The Art Newspaper
Bergen Kunsthall Project, 2025
For my MFA graduation exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall in April 2025, I set out to paint a mural, accompanied by a digital presence, continuing the approach I had developed in We’re Sorry — intended to spark conversation around a pressing societal issue. As with that project, the nature of the work required that I keep its content confidential ahead of the opening.
The University of Bergen’s Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design responded by demanding I disclose the mural’s content in advance, citing concerns about potential illegality. This was the same University of Bergen that, only months earlier, had written a letter of support for my freedom of expression amid the litigation surrounding We’re Sorry — the institution had already engaged with my practice and backed it in writing. When I did not provide the disclosure, the university voted, on February 24, 2025, to remove me from the graduation exhibition: a preemptive act of censorship that directly contradicted its own prior support.
I used grant funding to retain legal counsel and fight my way back into a show I was already part of. On April 3, 2025, the University of Bergen issued a formal apology and reversed its decision.
Somewhere in that fight, the censorship stopped being an obstacle to the work and became the work itself. In place of the mural, I installed a large-scale black-and-white QR code on the south wall of the museum’s main exhibition space, leading to kunsthall.art: a living, remotely editable website hijacking Bergen Kunsthall’s own identity and taking over the communication channels of both the gallery and the university. It is culture jamming in the same vein as MOM air’s takeover of WOW air’s identity and We’re Sorry’s takeover of Samherji’s — only here, the institution under critique was the one hosting the exhibition. When the institutions intervened, it didn’t stop the work. They became the work.
The artwork now mirrors the censorship back at the institution that imposed it, keeping the dispute visible and open rather than resolved.
The dispute drew extensive coverage in Norway and abroad, including the Associated Press, The Art Newspaper, NRK, and Bergens Tidende — attention that extended past the artwork and the censorship story to the graduation exhibition as a whole.
Bergen Kunsthall Project has since been supported by two grants from the Fritt Ord Foundation, a Norwegian free speech organization. The project has also drawn support from Freemuse, which holds UN consultative status, and UKS – Young Artists’ Society.
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