At the dawn of the 2000s, French philosopher Paul Virilio imagined a Museum of Accidents. He defined it as follows: "To exhibit the accident. All accidents, from the most banal to the most tragic, from natural disasters to industrial and scientific catastrophes, but also the happy accident—from a stroke of luck to love at first sight. Exposing accidents so that we are no longer simply exposed to accidents." Stavanger Secession seeks to continue this inquiry, investigating the existential shift we are experiencing as we enter an era of continuous accidents.

The accident is the ghostwriter of advanced capitalism—the secret architecture holding together the fractured parts of our society. As humanity’s Promethean ambitions reach unprecedented heights, accidents emerge as revelatory moments—exposing our civilization’s eschatological obsession with acceleration. To borrow Hannah Arendt’s words: “Progress and catastrophe are the obverse and reverse sides of the same coin.” If museums have already seized the idea of progress, we will take its opposite: the accident.