13.06.25 – 13.07.25

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Tou Scene, Ølhallene
Thursday–Friday 13:00–17:00
Saturday–Sunday 12:00–16:00

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Galleri Opdahl
Tuesday–Friday 11:00–16:00
Saturday 11:00–15:00

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Norwegian Petroleum Museum
Monday–Saturday 10:00–16:00
Sunday 10:00–18:00

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“On his journey, as he was nearing Damascus, a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’

-Acts 9:3–6, New Testament, 80–90 AD

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We no longer crash into accidents. We float inside them. The 2025 edition of Stavanger Secession sets its sights on the accident, not as misfortune but as worldview: a revelatory cut in the tissue of modernity. In an age defined by rupture—ecological, technological, systemic—the accident is no longer a deviation. It is a structure.

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Drawing from Paul Virilio’s unfinished Museum of Accidents, the curatorial research for Stavanger Secession 2025 explores the accident as a form of knowledge: political, erotic, architectural, and philosophical. Virilio warned of a reality in which “we no longer live in real time or real space. We dwell in accidental space.” That time is now and this project seeks to dwell there lucidly.

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Following Aristotle’s distinction between substans (that which stands) and accidens (that which falls), we ask: what becomes visible when a system falters? What hidden orders emerge in the crash? Today, even our risk management is crashing. The insurance model, the risk assessment form, the predictive algorithm—these are rituals to appease a reality that is no longer linear, but cascading. The stock market collapses over a fat finger. A zoonosis leaps from jungle to jetstream. We swipe left and fall in love. Or don’t.

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Every accident is a mirror, and often a prophecy. As Jules Verne wrote in Dramas in the Air (1874), “Flying is a controlled suicide.” His character climbs into a hot-air balloon to tell stories of industrial disasters at altitude, before attempting to stage one himself. Progress is never clean. Every invention arrives with a twin: a glitch, a shadow, a submerged cost.

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In Crash (1973), J.G. Ballard outlines this theology with clinical clarity: “The car crash is a fertilizing rather than a destructive event... a liberation of sexual energy, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with the dreams of the living.” For Ballard, the crash is not just a failure of the machine—it is a cosmology. A death drive coded into chrome. Technology, libido, trauma: fused in a loop.

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This exhibition thinks through accidents not to moralize, but to analyze. We are not interested in the moment something breaks—we are interested in what becomes thinkable because it breaks. From minor glitches to epochal collapses, the accident opens space: between what we know and what we now must learn. From the collapse of architectural certainties to the algorithmic hallucinations of finance or surveillance, accidents don’t just disrupt—they unmask.

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The integral accident is not one that occurs despite technology, but because of it—and that multiplies. Stavanger Secession 2025 follows this thread across vectors: from epistemic accidents (misreadings, mistranslations) to ecstatic ones (falling, fucking, failing); from ecological violence to aesthetic refusal. The accident, here, is not only event but method. It is a theory of form and a theory of time.

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This exhibition insists on the accident not as an object to display, but as a condition to inhabit. We are not observers—we are within the wreckage, looking for coordinates. The exhibition will not offer lessons. It might offer velocity. As Ballard wrote: “After being bombarded endlessly by road-safety propaganda, it was almost a relief to find myself in an actual accident.” What a strange clarity comes in the moment of impact. Stavanger Secession 2025 asks: what if that clarity could be extended? What if the accident could be read—like a poem, a code, a scream?

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