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.
Ken Lum, Hurry!, 2026, Yawning Man, 2026. Courtesy of the artist and Magenta Plains Gallery, New York
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.
Sandra Vaka, Thirsty, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.
Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Gardar Eide Einarsson, “Flames Roar”, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and NILS STÆRK.
Matias Kill, A-Historical Now Choir, 2025. Courtesy of the artist
Per Dybvig, Dog barking, telephone rings, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Galleri Opdahl
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.
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
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.
Billboard
Untitled, 2025
Wade Guyton
Mon-Sun: 24/24
Since the early 2000s, Wade Guyton has examined the material conditions of digital image production by misusing the inkjet printer as a painterly device. Feeding canvas directly through the machine, he embraces glitches, misregistrations, and mechanical breakdowns as compositional tools rather than errors. These disruptions expose the unstable infrastructure behind seemingly seamless digital images, shifting attention from representation to process. For Stavanger Secession, Guyton presents a series of large-scale panels installed across an exterior surface, forming a vivid chromatic envelope. Oscillating between control and accident, the works transform technological failure into a generative aesthetic, where automation and authorship remain deliberately unresolved.
This project is supported by Smart Hotel
Wade Guyton, Untitled, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
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.
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.
Appearing as an insert within Stavanger Aftenblad printed issue, the project adopts the familiar format of a pullout poster while quietly unsettling the routines of daily reading. The image reproduces a closed-caption screengrab stating “Flames Roar”, detached from any accompanying visuals. Deprived of context, the phrase hovers between report and metaphor, prompting readers to imagine events that remain unseen yet insistently present. Circulating through the newspaper rather than the gallery, the work uses mass distribution as its medium, allowing meaning to emerge in passing encounters and reflecting on how information, anxiety, and interpretation are mediated through contemporary news culture.
This project is supported by Stavanger Aftenblad
Gardar Eide Einarsson, “Flames Roar”, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and NILS STÆRK.
Digital Screens
Dog barking, telephone rings, 2025
Per Dybvig
Mon-Sun: 3:00-6:00
Per Dybvig’s latest animated short merges his signature dark humor with a lineage stretching from Norwegian satire to the grand tradition of J.J. Grandville’s anthropomorphic art. Infusing grotesque elegance into his characters, Dybvig channels a caricatural legacy where animal forms mirror the basest facets of human morality. The film is made through a direct, improvised process, each line drawn without preparation, with scenes appearing in the same sequence they were made. No sound accompanies the film—only written sound effects and spontaneous decisions.
This project is supported by JCDecaux
Per Dybvig, Dog barking, telephone rings, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Galleri Opdahl
Installation
A-Historical Now Choir, 2025
Matias Kill
Mon-Fri: 10:00-15:00
Matias Kiil’s A Historical Now Choir transforms the maintenance records of Oslo Cathedral’s clock tower into an oscillating, accidental symphony. Drawing on Gustave Metzger’s notion of art staging accidents, Kiil’s installation stages time itself as a score of mishaps, with five cuckoo clocks performing in discord. The piece echoes the 14th-century marriage of church bells and mechanical clocks—symbols of civilization’s conquest over time. But today, as chrono-capitalism internalizes the rhythm of productivity, Kiil’s work exposes the comic origins of our obsession with precision, productivity, and the mechanization of daily rhythm. Five Cuckoo Clocks invites us to reflect on the control and management of the body through the political and economic use of time.
This project is supported by SpareBank 1 SR-Bank
Matias Kill, A-Historical Now Choir, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Jone Kvie’s Tivoli is a vivid red meteor, typically installed as if it has crashed into a building. For Stavanger Secession 2024, however, it appears displaced, resting on a parking lot as though briefly lost. The work fuses catastrophe with spectacle: the violent image of impact becomes strangely playful, recalling amusement parks and blockbuster cinema. Kvie points to our appetite for danger at a distance, and to how contemporary entertainment turns accidents into thrilling, consumable experiences in modern culture today.
Jone Kvie, Tivoli, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.