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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Kunsthall Stavanger

Tuesday–Sunday 11:00–16:00

Monday Closed

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The 2025 edition of Stavanger Secession explores the concept of the accident—every kind of accident—from petit mort to industrial disaster, from a broken catenary to the climate crisis. It aims to examine accidents as one of the cardinal conditions of our existence. Inspired by philosopher Paul Virilio and his adage “every progress generates its accident,” the exhibition presents a museum of disasters and catastrophes, but also of happy accidents—from strokes of luck to love at first sight. In response to the multiplication of catastrophes—climatic, financial, terrorist, or technological—Virilio, one of the most subversive and singular thinkers of our time, sought “to make sensible, if not visible, the suddenness of the accident that casts a shadow over history.” He believed that “we must quickly try to reveal the glaring nature of disasters linked to new technologies.”

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As early as 1972, the insurer Swiss Re calculated that human-caused disasters surpassed those caused by nature. More than fifty years later, such events have acquired a form of total ubiquity: computer bugs, train derailments, climate collapse, stock market crashes, microparticle poisoning, psychological warfare, terrorist attacks, infowars, urban pollution, pandemics... The accident is no longer an anomaly but a new chrome theology, whose temples are spread across airport hubs, pathogen research labs, and military-industrial complexes. It no longer occurs in isolation but cascades—its intensity and scale distributed homogeneously across all bodies and objects. We are traveling through the heart of the apocalyptic jackpot prophesied by William Gibson: an unstable ecosystem where collapse scenarios interpenetrate and feed each other, forming a monstrous, tentacular, insidious canopy. Yet alongside this, the exhibition also seeks to grasp the accident in its full moral ambiguity: the fall as a moment of revelation, doubt as antidote to the process by which opinion congeals into arrogance, and serendipity as a creative method.

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The Accident as Spectacle

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“If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. (…) Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown.... Although its individual parts are the outcome of brilliant inventions, lucidly planned by human intelligence, boosted by infinite computation, their sum spells the end of Enlightenment, its resurrection as farce, a low-grade purgatory.... ”

— Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, October, vol. 100, 2002

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The 21st century is an open-air museum of accidents. We are hypnotized by their representations, streamed constantly through news channels, Instagram stories, or TikTok feeds. The exhibition approaches the accident as the ultimate spectacular form of human hubris—whether political, erotic, technological, or climatic. Like a global reality show, we play an ambiguous comedy: both actors and spectators, fascinated and stunned. Submerged by a constant flux of contradictory forces, we can no longer untangle causality. Reality has metamorphosed into an immersive simulation—a junkspace saturated with debris too fragmented to be identified. The Earthship imagined by Buckminster Fuller is now just a drifting carcass, with its black box progressively lost.

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Gulf War TV War (1991, re-edited in 2017) by Michel Auder reflects on war as an audiovisual spectacle, inaugurated by the flash-conflict of the First Gulf War. In contrast to that aesthetic, Johan Grimonprez retraces the history of airplane hijackings from the 1950s to the 1980s, showing how such acts straddle the line between warfare and media performance. In the wake of state-led conflicts and terrorist acts by political organizations all the lives are crushed by the binary narrative of a war between Good and Evil. The Invisible Collective, founded by Naeem Mohaiemen, explores in Above Ground, 1798 how exclusion and surveillance policies shape contemporary immigration systems.

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Flames Roar (2025) by Gardar Eide Einarsson interrogates the ubiquity of catastrophe in the contemporary imagination, saturated and shaped by the media. Where Rothko’s gradations of black offered spiritual immersion, here it is war imagery and hyper-fires that etch themselves directly into collective consciousness.

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Finally, 2 Lizards (2020) by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani chronicles the pandemic through the daily life of two lizards confined in New York. Somewhere between Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Grandville’s anthropomorphic caricatures, the duo sketches the portrait of a total accident, inscribed in the age of zoonosis.

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Crash as Epiphany

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“As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him: 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?'”

— Acts of the Apostles 9:3–6

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In Pasolini’s unfinished adaptation of the life of Saint Paul, the apostle does not fall from a horse, but crashes a Mercedes-Benz. The accident becomes a revelation. This idea of the accident as an epiphany runs through Western culture. Icarus burns his wings in a tragic revelation of human hubris; Prometheus, with his liver eaten by eagles for stealing sacred fire, is punished for stolen knowledge. Yet accidents aren’t always punishment—they may be radical inner experiences, dislocating both the material and spiritual self. They may even be voluntary: Walter Benjamin compared proletarian revolution to a collective intoxication, akin to a mescaline high—Turn on, tune in, drop out.

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Piano Burning (1968) by Annea Lockwood is part of a series of performances that challenge the foundations of Western music as a rational order. Setting a piano on fire to make its strings wail under the heat is a betrayal of formal composition itself: here, chaos becomes composition.

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Similarly, Untitled: Pissing (1995) by Knut Åsdam is a silent 30-minute video showing, in a fixed shot, a man’s crotch. Gradually, a dark wet stain forms and spreads across his trousers, revealing an act of involuntary urination. Through this loss of bodily control, Åsdam probes vulnerability, norms around masculinity, and the social discomfort tied to biological functions.

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Inspired by the sight of a man falling in London in the 1960s, Kjell Pahr-Iversen’s ten abstract drawings turn a moment of clumsy collapse into a caustic meditation on shame and dignity. The works balance humour and precision, capturing the absurdity of losing control in a world obsessed with composure.

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The Body as Accident

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“This is the patent age of new inventions, for killing bodies and for saving souls.”

— Lord Byron, Don Juan, Canto I, stanza 132

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In A Body, Undone: Living On After Great Pain, Christina Crosby explores life in the body after an accident, and the way in which a body inhabited by pain comes to undo language itself: “Crying, screaming, raging against pain are signs of language undone.” Crosby insists on the inadequacy of language to convey bodily pain, and on how such pain destroys rational logos. In this sense, one cannot think of the accident without also invoking illness or disability as radical dissonances in existence, breaking with any heroic or redemptive narrative. According to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, identity is not an essence but a continuous narrative construction. Yet intense pain ruptures that continuity: it interrupts narrative, fractures temporality, and isolates the subject in a present saturated with discomfort. The individual can no longer tell their story; they become a body-event, deprived of articulable interiority. Pain depersonalizes—not in the clinical sense of dissociation, but in the existential sense: it prevents one from “being oneself” as a narrative project.

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This idea of an existential accident runs through Smalltown Boy (1984), 2025, a piece staged by Jeff Wall Production, in which a museum guard reads aloud the lyrics of Bronski Beat’s anthem each day. A bittersweet tale of exile and fate, this iconic song of queer communities during the AIDS crisis marks a moment where Eros and Thanatos—the Greek gods of love and death—meet in the sexual act.

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A little further on, in Wagons/Tracks (2013), Ida Ekblad constructs a sculptural constellation of shopping carts and industrial debris, evoking systemic collapse. This palimpsest brings forth the figure of the junkie, the discarded, neglected body—a silent echo of Gary Indiana’s texts on the homeless, public sculptures left absent from political discourse.

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Jung99 (2025) by Florence Jung imagines institutional access to painkillers and psychostimulants without any form of regulation. The gesture underscores how the history of modernity is inextricably linked to its pharmacopoeia. The contemporary body must either adapt to the forward rush of acceleration or surrender to the chemical arms of Morpheus.

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In Writing Her Diary (2025), Richie Culver stages the memory of a wound through the spectre of Walter Yeo, a disfigured soldier and the first recipient of facial reconstruction. The work blends digital printing with traumatic imagery, where trauma becomes both surface and narrative, weaving together personal and collective histories.

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With Self-Castration no. 1 (2020), Torbjørn Rødland presents a symbolic act of self-mutilation, captured in a disturbingly serene photograph. The polysemy of the piece evokes both wounding and the political gesture of releasing oneself from the phallic weight of masculinity.

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Finally, When We Were Monsters (2020) by James Richards and Steve Reinke assembles archival wounds, animations, and media fragments into a montage of broken bodies. Some of the images are drawn from the scenography created by Gretchen Bender for Still/Here by Bill T. Jones—a landmark choreographic work on life with HIV in the 1990s.

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The Avant-Garde as Accidentologist

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“What defines the bachelor machine is that it is at once mechanical and poetic, rational and delirious—a device where pleasure follows an obscure logic.”

— Michel Carrouges, Les Machines Célibataires, 1954

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The idea of the accident runs throughout the history of the avant-garde. From Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance to Gustav Metzger’s Destruction in Art Symposium, the artist becomes an accidentologist. By its very nature, the accident is a transgression of the limits imposed by the established order. Rupture becomes experience: it reveals the boundary by briefly crossing it—before it is reconstituted behind the flash of the act. Transgressive art, by generating poetic accidents and deserting the realm of the sayable, makes us feel the incandescence of unreason. The accident, as it concentrates the unbearable, can also be understood as excess and eruption.

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With Play Ruin (2025), Andreas Angelidakis turns the ruin into a playground: a space for collective experimentation and transgression, inspired by Palle Nielsen’s The Model at Moderna Museet in 1968. The accident, as a confrontation with limits, becomes the first act of learning and being in the world.

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In Fire Door (1979), Steven Parrino triggers a fire alarm before exiting through the emergency door, diverting a safety mechanism into a fleeting poetic act. This gesture—without commentary or clear purpose—transforms infrastructure into a derisive stage for negation, whose only effect is the resonant disappearance of the artist.

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MOTOR-SCREEN-SCULPTURE (2025) by Matias Faldbakken pairs a LED screen with a loud diesel generator, making noise pollution integral to the work. In this absurd loop, wasted energy becomes an ironic commentary on consumption-as-spectacle within contemporary aesthetics.

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At Galleri Opdahl and the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, Lili Reynaud-Dewar presents Sincerely yours, a series of altered self-portraits—multiplied limbs, patched heads—juxtaposed with drill bits from the museum’s technical collections. This absurd pairing sketches a contemporary mythology of catastrophe, in which the human body, saturated with metal, becomes a malfunctioning infrastructure.

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At Kunsthall Stavanger, Ida Ekblad presents SMOKIES SKYLAB, a vibrant collision of background and foreground, where layers of paint behave like a palimpsest — eroded, overwritten, and unstable. Ekblad evokes the chromatic intensity of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, but her composition resists spatial hierarchy and coherence. Forms surge and dissolve in a restless flux, echoing Bois and Krauss notion of the formless — where order collapses into raw affect. Her palette is exuberant yet corrosive, and each mark feels like the ruin of a past decision, turning the canvas into a site of friction and continuous undoing.

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This exhibition does not aim to display accidents, but to interrogate how they intoxicate modernity—our priapic regime par excellence, which predicts both its triumph and its demise on the same horizon. It is not about moralizing the accident, but analyzing it. What interests us is not what breaks—but what the break allows us to think. From minor bugs to systemic collapse, the accident opens a space between what we know and what we must now imagine. From architectural failures to the hallucinations of algorithmic finance, the accident dismantles reality and exposes its scaffolding. The 21st century has become a continuous monument to derailments. This exhibition takes its inspiration from baroque churches, which Norman Klein called the first special-effects machines. But while they staged the apocalypse as a revelation toward transcendence, here we present a martyrology without ideals, an agony without redemption—unless, of course, we take into account the strange clarity that emerges at the moment of impact.

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