Nora Adwan, Things Fall Apart, Young Artists’ Society (UKS), Oslo
How does time appear to a refugee? Do past, present, and future collapse into a single continuum for someone living with trauma? Things Fall Apart by Nora Adwan posed stark existential questions. Brutal, aesthetically beautiful, and total in the sense that the entire UKS space, a former theatre, was brought into play from floor to ceiling, wall to wall. Textiles, projections, sound, screen prints, and, not least, shadow play filled the room. Climbing the stairs to the second floor and following the mezzanine in the half-light, coming close to a latticework structure that I would later learn is called a mashrabiyya, observing the intricate pattern and watching my own silhouette morph into the shadow play that filled the space while a woman’s voice spoke of mothers’ amputated hands, was an absolutely necessary experience.
Damla Kilickiran, Semantically Threaded, Like Prayers, Hulias, Oslo
Situated underground, Hulias is like a crypt with vaulted ceilings and terracotta tiles. The gallery’s bare concrete walls provided a perfect setting for Damla Kilickiran’s works. In my previous encounters with Kilickiran’s practice, I have sensed something profoundly human in the work, as if abstract, physical remnants of a civilisation had been transformed into a language, spoken everywhere for those willing to listen. This time, what I encountered appeared as casts left behind from something that has already happened, or perhaps is unfolding this very moment – displaced, moulded, cut out, and intensely present.
Lorck Schive Art Prize 2025, Trondheim Art Museum, Trondheim
Art prizes are difficult to relate to, not least because most people would agree that art is not a competitive sport. Since “the Lorck,” as some refer to it, has operated with an upper age limit of 50, the nominees have, from the beginning, tended to belong to roughly the same generation – a condition that has not always served either the exhibition or the prize itself particularly well. This year, however, it felt as if something had changed. The shortlisted artists, Marthe Ramm Fortun, Silje Linge Haaland, Anawana Haloba, and Toril Johannesen, complemented one another in their various expressions of loss, sorrow, and a longing for belonging and solidarity in a collapsing world. It was quite moving to walk through the different exhibition spaces before accompanying Ramm Fortun outside to confront Nidaros Cathedral in the darkness of autumn. [The exhibition runs through 4 January 2026.]
– Lotte Konow Lund is an artist and professor at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She has exhibited at a number of Norwegian institutions and museums, including the Vigeland Museum in Oslo, Lillehammer Art Museum, Henie Onstad Art Center in Bærum, Kunsthall Trondheim, and Kode in Bergen. Konow Lund is the author of the books Om kunst: 25 kunstnersamtaler (On Art: 25 Artist Talks, Forlaget Oktober, 2021) and Dagbøkene 2014–2016 (The Diaries, Teknisk Industri, 2016).
Translated from Norwegian
For this year’s contributions to the Advent Calendar, see here.
