Articles Available Online

Secularity, the theme of this year’s Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), is often imagined as something akin to the cartilage between two vertebrae: a tissue that separates church from state But what would it mean to consider secularity not as tissue but as bone, as a structure that stands alongside civic and religious society? What, then, can we say secular culture looks like? Does it have a time, a space, an aesthetic of own?   Featuring 30 artists spread across two main venues, Röda Sten and Göteborgs Konsthall, as well as a number of off-site spaces, the biennial’s ninth edition focuses largely on artists and histories connected to Scandinavia Curator Nav Haq borrowed the title, ‘WheredoIendandyoubegin’, from a light installation by Shilpa Gupta, which glows atop a building in an industrial no-man’s land between the city and the suburbs Applied to the theme of this year’s GIBCA, Gupta’s question expands the field of secularity beyond the chasm between church and state, to the more immediate difference between ‘you’ and ‘I’   On the occasion of the biennial, Platform for Artistic Research Sweden (PARSE) have published a discussion on secularity, between Haq and two professors at the University of Gothenburg, Andrea Phillips and Ola Sigurdson In this discussion Haq, an Antwerp-based Brit, describes Sweden’s second city as one full of contradictions: at once working class and incredibly bourgeois; of a social-democratic persuasion yet remarkably socially segregated Such contradictions are laid bare in Sicherheit (2017), a video installation at Göteborgs Konsthall by Ellen Nyman, Corina Oprea and Saskia Holmkvist, which shows refugees living in accommodation directly adjacent to a site of Sweden’s immense weapon industry Combining vox populi with testimony from asylum seekers, the work illustrates how the benevolence and tolerance frequently associated with Swedish society exist alongside the simultaneous and active production of crisis elsewhere in the world   One of a three-part video installation at Röda Sten, Stone Wall Nation (2014) is a cinematic short by Norwegian artist Sille Storihle, in which an actor re-performs an interview with the gay rights activist Don Jackson, originally conducted in 1986 Back in 1970, Johnson had