Tony Cokes, He’s a pig (charade)!, 2026. Courtesy of the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Hoffman Donahue, Los Angeles and New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Ken Lum, Hurry!, Yawning Man, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains Gallery, New York.
Tony Cokes, He’s a pig (charade)!, 2026. Courtesy of the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Hoffman Donahue, Los Angeles and New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Tony Cokes, He’s a pig (charade)!, 2026. Courtesy of the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Hoffman Donahue, Los Angeles and New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Ken Lum, Shopkeeper Series, 2001. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains Gallery, New York.
Sandra Vaka, Thirsty, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.
The City Project is a program of artistic interventions throughout the city, commissioned specifically for each edition and presented year-round. The initiative brings art into public spaces and engages with daily life through local infrastructure. All the program is open to the public and free of charge.
For more information:
Stavanger Secession 2026 – Festival Guide
Billboard
Yawning Man, 2026
Hurry!, 2026
Ken Lum
Mon-Sun: 24/24
Ken Lum’s contribution to Stavanger Secession includes two billboards, a medium he has long used to occupy the uneasy space between advertising, confession, and public address. Mimicking the visual language of commercial display, Lum inserts statements that oscillate between humor and discomfort, personal revelation and social critique. These works anticipate the logic of the meme: terse, repeatable, and disarmingly direct, yet charged with questions of identity, class, and belonging. Installed in the urban fabric, the billboards become both mirror and interruption—an image that appears familiar, only to reveal the ideological scripts embedded in everyday visual culture.
Project in collaboration with Stavanger Kunstmuseum and supported by Marcus Thor.
Ken Lum, Hurry!, 2026, Yawning Man, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains Gallery, New York
Ken Lum’s Shopkeeper Series appears as a newspaper insert in Stavanger Aftenblad, extending his longstanding engagement with vernacular portraiture and the economies of everyday life. Combining staged photographs with matter-of-fact textual statements, the works hover between empathy and deadpan observation, revealing the social identities negotiated within small-scale commerce. Distributed through the newspaper, the project adopts the logic of mass circulation rather than the singular art object, meeting readers within habitual gestures of reading. Part documentary, part typology, and subtly humorous, the insert foregrounds the poetics of ordinary visibility while reflecting on labor, self-representation, and community exchange.
This project is supported by Stavanger Aftenblad.
Ken Lum, Shopkeeper Series, 2001. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains Gallery, New York.
Digital Screens
He’s a Pig (Charade), 2026
Tony Cokes
Mon-Sun: 24/24
Tony Cokes’s He’s a Pig (Charade) unfolds across Stavanger’s digital screens, inserting his signature text-based video work into the rhythms of urban display. Using bold color fields, timed language, and appropriated references, Cokes treats the screen as a site of critical address rather than advertisement. The work merges political analysis with the visual economy of commercial seduction, where information is condensed, repeatable, and publicly encountered in passing. Part agitation, part reflection, and attuned to the circulation of images in the age of feeds and loops, the project reframes the city’s media surfaces as spaces for dissent, irony, and social pastiche.
This project is supported by Stavanger Aftenblad.
Tony Cokes, He’s a pig (charade)! (2026) Courtesy the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Hoffman Donahue, Los Angeles and New York; Felix Gaudlitz, Vienna; and Electronic Arts Intermix, New York.
Public Sculpture
Thirsty, 2026
Sandra Vaka
Mon-Sun: 24/24
Slurp, suck, consume, collapse. Sandra Vaka presents Thirsty, a monumental site-specific sculpture that transforms a disposable plastic straw into a five-metre-high public artwork. Enlarged to an absurd scale, the petroleum-derived object becomes a fossil-like emblem of global consumption and its ecological aftermath. Installed along Stavanger’s harbour, the work enters into dialogue with the North Sea and the offshore infrastructures that define the region’s identity. Echoing the sculptural strategies of Claes Oldenburg, Vaka mobilises the everyday object to balance humour and unease, questioning how pleasure, habit, and environmental consequence remain tightly entangled in contemporary life.
The artist wishes to thank Stavanger Municipality, and extends a special thank you to Stavangerregionen Havn IKS for generously lending Stavanger Secession the pier. Particular gratitude goes to Marianne Skarbøvik and Ivar Heggheim for their invaluable support throughout the planning process, as well as to the artist’s father for driving her to numerous production sites during the research phase. The artist would also like to acknowledge the many skilled production partners who contributed over the past year to bring this sculpture to life: Niras, Nordic Steel, PROCON, NOT Varmforzinkning, NOT Pulverlakk, OSN Objektsikring, Bø Transport, and Ørland Transport.
Sandra Vaka, Thirsty, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.