From Grenfell Tower to the clothing factory fires of Gujarat, the wildfires of Sicily to those in California or New South Wales, the great fires of the past decade have all seemed to reveal something about the place that they destroyed. Caused by different circumstances, and burning on distant parts of the planet, what the fires share is this quality of revelation: each one shed light on the slower but relentless systems that made its devastation possible. You don’t need to contemplate the geopolitical causes of disaster, though, to know that fire compels attention. Its mesmerizing quality is everywhere in this group exhibition, shown over two floors in a former fire station, that places nineteen local civic relics and documents beside twenty-six international contemporary and modern works. Lungiswa Gqunta’s Feet Under Fire (2017) plays hypnotically slow video footage of bare feet, with scrubbing brushes strapped onto them, swinging over a rubble of charcoal and matches. Noémie Goudal’s film Below the Deep South (2021) sees flames licking and consuming a tropical forest, set to a soundtrack of distant bird calls. In John Gerrard’s CGI Flare (Oceania) (2022) a flag of pure flame waves over an unending stretch of water. In Tell …

At first glance, I thought Jes Fan’s iridescent installation Mother of Pearl 東方之珠 (2021) was simply a set of surrealist silk scarves strung up between aluminum poles. In the mostly abstract, brightly colored close-up images of oyster shells’ undersides I saw the stage set for a (deliciously) campy eco-political sex show. The images printed onto the fabric document a process by which the artist had four Chinese characters implanted into a variant of pearl oysters native to Hong Kong; the oysters responded to the implants the way they respond to sand, coating the intruder in mother-of-pearl. Each of the four characters translates to a word that, taken together, form a colonial nickname for Hong Kong: Pearl of the East. So, yes, a brilliant eco-political sex show starring the oyster slathering layers of nacre and wet dichroic substrate over the legacy of British colonialism. Fan’s work sets the tone for “Sex Ecologies,” a group show curated by Katja Aglert and Stefanie Hessler, with Prerna Bishnoi, Carl Martin Faurby, Kaja Grefslie Waagen, and Katrine Elise Pedersen, that presents nine newly commissioned works spanning both floors of Kunsthall Trondheim. Asking playful but biting questions about contamination and desire, the works on view critique …