The first edition of Stavanger Secession is a metaphorical portrait of the city based on its obsessions. These are not visible to the naked eye. You have to lean over the imaginary abyss that every city produces, almost to the point of falling into it, to begin to discern the shapes traced over the centuries by the tangle of epic narratives nibbled away at reality. It’s only from this vantage point that we can make out the mighty pillars of this obscure project bearing the name of Stavanger. There are three of them: Lars Hertervig’s dark landscapes, the song of the oil sirens and the insane machinery invented by the Quakers. Three heady obsessions that unfold throughout the public program and the exhibition organized for this 2024 edition.

Lars Hertervig has brought the Norwegian landscape into the negative realm of the imagination. You only have to look at his coastal landscapes for a handful of minutes to realize that deep in the rock and clouds, neither in front nor behind but rather within them, something is scanning us in return. Lars Hertervig is a century ahead of his time. While his contemporaries turned to Gothic tales to detect the world’s strangeness, he abandoned the grotesque bestiary and its castles to plunge into the vertigo of existence. In the silent reality of a landscape, he grasped an even stranger and more profound truth than the one that revealed Frankenstein to Mary Shelley: after the fantastic and the marvelous, it’s the Pirandellian maze of the human mind, its mysterious convolutions that give us a glimpse of the world but prevent us from understanding it, which is the foundation of all amazement.  He shares this truth with Deep Ecology thinker Peter Wessel Zapffe and horrific short-story writer Thomas Ligotti. The former’s photographs trace the sacredness of the montages, this Dionysian affirmation of life, which is also a form of abandonment.Ecological awareness comes through the uncomfortable realization of our imperfect condition. These natural cathedrals are paralleled by his writings, The Last Messiah, On the Tragic and his collection of comic short stories, Vett og uvett. The thick voice that fills the room belongs to Thomas Ligotti, who reads a poem entitled This degenerate little town, accompanied by a composition by Current 93, an English band whose music, with its ferrous, mineral taste, borrows from all dogmas, whether industrial or Druidic. From his exile in Florida, Ligotti pursues Zapffe’s quest: to tell the story of existence in its deepest folds through the tale of a small town, the mother of all afflictions. In the center, Here, here IV (2020) by artist Jone Kvie. Disheveled, twisted and famished, she seems to carry the weight that the gods reserve as punishment for unfortunate humans, like Sisyphus, who have tried to defy them. The story continues with photographs of Stavanger taken by Rob Kulisek during the prologue to Stavanger Secession. These landscapes are hollowed out by ineffable visions and culminate in the dramatic fresco by Scott Barley, a Scottish director whose Zapffe-inspired work strips away the dreamlike pretensions of nature to reveal it in all its metaphysical depth. Once again, a force returns our gaze, lurking in the silence of the dark forest.

Contrary to popular belief, the horizon of machines that began to populate the world at the dawn of the 20th century did not signal the end of the imaginary – quite the contrary.  With his book Les Machines Célibataires, Michel Carrouges brought to light the fact that, however machine-like and rationalized the human environment may be, its fictional power is all the more delirious. From Franz Kafka’s La Colonie pénitentiaire to Marcel Duchamp’s Grand Verre to Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, machines have become the psychic mirror through which artists have sought to analyze the human psyche as a watchmaker studies the finer mechanisms of a watch. Machines Célibataire gave rise to the emblematic exhibition by the king of curator-authors, Harald Szeeman. Szeeman saw in the Quakers and their technical virtuosity the beginnings of our whimsical rapprochement of machine and psyche. Stavanger and Norway are known as one of the European strongholds of the Quaker tradition, which dates back at least to the early 19th century. Two centuries later, Stavanger has become one of the major arteries of European industry. It was a position that exposed her to the idea of accidents, and made her phobic about them. Following a 1972 report by insurer Swiss Re Group stating that the damage caused by accidents caused by human activities had surpassed that of natural disasters, philosopher Paul Virilio developed an accident museum. His idea: to exhibit accidents, from the most banal to the most tragic, from industrial accidents to accidents in love, so as to no longer be exposed to them. Machines, accidents and desire are at the heart of the practice of Bjarne & Patrick Melgaard, Yngve Holen, Clémentine Deliss and Anette Gellein. Bjarne & Patrick Melgaard and Clémentine Deliss have created a project based on the latest book by Bjarne Melgaard, an artist who has adopted writer Kristina Lugn’s motto, I am the wreck that you don’t need to be. For several years now, Yngve Holen has been interested in the cursed or repressed side of industry, whether food, mechanical or digital. From the erogenous curves of a car body to the totem of global telecommunications, where finance and pornography intersect, he exposes mechanized relics in totem-like fashion. Finally, Annette Gelleim, an artist inspired by both queercore culture and pulp cinema, presents a series of videos, one of which focuses on Japanese sex doll culture, a standardized version of the fantasies of surrealist artist Hans Bellmer.

Oil is everywhere. It produces wisps of smoke and a concerto of noises, fills the lungs and lends a gray veil to urban life. Yet in Stavanger, these manifestations are conspicuous by their absence. What’s more, unlike other oil-producing countries, no monument has been built to its glory. He exists only in the collective imagination. Yet this silence is commensurate with its importance as one of the most crucial fuels in modern history, driving technological development, conflict and climate upheaval. The most emblematic petro-fiction of the 20th century is certainly Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last book, Petrolio. Unfinished, this book is a fresco on black gold inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, the tales of the Thousand and One Nights and Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Pasolini describes it as “a very political novel about consumer society, a society that ends up selling people and consuming itself”. In short, it’s a treatise on the politics of essence and the autophagic drive of capitalism. The latter is the subject of a lecture by artist Lili Reynaud Dewar at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum and a series of projections. Within the exhibition, Sandra Vaka refers to the ubiquity of black gold through its most derisory and childlike materialization, straw, which she transforms into a sculpture whose base is a stele. In the tradition of Claes Oldenburg, she detects the most violent discharges in the most pop forms.

Scott Barley (b. 1992, United Kingdom)

Blackhaine (b. 1989, United Kingdom)

Clémentine Deliss (b. 1960, France)

Current 93 (est. 1982, United Kingdom)

Anette Gellein (b. 1995, Norway)

Yngve Holen (b. 1982, Norway)

Rob Kulisek (b. 1989, United States)

Jone Kvie (b. 1971, Norway)

Thomas Ligotti (b. 1953, United States)

Bjarne Melgaard (b. 1967, Norway)

Patrice Melgaard (b. ?, Norway)

Sandra Vaka (b. 1980, Norway)

Peter Wessel Zapffe (b. 1899, Norway)