September 11, 2026–February 7, 2027
Trondheim 7011
Norway
Hours: Thursday–Friday 2–6pm
Saturday–Sunday 12–4pm
Continuing our annual curatorial inquiry into the expanded semantic field of power (the Psychic, the Symbolic, Knowledge, Influence, Leverage, Force, Authority, and Resistance), Kunsthall Trondheim presents two further exhibitions and a discursive program. These bleed into our concurrent performance program within the same field, tangling the web of crossings that power generates or forecloses.
October 22, 2026–February 7, 2027
Isabelle Andriessen: THE BARREN
THE BARREN offers a site in which reanimated bodies, mutant animacies, and aberrant forms of becoming arise in a material opera. Populated by a series of newly commissioned automata, Andriessen's exhibition inhabits a liminal space between sculpture and performance, activated by disobedient entities whose steel carcasses perform their own requiem. Rooted in medieval rites of violence and torture devices that developed as practical and public means of dehumanization, this dark history continues to echo within necropolitics to this day—the politics of who is allowed to live, and who is left to die. The exhibition unfolds a world of unquiet matter in a condition of withheld generation: a choir of lamenting and resisting bodies marked by control, extraction, exhaustion, disposability, revolt, sterility, and failed renewal.
Mariella Otto:...in statues, still image
Reflecting levels of order, surveillance and stasis, Otto’s ...in statues, still image considers both the archive and the camera as apparatuses (or dispositifs), in the sense developed by the French philosopher Michel Foucault—systems through which knowledge is produced and power is exercised. The exhibition points back towards the “archival turn” of the 1990s, while simultaneously asking questions about the legacy of the record in a contemporary moment where misinformation demands evidence.
Working with video, sound and sculptural elements, Otto's installation centers on a montage drawn together using material filmed at two Portuguese archives, the Torre do Tombo National Archive and the National Archive of Moving Images. This footage is interlaced with voices gathered through interviews, descriptions of workflow and policy, and notes by philosophers and artists. A suggestive soundscape runs throughout, stemming from a coin spun on a glass table.
September 11–12, 2026
Jelsen Lee Innocent: Against Benevolent Hands: Debts, Inheritance, and Reparations
Organised by Black History Month Norway in collaboration with Kunsthall Trondheim, this two-day programme opens on September 11 with a screening of The Forgotten Occupation: Jim Crow Goes to Haiti (2023), a documentary by Alain Martin. Brunel Martin, the filmmaker's grandfather, came of age during Haiti's brutal occupation by US Marines, yet became a fierce advocate for the country that had destroyed it. A decade after Brunel's death, Martin writes him a letter trying to reconcile the contradictions. Hosted at Cinemateket Trondheim, the screening is followed by a Q&A with the filmmaker and artist Jelsen Lee Innocent.
On September 12, the programme continues at Kunsthall Trondheim with a conversation between writer and designer Alice Grandoit-Šutka, co-founder of Deem Journal, and cultural anthropologist Dubie Toa-Kwapong. The discussion explores debts, inheritance, and reparations alongside colonial legacies, memory, and Black futures, in dialogue with Martin's film and Jelsen Lee Innocent’s exhibition The World, The Flesh, and The Devil, on view at Kunsthall Trondheim until September 27, 2026.
This season is curated by Adam Kleinman and Joe Rowley; Tendai Angela Rokkness is the producer for Against Benevolent Hands: Debts, Inheritance, and Reparations, which is co-organized with Black History Month Norway.
THE BARREN is supported by: Mondriaanfonds, Kulturdirektoratet, Stichting Niemeijer Fonds, Stichting Stokroos, Cultuurfonds, and Gilles Hondius Foundation.
...in statues, still image is supported by: Kulturdirektoratet, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee, and Air 351.
Against Benevolent Hands: Debts, Inheritance, and Reparations is supported by: Kulturdirektoratet, Kulturrådet, Olso Kommune, Cinemteket Trondhiem.
Kunsthall Trondheim is supported by Kulturdirektoratet, Trondheim kommune, and Trøndelag fylkeskommune.
To learn more about these programs and our concurrent fall performance series, please visit our website. Thank you!
