Newsletter MAY '26

Heia,

As prophesized in last month’s post, here are some more updates about what’s going on. Who’d have thunk? It includes an invitation to the opening of Vårutstillingen tomorrow at Fotogalleriet in Oslo, and the artists are wonderful so don’t miss it. I’m also very happy to present a couple of recommendations by the brilliant filmmaker, artist and member of the Camelia Committee Mira Adoumier.

As always: Any and all responses are welcome through replies to this mail. And you can opt out of receiving them at the bottom.

Hoping everyone had a lovely 1st of May, without undue labour 🚩🚩 Wishing you all the opportunity to sit by a tree in peace or in good company sometime this summer! <3

New solo performance at Kunstdøgn in Stavanger

Stavanger city has a jubilee this year, and part of their commemoration includes Kunstdøgn, 24 hours of art with a particular focus on performance and intervention works. The extensive programme is curated by Koffi & Højgaard and will happen between 12PM the 6th and 12PM the 7th of June. If you happen to be in Stavanger this weekend, do come outside and see what’s going on.

I’m taking part with a new solo performance work for the occasion! This will be made in collaboration with artists Grusha Pankert and Vilde Jensen. More info will soon be added to the link below.

The line-up of the day includes, but is not limited to: Nils Bech, Ahmed Umar, Rita Marhaug, Nicolai Risbjerg, Cooking Therapy, Anne Marte Overaa, Simin Stine Ramezanali, Siri Borge, Becoming Species and Veslemøy Flotve.

Dates: 06-07 June
More info: https://www.stavanger.kommune.no/kultur-og-fritid/kultur/kunst-i-offentlige-rom2/der-vi-motes---kunst-i-uterom2/kunstdogn/#offisiell-pning-av-kunsthall-stavanger-sin-nye-hage-og-pning-av-kunstd-gn

VÅRUTSTILLINGEN 2026 - Opening tomorrow

Welcome to the opening of the 45th edition of Vårtustillingen, which is in its 50th anniversary this year! I’ve been part of the jury the previous year and this one, along with Åsne Eldøy and Trine Stephensen. This time around I’m acting as jury leader and curating the exhibition at Fotogalleriet, which features a wonderful bouquet of works by artists working with lens-based media.

At the opening, there will be speeches, celebration and announcing the winner of the BKH Photo Award. More info on the latter here: https://kunstfond.no/kunstpriser#fotokunstprisen-fra-bkh

This year’s participating artists, along with info about the works:

Henrik Follesø Egeland
Emma Lomell
Joanna Chia-yu Lin
Johanne Nyborg
Greg Pope
Sakib Saboor
Dan Skjæveland
Christian Tunge
Jostein Venås

Dates: 22 May - 28 June
More info: https://www.fffotografer.no/varutstillingen

Residency at BEK - Bergen senter for elektronisk kunst

Earlier this month, I spent some time in the video studio at BEK in Bergen. This allowed for some time to start developing a new process with video, in which I’m inspired by the works of Dani and Sheila ReStack. Combing through my own material from the last few years and combining with archival video footage, graphic collages, voice-overs in multiple languages… Exploring something revolving around domesticity, queerness as the everyday ritual, intimacy, ferality, animals, landscapes and the textures of video formats. This way of making stuff is a continuation of previous works I’ve done, like the docufiction essay ‘History is a Black Circle’ and the installation “I Think We’ve Waited Long Enough”.

Thank you to Kaeto Sweeney and the rest of the BEK team for being a great bunch of people to hang out with, along with Mortimer and Grusha, who happened to be at BEK in overlapping periods!

More about BEK: https://bek.no/en/

MIRA ADOUMIER recommends!

In this column, I invite someone I know to make a recommendation. It can be anything really, whether a piece of media, an experience or something else entirely. This time, we’re joined by Mira Adoumier:

^{Mira Adoumier (b. 1985, New York) is a filmmaker, visual artist, and curator based in Oslo. Her work explores landscapes marked by displacement, peripheral histories, and layered temporalities, moving between essay film, fiction, and installation. Drawing on her experience of exile and her background in cinema, philosophy, biology, and psychology, she works with image, text, voice, and sound to create fragmentary, poetic forms that unsettle linear narratives and dominant ways of seeing. She is a member of The Camelia Committee with Carine Doumit and Nour Ouayda, and is a guest lecturer at Kunstfilmskolen i Kabelvåg. Alongside her artistic practice, she curates film programs for art institutions and festivals and works as a cinematographer on artists’ films.}

Mira:

"I would like to recommend the book  Mistaken Identity: Mass Movements and Racial Ideology by Asad Haidar. Published in 2018, the book feels, if anything, even more urgent now. Haider returns to the Black radical tradition to think through the impasses of contemporary identity politics, not in order to dismiss identity, but to ask what happens when it becomes detached from collective struggle, solidarity, and material transformation. At a moment when political debate is so often reduced to moral positioning, individualized injury, or increasingly rigid camps of belonging, Mistaken Identity insists on how do we build politics that begin from particular histories of oppression without ending there? Haider passed away in December 2025 at only 38. Reading the book now also feels like returning to the work of a thinker whose clarity, and serious engagement with Marxist theory is sorely needed amidst the dead-end identity politics driven discussions, be it in the art or political arenas.

My second recommendation is Rhayne Vermette’s Levers (2025). Vermette’s films have a way of feeling both hand-built and cosmological, and Levers seems to expand that sensibility into a strange, grief-struck vision: one day, the sun does not rise, and across this disturbance, the lives of three characters begin to loosen from ordinary time. Shot over the course of a year on broken Bolex cameras, with in-camera effects and tactile image-making, the film appears to hover somewhere between fable, landscape film, and quiet apocalypse. And I’m a sucker for apocalypses! ”

All the best.

a queer and riotous pride month
azaadi wishes for
Palestine, Sudan, Iran, Congo, Kashmir, Ukraine, Rojava
and all the peoples globally
fighting colonialism, fascism or imperialism