Rebecca Ackroyd

Fools Gold, 2025

Public Sculpture

Courtesy of the artist and Galleri Opdahl

‍

Localization: TBA

Rebecca Ackroyd unveils Peeing Boy, a bold new sculpture for Stavanger Secession 2025 that channels the tradition of the classic public fountain. Inspired by Gustave Metzger’s assertion at the Destruction in Art Symposium that fountains represent the first kinetic sculptures—staging perpetual motion and accident—Ackroyd’s work extends this lineage in a city perhaps more than most is phobic to the notion of accident. For Metzger, art had to stage accidents to sensitise new generations to the destructive potential of capitalism. Peeing Boy also explores the dynamics of public shame, referencing Jean Genet’s notion that shame is wielded by aggressors but can be reclaimed and inverted. By making the personal public, Peeing Boy celebrates defiance, fragility, and the subversive power of exhibiting shame with pride.

‍

‍

Per Dybvig

Dog barking, telephone rings, 2025

Stop motion animation, pencil on synthetic paper

Edit: Andreas Joner

Courtesy of Per Dybvig

‍

JCDecaux digital screens circling Mosvanet

Everyday 3 a.m. to 6 a.m, 13/06/25 - 13/07/25 

‍

Per Dybvig’s latest animated short merges his signature dark humor with a lineage stretching from Norwegian satire to the grand tradition of J.J. Grandville’s anthropomorphic art. Infusing grotesque elegance into his characters, Dybvig channels a caricatural legacy where animal forms mirror the basest facets of human morality. The film is made through a direct, improvised process, each line drawn without preparation, with scenes appearing in the same sequence they were made. No sound accompanies the film—only written sound effects and spontaneous decisions. Screened exclusively on JCDecaux screens from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m., it invites night wanderers into its world of absurdity and subtle cruelty.

‍

‍

Gardar Eide Einarsson

“Flames Roar”, 2025


Acrylic on canvas


Courtesy of the artist and NILS STÆRK gallery

‍

Stavanger Aftenblad, June 12th, 2025 edition

‍

Flames Roar (2025) is a black monochrome painting by Einarsson, based on a screen grab featuring the closed caption “Flames Roar” rendered in white against a field of black. Typically used in film and television to convey sound for the hearing-impaired, this caption stands alone, stripped of context, inviting viewers to imagine the unseen: a catastrophic event, a roaring inferno, or more symbolically, the fires raging globally—from wildfires and bombed cities to the collapse of democracy. These “accidents” often stem from deliberate decisions and withheld truths. For Stavanger Secession, Flames Roar will be featured across a double-page spread in Stavanger Aftenblad on June 12, 2025, blurring the boundary between painting, newsprint, and lived experience. This media intervention will be reified in the exhibition at Tou Ølhallene, where a painting of the same image will be displayed, reinforcing the work’s critical engagement with the saturation of media violence. Evoking Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Profil ohne Worte for Museum in Progress, where images silently replace words, Einarsson’s work confronts viewers with absence and ambiguity, reflecting on the fragility of what we choose to see—or ignore.

‍

‍

Wade Guyton

Untitled, 2025

Digital print mounted on Panels

Courtesy of Wade Guyton

‍

Billboards, construction site

Skansegata 9, 4006 Stavanger, Norway

‍

Since the early 2000s, Wade Guyton has consistently explored the conditions and effects of digital image production. He subverts the conventional use of the inkjet printer by pushing its commands and materials beyond their intended limits — introducing errors, misalignments, and mechanical failures into the production process. These glitches are not mistakes to be corrected but accidents to be embraced, revealing the fragile infrastructure beneath digital perfection. In doing so, Guyton’s work exposes and inverts the inherent contradictions of digital creation, interrogating the conditional nature of visibility, authorship, and perception. For Stavanger Secession, Guyton has produced 24 monumental panels composed of vivid abstract colors and floor-like patterns. Installed around the exterior of a building, they form a kind of chromatic skin — at once decorative and destabilizing. The works resonate with the spectral presence of Andy Warhol’s "Shadow" series, but also channel a different logic: one of accidental composition, mechanical autonomy, and unpredictable emergence. The accident becomes a method — a structural part of the process that blurs the line between control and contingency, authorship and automatism. In what is arguably one of his most ambitious spatial works to date, Guyton transforms malfunction into form, and failure into aesthetic force.

‍

‍

Matias Kiil

A-Historical Now Choir, 2025

5 cuckoo clocks

Courtesy of the artist

‍

SpareBank 1 SR-Bank Bank,  Domkirkeplassen 1, 4006 Stavanger, Norway

Regular office hours, 13/06/25 - 13/07/25 

‍

Matias Kiil’s A Historical Now Choir transforms the maintenance records of Oslo Cathedral’s clock tower into an oscillating, accidental symphony. Drawing on Gustave Metzger’s notion of art staging accidents, Kiil’s installation stages time itself as a score of mishaps, with five cuckoo clocks performing in discord. The piece echoes the 14th-century marriage of church bells and mechanical clocks—symbols of civilization’s conquest over time. But today, as chrono-capitalism internalizes the rhythm of productivity, Kiil’s work exposes the comic origins of our obsession with precision, productivity, and the mechanization of daily rhythm. Five Cuckoo Clocks invites us to reflect on the control and management of the body through the political and economic use of time.