By combining captivating musical performance with fantastical sculpture, Tori Wrånes has earned an international reputation. Next year, she will represent Norway in the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In other words, Wrånes is a natural choice for this year’s Bergen International Festival Exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall. Her exhibition, Moon Bag, is introduced with a poster featuring a ballpoint pen sketch of a mouse leaning forward on a scooter and wearing a crescent-shaped bag across its chest. In the world of crypto finance, a “moon bag” refers to the part of one’s portfolio that is left untouched – coins clung to in the hope and belief that they will eventually pay off. It is a similarly long-term collection of investments, or values, in a more metaphorical sense, that Wrånes presents in her Festival Exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall.
The mouse from the poster, in the form of an animatronic sculpture, whizzes along the exhibition’s walls on an electric scooter, occasionally letting out squeals of delight. For the occasion of Wrånes’ show, the fourth and smallest room of the kunsthalle has been tucked away. Across the remaining three galleries, two massive pine oars, stained red, stretch through the space, piercing the walls. With no visible blades, their handles at first resemble slender rolling pins seemingly raised mid-swing like improvised weapons ready to strike an unwelcome guest. The doorways between the rooms have been turned into cartoonish mouse holes in true Hanna-Barbera style, and apart from the ceiling, every surface is carpeted. The floor and lower sections of the walls are covered in blue whilst the upper sections closer to the ceiling are a light beige. Both carpeted areas feature marbled patterns in deeper tones: the blue carpet suggests the restless shimmer of the sea, while the veining in the pale textile evokes pungent cheese, yellowed marble, and a barren lunar landscape. During the artist talk two days after the opening, Wrånes declared the exhibition a drag show: “The space is the performer, and the carpet is drag!”
Scattered throughout the exhibition is a series of eight sculptures made from cement framed in steel. Embedded in the cement are blue mussel shells, alternating between their inner and outer sides facing up (Mussels 1–8, all works, 2025). The shells form concave and convex droplets, arranged like cartoonish bursts of tears. Two of the sculptures resemble the light boxes radiologists use to examine X-rays; two others recall saloon doors. The remaining ones look like large bags of water suspended from the walls and slumping into the room. This visual language is reiterated in a second series of sculptures, in which the steel frames instead hold bulbous growths of epoxy, foam, and fabric (River 1–14).
The exhibition space is enveloped in a dynamic soundscape emitted through nearly two hundred speakers (Moon Bag Sound). Throughout the galleries, the music of conch shells and echoes of Wrånes’s distinctive, troll-like vocal idiom resound, shimmer, and swoosh. At times, the voice is pitched down into sluggish rumbles like yearning utterances from the mysterious giants encountered in two groups of spectacular sculptures positioned at opposite ends of the exhibition (Mothers and Child I and II).
Mothers and Child II hovers vertically above the ground, serving as a wilder, more unsettling reimagining of the artist’s 2018 sculpture Travelers, which is permanently installed in Ekebergparken Sculpture Park in Oslo. Here, two massive bodies with rough, outstretched fingers are dressed from head to toe in rather conventional outerwear tailored by Studio Wrånes. The giants are fused together in mid-flight, and where the lower figure’s head should have been, we instead encounter the crotch of the figure above. In place of a face, two birds resembling swans or geese protrude from the head of the upper body. These too are conjoined, sharing a single neck from which a smaller bird body suspended in a closed loop hangs like a pendant. The giants appear either to be ascending through the skylight or heading for a crash landing.
At the exhibition’s other end, we witness the result of an alternative reproductive process: two giant mothers kneel face to face. One wears a mustard-yellow corduroy jumpsuit; both are in trainers, with grey hoodies drawn tightly over their faces (Mothers and Child I). From one of the mother’s mouths, a twisting flute forcefully tunnels through the body of the other and emerges from her pelvis. Both skin and instrument have coarse surfaces of golden-brown and green-patinated bronze. At the end of the instrument, a headless baby with four outstretched hands lies on its back.
CAT’n DOG is a bronze sculpture of a cat and a puppy sharing a tail. Together, they form a classic pair of opposites: a yin to a yang. It is tempting to read the work as another thematic reflection on sexual politics and gender roles. These pets are the only figures in the exhibition rendered life-sized. The size ratio between them and me mirrors that between my body and the giants. In the smallest gallery, Wrånes invites her guests to take on the role of domesticated beasts. Near the wall that conceals the kunsthalle’s fourth room, a pulsing rhythm can be heard from the other side. Those willing to join in and play must get down on all fours to peer through a small mouse hole. There, a miniature party scene comes into view: a group of dancing mice, projected as holograms, groove to pounding beats in a dark club, safely out of reach of any curious or hostile cats and dogs (Night Life). If the pets are read as symbols of two genders, the mice on scooters and dance floors can be seen as representing something other – a deviation from the norm that disrupts the binary pairing.
Above a portal shaped like a mouse hole hang two hammers, each with a bow, all in bronze. Facing one another and fused at the head, they appear to kiss, sharing a single hammerhead (Sisters Wedding). The de-functionalisation of identical everyday objects through their joining recalls the counterproductive – and thus non-reproductive – knotted drainpipes in Elmgreen & Dragset’s series of sink and urinal sculptures (notably Gay Marriage, 2010). To turn paired identical objects into materialised symbols of same-sex coupling is a well-established queer artistic strategy, one that Wrånes employs in several works. On three pieces of linen, Wrånes has stitched outlines of empty plates, each surrounded by matching cutlery (Spoon, Spoon, and Spoon; Knife and Knife;and Fork and Fork). The forms are loose, approximate, and at times incomplete, yet still legible. Their material malleability points to a potential for change. Only up close does it become clear that threads in colours other than white have also been used. Fixed in place, yet less rigid than cast bronze, the string can be read both as a metaphor for queer relations, and for identities more broadly, as unstable constructions.
Amid the more tightly composed object groupings, a few delightfully overstuffed framed sculptures appear (Winter Holiday, Parade 1 and 2). These tactile, colour-drenched vulgarities don’t quite fit in – like sticky pick-and-mix sweets clinging to the lining of Wrånes’s moon bag. With improvisational playfulness and humour, her Festival Exhibition project unsettles simplified narrative frameworks. In keeping with this spirit of complexity, the interpretive space opened by the exhibition provides the viewer with few directives. Although certain points the artist likely intends to communicate may be lost as a result – particularly those concerning the threats and power structures imposed on mothers and sisters, especially those who are trans or queer (but also heterosexual cis women and others at risk) in Norway, the US, Palestine, and Sudan – there is something deeply satisfying about seeing her enigmatic fantasy shapes left unburdened by predetermined meaning. This year’s Festival Exhibition presents a masterful mid-career artist at the height of her many powers.
