Monday Begins on Saturday

Monday Begins on Saturday is the title of a fantasy novel from the 1960s about a magical research institute in the Soviet Union, written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It is also the title of the first edition of Bergen Assembly (www.bergenassembly.no), a new triennial of contemporary art. The project—which takes the form of an exhibition and this book—imagines a contemporary rewriting of the novel as an archipelago of fictitious research institutes. Through an aggregate narrative of essays, works of fiction, artworks, heterogeneous research materials, and curatorial notes, it delves into the idea that contemporary “artistic research” may be the place where the dialectical materialist magic of Monday Begins on Saturday has its afterlife.