Fall–winter 2025 program

Spanning science fiction, body horror, material and emotional supply chains, and the political semantics of language, Kunsthall Trondheim presents a seasonal suite of solo exhibitions that lean on art to read the present moment. From the personal and visceral to the global and systemic, each presentation offers unique storytelling perspectives on how past histories and their frictions shape contemporary forms. 

From September 25 to October 12, 2025

American Artist: The Monophobic Response
How do imagined futures shape today's realities? In The Monophobic Response, American Artist presents a two-channel film installation reimagining a pivotal 1936 rocket engine test that launched the U.S. space program. The exhibition does not historically reenact, but instead explores the spiritual and political motivations behind contemporary desires to abandon Earth by opening an alternative history inspired by Octavia E. Butler's 1993 novel Parable of the Sower. Enacted with actors playing Butler's protagonists, and filmed in the Mojave Desert with an actual rocket test fire, the film draws haunting parallels between Butler's prescient visions and today's actualities—asking whether our cosmic ambitions can transcend the colonial logics of extraction and escape, or whether we are destined to carry the patterns of Earth's destruction to the stars.

Madeleine Andersson: 10K VIRGIN BRAINS
In an era where artificial intelligence increasingly shapes our world, what distinguishes genuine intelligence from its absence? Andersson's 10K VIRGIN BRAINS confronts this question through thousands of white plastic containers that occupy Kunsthall Trondheim, mirroring The Brain Collection at the University of Southern Denmark—a repository of over 9,479 brains extracted from patients predominantly diagnosed with mental illnesses.

These containers form an eerie labyrinthine installation throughout the Kunsthall's sublevel basement galleries, inhabited by animated lab gloves that reach into the space like disembodied hands emerging through walls. Within these haunted corridors, visitors repeatedly encounter fragments of a video essay distributed across multiple screens, where the artist weaves together medical documentation with contemporary media artifacts from horror's collective unconscious. The work deconstructs and parodies the supposed objectivity of scientific inquiry into consciousness, the ethics of medical experimentation, and the very nature of life itself.

10K VIRGIN BRAINS was developed with O-Overgaden in Copenhagen and Index in Stockholm.

From October 30, 2025–January 25, 2026

Céline Mathieu: Lån
How do the intertwined chains of material supply and human intimacy shape our everyday experiences? Céline Mathieu's first Scandinavian institutional exhibition stems from her research project, "Conditions for Raw Materials", an ongoing investigation into the circulation of thoughts and materials in exhibitions. In Lån ("loan"), Mathieu navigates the conflation of material flows, value creation, artistic labor, and emotional attachment, employing a "soft" institutional critique laced with personal narrative. Organized around bespoke comfort objects, reclaimed materials, and a piece of primary Norwegian aluminum, the exhibition evokes a richly relational network as vulnerable to collapse as any system, yet representing human sustenance in its most elemental forms.

Hanne Lippard: All the same bright
How does multilingual culture foster new forms of understanding? In All the same bright, Lippard centers a sound installation around a monolithic stele sculpture that functions as a contemporary Rosetta Stone, anchoring the gallery space while emitting a low, continuous drone. Analogous to ancient stone pillars that marked territory or honored gods, this architectural puzzle serves as the entry point for durational audio compositions that play on multiple speakers throughout the space, mapping our translingual, contemporary experience through carefully orchestrated fragments of English and Norwegian speech. Developed through extensive studio engineering, these layered cadences fill the gallery with thick, overlapping language. Lippard's dense sonic landscape examines how productive misunderstandings and other verbal gaps can create expanded possibilities for meaningful connection across boundaries.

Adam Kleinman and Joe Rowley curate this season.

Kunsthall Trondheim would like to thank the kind souls who contribute to this program, including the in-house team, the participating artists and their teams, as well as our generous supporters who make this season possible. Please stay tuned for more information about each exhibition.