At the beginning of the 20th century we saw a new world order take the stage – Modernism. This new paradigm sprang out of a vision of technology as a tool for transforming nature from a state of randomness and chaos to a state of orderliness, controllability and perfection. The dream of re-creating nature the way we deemed fit.

In other words, modernism isn’t just about purity, abstraction and exclusion within fields of practice in art or science. It also makes itself known through a variety of expressions in as different areas as rationalized ways of farming, industrial food processing, urban planning and population control. This logic, and ultimately politics, maintaining reduction and abstraction as goals, has had inconceivable world-wide – and world-transforming – consequences. Modernism has provided us with a range of new fields of knowledge, encompassing a multitude of ways of perceiving the world and ourselves.

But there is always the flip-side: Though modernism has created new insights, it has simultaneously led to enstrangement – as reduction with time can lead to isolation. The processes that support and shape our lives can’t be controlled from the top, they come into life from the bottom up. All activity on the micro level interact with and shape the macro level, that governs the world. A strict, modernist logic, will therefore carry a destructive impact on the environment, climate, biopolitics, cities, country-life and plurality in general, leading to destructive disorderliness.

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Meta.Morf biennale projects 2010:

The following blog entries are amongst other showing biennial projects as they are confirmed.

Supported by the City of Trondheim, Arts Council Norway, KORO.