Tiril Hasselknippe: Play

Kunsthall Stavanger is delighted to present the exhibition Play by Tiril Hasselknippe.

Hasselknippe, who is based in Stavanger, is considered one of Norway's leading contemporary artists. Now she takes over Kunsthall Stavanger with a large-scale installation comprising light, sound and sculpture.

The audience is invited into a sensorial world that welcomes alternative ways for experiencing space. A starting point for the exhibition is the artist's own experience with fibromyalgia – a nervous system disorder causing widespread pain as well as substantial physical, cognitive, and psychological limitations.

In the exhibition, the surroundings seem to smoulder, with glowing glimpses in a vague backdrop of fog – referencing the artist’s experience with fibromyalgia, leading to feeling what she defines as “brain fog”. The exhibition can be approached as a visualization of an inner landscape, where one can look for a way out or wander through the maze.

Symbols of both form and structure, portals and arches are widely represented in the history of art and architecture as metaphors for entering other worlds, celestial spaces, or as signs for spiritual forces – as well as passages into new experiences.

Tiril Hasselknippe is one of the voices from the new Norwegian contemporary art scene establishing a reputation in the past years by exhibiting at the New Museum Triennale Songs for Sabotage, New York (2018) and with a solo exhibition at Braunschweiger Kunstverein, Germany (2017). Hasselknippe’s installation Forest of my Eye, shown at Kunstnerforbundet (2019), was acquired by the Norwegian National Museum, and her work Queens of the Tear Duct was recently completed as a public commission for the Faculty of Law at the University of Oslo.