Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos will curate the 2028 Bergen Assembly. The triennial event stems from a 2009 conference commissioned by the Norwegian city to establish whether it should inaugurate its own biennial; the outcome of that survey was a negative, and that a more amorphous model should be instituted instead.
Pietroiusti and Ramos will stage a prelude to their exhibition, the sixth edition of the event, in September, a conference on ‘matters of technology and ecstasy’.
The duo listed further preoccupations that may inform their project: ‘Dances and other prayers. Cats and robots. Myths. Snakes. Rhythms or algorithms. Death, tenderness, friction and contemplation. Playing. Crying. The unbearable. Rituals and systems. Sleep.’
Ramos and Pietroiusti have worked together on a long-term project titled The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish since 2018. Bringing together artists, scientists and other thinkers ‘as an open-ended inquiry into consciousness and more-than-human intelligence’ it has produced exhibitions, seminars and publications. In 2025, a publication under the same title emerged from the project, coedited by the duo. Alongside this, they have curated various projects collaboratively, including the 8th Biennale Gherdëina in 2022; the first Klima Biennale Wien in 2025; and, alongside Marina Otero Verzier and Mi You, under the artistic direction of Andrés Jaque, the 13th Shanghai Biennale in 2020.
Ramos is also curating the 19th edition of the Lofoten International Art Festival, which will take place across the Norwegian arctic archipelago in June 2027.
Read next Bergen Assembly’s 2022 edition returns to questions of authorship and identity
