Stavanger Secession is an interdisciplinary art platform that explores urgent contemporary issues through exhibitions, installations, performances and talks. The project brings together artists and thinkers from Norway and abroad, examining how art can open new perspectives on power, society and human experience.
This year’s edition, titled “To Live and Think Like Pigs”, takes the pig as its starting point – as body, symbol and cultural figure. The pig is approached as a complex world-being: from a sensing animal with a highly developed sense of smell, to a pejorative cultural image, and further to an industrialised body shaped by global agro-industry and systems of mass production.
The theme explores how humans project their own traits, desires and forms of disgust onto the “other”, and how this relates to ideas of control, excess, consumption and exclusion. Inspired by the philosophical work of Gilles Châtelet, the exhibition reflects on how contemporary life is shaped by comfort, automation and constant stimulation, and how this influences the way we think, live and relate to the world.
Through this, Stavanger Secession creates a critical and sensory space for reflection on what it means to be human in a time defined by industrial logic, cultural projection and increasingly complex systems of technological and social organisation.'
Visit the website for the full program.