Anawana Haloba: From This Darkness I Shall Grow / Hanni Kamaly: and yet what remains of former times

Anawana Haloba: From This Darkness I Shall Grow
Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present Anawana Haloba as the Festival Exhibition artist 2026. The exhibition is curated and produced by Bergen Kunsthall and has run in parallel with the Bergen International Festival since the festival's inception in 1953.

The title From This Darkness I Shall Grow is inspired by the universe of Aboriginal Australian poet and filmmaker Romaine Moreton, pointing to a transformative movement from oppression into a space of agency. The exhibition is anchored in the reading of female craft traditions and polyphonic rituals as active forms of resistance. In the ceremonial practices of Tonga culture, multiple voices form a dense, collective sound structure built through repetition and call-and-response, in which a leader sings a phrase that the group responds to. Through improvisation and shifts in rhythm and expression, the soundscape gradually evolves in complexity. This layered polyphony can be experienced as a rite of passage or an open channel to a spirit world, where connections between the living and the dead can emerge.

Through exploring the patterns, materials, and methods of Tonga culture, the exhibition enters into a long-standing dialogue Haloba maintains with the late textile artist Hannah Ryggen, in which resilience and the visibility of oppression are central. Body, history, and collective memory are woven together through sound, text, and movement, creating a resonance across time and experience.

Curated by Silja Leifsdottir and Kjersti Solbakken.

Anawana Haloba was born in Livingstone, Zambia, and lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. Haloba was recently featured in the solo exhibition I Want to Tell You Something at the National Museum in Oslo, participated in the Berlin Biennale 2025, and was recently nominated for the Lorck Schive Art Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize.

Also opening
Hanni Kamaly: and yet what remains of former times
Hanni Kamaly works mainly with sculpture, video and performance, examining how notions of the Other are generated and maintained through language, images and historical structures.

The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall marks Kamaly's first solo exhibition in Norway. Its title, "and what remains of former times", is drawn from a poem by Aimé Césaire and emerges from a close artistic dialogue and personal collaboration earlier in Kamaly's career.

The exhibition examines the portrait. Not as a genre, but as a fundamental impulse: the human need to create images of others. With references to photography and sculpture as a historical and colonial tool, Kamaly explores how such forms of representation both produce and limit an understanding of the human.

However, none of the works are portraits in the traditional sense. Rather, they point to the absence of what they seemingly attempt to represent: hints of the body and its presence without actually depicting it—as a form of perceptual reflex where you project and read the figurative into materials and structures, even when it is not present.

Alongside a video work, the exhibition includes sculptures composed of steel and industrial elements. The works can be read as parts of a fragmented monument, where each element relates to the question of how life can—and cannot—be represented truthfully. They reflect a recurring concern: dehumanisation and the reduction of people into types, objects, or categories. Here, the human emerges as something unstable and continually negotiated.

Hanni Kamaly (b. 1988, Norway) lives and works in Malmö, Sweden. Kamaly's work has been exhibited internationally at, among others, Malmö Konsthall, the Sharjah Biennial (15th edition), the São Paulo Art Biennial (34th edition), and the Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art.  

Curated by Silja Leifsdottir.

Events
Opening: May 28, 1–4pm
Opening party: May 28, 10pm–1:00am, with DJ Hawa
Plattform: Artist talk with Anawana Haloba and Trond Lossius: May 30, 2–3:30pm
Plattform: Dr Memory Biwa: September 5, 2–3:30pm

Additional events:

Plattform: Elvira Dyangani Ose in conversation
Date tbc
In English

Workshop: Zine-making with Hanni Kamaly
Date tbc
In English