Stavanger Secession 2026 – To Live and Think Like Pigs takes the pig as its point of departure: the animal endowed with a refined sense of smell but also the insult; the vilified mammal; the cyborg body genetically modified by globalized agro-industry; and the cartoon figure with synthetic pink skin. The pig is a world-being, carrying a truth not only about the obscuring power of modernity and its violence, but also about humanity’s capacity to inscribe its most unbearable traits into the bodies of others: greed, gluttony, impurity, excess, and filth. To live and think like pigs is to exist at the intersection of industrial automation, the mass management of bodies, the comfort of anthropocentrism, and the process through which the other is rendered abject. For the third year in a row, the main exhibition of Stavanger Secession returns to Ølhallene at Tou Scene and will explore the following sentiments through a selection of video, installation, sculpture, literature and drawing by Norwegian and international artists, architects, authors and filmmakers.

Consensus

This edition takes its title from the eponymous book by Gilles Châtelet. A mathematician, philosopher, and polemicist, Châtelet describes the cognitive livestock that the average Western citizen has become at the dawn of market democracies—satiated by comfort, abundance, and cathodic 24/7 entertainment. He traces the slow “putrefaction of libertarian optimism” (1) in the 1960s into the “libertarian cynicism” (1) of the 1990s. The latter rapidly “became the close auxiliary of the liberal Counter-Reformation, pushing the West toward forms of techno-populism” (1). Hardly could one be more clear-sighted, as the alliance between the Silicon Valley elite and the extreme right wing is rapidly intensifying on the other side of the Atlantic. To put it in his words: “To have moved from cannon fodder to consensus flesh and to informational paste is certainly a ‘progress.’ But these fleshes spoil quickly: consensual raw material is essentially putrescible and turns into a populist unanimity of silent majorities, which is never innocent.”(1) Minds resemble bodies, soaped and motorized. They obey a culture of usefulness and common sense, both notions serving as vectors of a premium mediocrity. For the promise of consensus, conceived as an end in itself, reveals modernity’s obsession with uniformity and purity, and thus a hatred of ambiguity and otherness.

Shame

Shame is one of the most powerful feelings. The shame of being human, confronted with our moral vulgarity. Shame is the human mask we put on when we abjure our animality. “Today, as though clinging to what is essential, we tenaciously hold onto the dissimilarities that set us apart from the animal. Anything that recalls the animality persisting within us unfailingly appalls us and, like a prohibition, makes us recoil in horror.”(2) In contrast to the men of the Reindeer Age who, cladding themselves with the prestige of the beast, almost always concealed their features behind an animal mask whenever they depicted themselves, human beings were born by substituting this mask with the profane one of the homo faber. “And there is no way to escape the ignoble but to play the part of the animal (to growl, burrow, snigger, distort ourselves): thought itself is sometimes closer to an animal that dies than to a living, even democratic, human being.”(3)

Power

Porcile by Pier Paolo Pasolini tells the tragic story of the son of a wealthy Italian postwar industrialist who refuses to follow the path of his father or to join the progressive May ’68 protests embodied by his girlfriend. “The film can be described as a film about the impossibility of escaping sovereign forms of power in advanced capitalist society. This impossibility materializes in Julian’s incapacity to enter history either on the side of the fathers or on that of the students’ protests. Instead of demonstrating with the students or conforming to his father’s will, Julian decides not to undertake either of these possibilities. He rather prefers to disappear into the pigsty located in the forest of his father’s villa, performing the unsayable act of having sex with the pigs.”(4) The pig is an abject fantasy. Julian not only refuses what is presented to him but reconciles himself with something unspeakable, unimaginable, and incorruptible by capitalist society, whether liberal or reactionary. The pig, normally the object of automated death, becomes the symbol of a negative epiphany and the inverted emblem of freedom.

To grasp the oddity of this claim, one must recall the indelible link between the pig and the modern worker contained in the evolution of the modern slaughterhouse into the factory. As Henry Ford noted, the Chicago slaughterhouse was the first moving line ever installed. In that regard “Animals, as living beings, were largely irregular and messy… In order to make sure the animals were processed correctly, a large number of workers were required. But the workers, as living beings as well, were largely irregular and messy. You have on the one hand a huge series of technological innovations: the overhead drag line, the conveyor belt, automatic shifters, etc.; and on the other hand, you have to use these workers that are a friction to the capitalist desire for speed and control. The companies didn’t just need hogs to submit; they needed to figure out how to make the workers submit as well.”(5)

1- Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies. Trans. Robin Mackay. London: Urbanomic / MIT Press, 2020.

2- Georges Bataille, “The Representation of Man: Man Clad in the Glory of the Beast,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl (with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp. 83–102

3- Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? Trans. Graham Burchell and Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 108.

4- Filippo Trentin, Pasolini’s Anti-Relationality: Porcile and the Negative Turn in Queer Theory.

5- V. Stănescu, Slaughterhouse capitalism: Animal resistance, effeminate rice eaters, and solidarity as the basis for animal liberation, 2025

Rebecca Ackroyd, artist (b. 1987, United Kingdom)

Theo Deutinger, architect, author and curator (b. 1971, Austria)

Carsten Höller, artist (b. 1961, Belgium)

Sebastian Jefford, artist (b. 1990, United Kingdom)

Steffen Jørgensen, artist (b. 1983, Denmark)

Roald Kyllingstad, artist (b. 1942, Norway)

Ken Lum, artist (b. 1956, Canada)

Kristoffer Myskja, artist (b. 1985, Norway)

Ang Siew Ching, artist and filmmaker (b. Singapore)

Deborah Stratman, artist and filmmaker (b. 1967, USA)

Rosemarie Trockel, artist (b. 1952, Germany)

Hanne Tyrmi, artist (b. 1954, Norway)

Xu Zhen, artist (b. 1977, China)