'Pandemonium - Art in a Time of Creativity Fever': The Goteborg International Biennial

In John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost (1671), Pandemonium is the castle built by Lucifer and his band after they had been booted out of heaven. It is the base camp from which they plot against the ‘old order’. But it is also a platform from which they seek to launch the project of another creation, a new kind of world albeit a ‘devilish’ one.  Through ‘Pandemonium’, Milton reflects on the turbulence and topsy-turvy of civil war England. Was this only chaos and hurly burly? Or was it also the birth of the modern world, of modern values and experience? It ushered in Atlantic and European modernity and Enlightenment— and the promise of a variety of paradises and utopias to come.

The term, therefore, has both positive and negative connotations. From William Blake to Derek Jarman, from punk to pop bands and everyday ‘hubbub’ of street sound and speech, it has been used to explore chaos and disorder that is at the same time about the emergence of new worlds, alternative global modernities, other possibilities. The Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art is an occasion for artists, thinkers and writers to mull over the turbulence and turmoil that is today’s world. Is it only about a sense of hurly-burly, disorder and dismal confusion — of ‘sheer pandemonium’? Or is it also about transformation and creative emergence — the making of new worlds, possibilities and paradigms?

The Biennial takes place at several venues around Göteborg: Wim Botha will be exhibiting at Göteborgs Konsthall.

10 September - 13 November