistorical perspectives. This project invited artists, thinkers and cultural producers, together with members of civil society and public authority – from Scandinavia and across the globe – to partake in various initiatives enquiring the meaning and production of history. Taking the notion of Umberto Eco’s open work as both a conceptual backdrop and curatorial methodology, GIBCA 2015 questioned the structure of biennials themselves as systems of power and propose instead to engage with a “series of acts of conscious freedom.”

Artists included:

Ângela Ferreira, Anna Lundh, Arvo Leo, benandsebastian, Bouchra Khalili, Carlos Motta, Coco Fusco, Esther Shalev-Gerz, Inmaculada Salinas, Isabel Lewis, Jacob Kirkegaard, Kader Attia, Kerry James Marshall, Leslie Hewitt, Loulou Cherinet, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, María Berríos & Jakob Jakobsen, Maryam Jafri, Meleko Mokgosi, Nastivicious, Petra Bauer & Rebecka Thor, Phoebe Boswell, Pia Rönicke, The Propeller Group, Runo Lagomarsino, Santiago Cirugeda - Recetas Urbanas, Sara Jordenö, Serge Alain Nitegeka, Shilpa Gupta, Simon Starling, Theo Eshetu, and Tris Vonna-Michell