Seven times the color of the sun

Artists: Hilde Hauan Johnsen, Saodat Ismailova, Olof Marsja, Ina Otzko, Angelo Plessas, Alf Magne Salo

Curated by Adriana Alves and Vanina Saracino

North Norwegian Art Centre is pleased to announce Seven times the color of the sun. The exhibition is the second chapter of Solar Kin, a long-term curatorial project that follows artistic explorations of post-carbon imaginaries in the context of the global transition from fossil fuels to renewables, particularly solar energy.

The exhibition takes as its point of departure a Mayan creation myth: after several unsuccessful attempts to craft humans from different materials, the gods shaped them from sunlight. The beings that emerged were described as “seven times the colour of the sun”. Radiant, skilled, and powerful, they placed themselves above other species and natural processes, as if the very light that gave them form had become a source of blindness rather than vision. The project draws on this image to consider humanity’s place and responsibility today.

The first chapter, I converse with fire, traced an arc from sacred ancestral fires to the burning of fossil fuels, with works by Rosa Barba, Tanya Busse, Marja Helander, Markus Li Stensrud, and NORDTING. Guided by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää’s vision of solar kinship, it approached fire as a presence rather than a tool. Within this register, ignition and restraint became methods for rereading modernity’s promises, and the sites shaped by extraction, militarisation, and tourism. 

The second chapter turns toward a broader understanding of energy, beyond its role as a productive force, and into an essence that traverses all beings and matter, from the vast reach of solar radiation to the minute scales of matter. It approaches the solar not only as material resource, but also as a symbolic, affective, and spiritual dimension of life in an era increasingly shaped by technological mediation, fractures, and dissonances.

Drawing from Indigenous epistemologies and Norwegian folklore, as well as Zoroastrian cosmologies and Greek mythology, the exhibition brings together artists who engage these inheritances in relation to the imperatives of the present and the horizons of what is to come. Their works weave ancestral knowledge with contemporary technologies, spiritualities, and material practices, foregrounding energy as relational, vital, and alive. In doing so, the exhibition opens a space for imagining non-extractive, interdependent ways of inhabiting the world.

Seven times the color of the sun presents, for the first time in a public exhibition, the series De fire årstider (The four seasons, 1987) by Sámi artist Alf Magne Salo (1959–2013), originally commissioned for the Center for Northern Peoples in Manndalen. Also premiering are Angelo Plessas’ quilts Sole Solaris (2025) and Rainbow Unit Ceremony (2025), conceived by the artist as the show’s opening act.