Stavanger Secession: open exhibition

Running from 13.06.25 - 13.07.25

Tou Scene, Ølhallene

Thursday-Friday 13:00-17:00

Saturday-Sunday 12:00-16:00


Stavanger Secession 2025 explores the accident as a condition of life and creation. From minor failures to industrial catastrophes, the exhibition considers the accident not as deviation but as structure-shaping how we live, perceive, and adapt. Drawing from Paul Virilio's insight that "every progress generates its accident," the program reflects on the ambiguous role of disaster, breakdown, and chance in contemporary existence.


Virilio warned that modern acceleration produces its own collapse. Since the 1970s, human-made disasters have outnumbered natural ones. Today, events like market crashes, wildfires, digital glitches, and pandemics are constant and interconnected. Accidents no longer happen in isolation-they cascade. They are not exceptional but systemic, forming what Virilio called a "global accident." Stavanger Secession asks: what can we learn from the crack, the slip, the fall?

One answer lies in the idea of the accident as spectacle. Today's world is saturated with disaster imagery-streamed, shared, commodified. From news feeds to TikTok, we consume catastrophe. The exhibition explores how this shapes perception. Michel Auder's Gulf War TV War critiques the visual codes of televised conflict, while Johan Grimonprez and Naeem Mohaiemen reveal the theatricality of political violence. Gardar Eide Einarsson's Flames Roar confronts what we don't see in the flood of imagery. 2 Lizards captures pandemic life as an absurd spectacle.
Other works frame the accident as epiphany-a break that reveals. In Pasolini's unfinished Saint Paul, the apostle crashes a car instead of falling from a horse. Lockwood's Piano Burning transforms musical tradition into chaos. Knut Åsdam, Kjell Pahr-Iversen, and others probe bodily loss of control, shame, and rupture as sites of awareness.

The body as an accident appears in works addressing pain, trauma, and social exclusion. Inspired by Christina Crosby's memoir A Body, Undone, artists such as Jeff Wall Production, Ida Ekblad, and James Richards portray the body as something unstable, overwritten, and politicized.

The exhibition also follows the avant-garde's embrace of collapse. From Mallarmé to Metzger, artists have used accidents to unmake and rethink form. Angelidakis, Faldbakken, Reynaud-Dewar, and Ekblad extend this tradition-turning ruin into play, noise into critique, breakdown into vision.

Ultimately, Stavanger Secession 2025 examines not what breaks, but what the break reveals. Accidents are not ends-they are beginnings of thought.

Visit stavangersecession.com for the full program
Accidents, opening June 13th, 2025

stavangersecession.com



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