Anette Gellein: Tender Endings

Kunsthall Stavanger presents Tender Endings, the first major institutional solo exhibition by Stavanger-based artist Anette Gellein. Spanning all five galleries, the exhibition brings together the artist's recent film trilogy: Love and Greed and Pain and Lust (2023), Dyke Dreams (2024), and the premiere of Annus Horribilis (2026) within an immersive installation of moving image, sound, sculpture, lighting, furniture, and scenographic elements.

Working across film, performance, drawing and installation, Gellein creates worlds where desire, power, and violence become inseparable. Drawing on horror, camp, experimental cinema, and queer traditions of world-building, their films span fantasy and social reality. Historical settings overlap with contemporary life, while fictional characters, erotic encounters, revolutionary figures, demons, monarchs, and dreamlike landscapes become vehicles for examining the structures that shape our lives.

The three films unfold within a shared universe rooted in the artist's experience of Stavanger and the surrounding region. Emerging from a place marked by the wealth of the oil industry, social inequality, and enduring religious conservatism, the works reflect on personal and societal concepts of desire, power, and freedom. Throughout the trilogy, longing and love repeatedly transform into control and violence, and Gellein uses the fantastical registers of theatre, horror and historical films to critique reality.

In Love and Greed and Pain and Lust, a doomed romance unfolds as a highly stylised theatrical performance. Desire circulates between lovers and a demonic third figure that feeds on their inability to connect, becoming an allegory for the forces that profit from discord and domination. In Dyke Dreams, bodies, machines, blood, and oil merge within a queer reimagining of the erotic commercial. Acts of tenderness shift to horror as the film explores the thin boundary between desire and destruction, and how destruction might also be a path towards freedom. The trilogy culminates with the premiere of Annus Horribilis, a dark period drama that follows the collapse of a fictional monarchy. Through body doubles, grief, revolution and acts of refusal, the film imagines the breakdown of inherited systems of authority and the possibility of other futures, particularly poignant as the film was shot in recognisable historic sites in Stavanger. The exhibition also includes the short film My Dog Home Movie, which further explores concepts of intimacy and control through the literal leashing of romantic partners.

Rather than presenting these works as individual films, Tender Endings expands them into a total environment. Through film, sculpture, lighting and installation elements, the exhibition is staged as an encounter with Gellein’s practice that is fragmented and non-linear. Visitors are invited to navigate the spaces as if in a dream, a theatre set, or the aftermath of an event whose consequences are still unfolding.

In Tender Endings, endings are never simply conclusions. They are moments of transformation: the collapse of a structure, the death of an identity, or the refusal of a system that no longer sustains freedom. At once deeply personal and political, Gellein's work asks what kinds of stories are needed to imagine different ways of living together. Through horror, fantasy, and excess, Tender Endings creates a space where established narratives can be dismantled and where new possibilities can emerge from the wreckage.

The exhibition is accompanied by the first major publication dedicated to Gellein's work. Focusing on the film trilogy, the book brings together an extended conversation between the artist and the exhibition’s curator Heather Jones, alongside newly commissioned essays by Amelia Groom, Lola Olufemi, and Mike Sperlinger that situate Gellein’s work within queer and feminist discourse. Published by Kunsthall Stavanger and Mousse Publishing, the publication offers the first presentation of the artist's work in print, and expands the questions and narratives explored throughout the exhibition.