TRONDHEIM.- Even stagnant power is never passive; in revolution and stasis alike, social and political conditions will determine a life’s possibilities. From unwritten social codes to internalized grand narratives of progress or decline, Kunsthall Trondheim examines the norms and systems that govern inclusion and exclusion. Spanning the Baltic, North Sea, and Caribbean, as well as more mundane sites like corporate offices and amusement parks, these projects expose the invisible lines between who is considered "in" and "out"- and what it takes to redraw them.

February 19–May 10
Pilvi Takala: Breaking Ranks

How much of "real life" is real? What happens when something true is made by someone fake? When a person dressed as Snow White tries to enter Disneyland? When an artist, dressed as an intern, goes into a multi-national consulting firm to sit at an empty desk and do "brain work"? Breaking Ranks is a mid-career retrospective of Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, showcasing over two decades of her quietly subversive "interventionist" practice. Working across film, installation, and performance, Takala takes the tacit norms that domineer over our day-to-day experiences and renders them transcendently awkward. Through adopting the guises of myriad characters (princess, intern, security guard, negotiator), Takala interrogates how normalcy is enforced, challenging viewers to reflect on our own roles within the rituals of convention that simultaneously oppress and buttress communities. Breaking Ranks reveals how both subtle and dramatic interventions can expose the fragility of societal constructs too often mistaken for natural law. Sometimes the simplest gesture can make what we thought was solid start to shake.

June 4–September 27
Jamie Fitzpatrick: National Theatre

In National Theatre, Fitzpatrick makes visible the backstage machinery of how nations build their identities through the revision and valorization of images. Monuments, history painting, and national anthems are presented as ideals of patriotic selflessness, but these visual and sonic regimes tend to betray their outward sincerity, slipping easily into operating as ideological machines, devices for transforming pastoral fantasies of belonging into weapons that justify territorial claims, entrench hierarchies, and muffle counter-narratives. In a deliberate estrangement of such unifying civic myths, the artist stages sardonic monumental sculptures and theatrical landscape paintings inspired by AI-generated renderings of preservationist rhetoric. This solo presentation, the artist's first in Scandinavia, strips away the varnish from art's complicity in power, using the British experience as a case study to expose the treacherous agency of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Through several new commissions, Fitzpatrick's focus shifts between utopia and dystopia, showing how nationalist aesthetic practices also conjure fictive environments that house an ideal country, to be traversed in thought and mind, rather than on foot.

June 4–September 27
Jelsen Lee Innocent: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

For Innocent, the "wake" of imperial afterlives in Haiti is at once (to borrow Christina Sharpe’s use of the term) the trail of a ship, a vigil for the dead, and a coming to consciousness. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil extends the artist's research through a constellation of new commissions in fiber, moving image, and spatial intervention. Collectively, these objects trace the marks that colonialism and debt continue to embed in daily life, from extractive labor economies to environmental dispossession to the global structures that continue to dehumanize Haitian people today. By design, their display seeks to close the artificial distance between the Caribbean, the Global North, and Scandinavia, asking viewers to reckon with their own place in these currents of global capital. Innocent's presentation, which treats artistic research as a practice of inhabiting sovereignty, positions Haiti as a place of origin: a living site of endurance, autonomy, and the will to demand a world beyond the colonial imagination.

This season is curated by Adam Kleinman & Joe Rowley with the greater Kunsthall Trondheim team, and is supported by: Arts and Culture Norway, Outer Spaces, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and The Finnish-Norwegian Culture Institute.