Exhibition program for spring 2025

Recent Acquisitions 

19.12.2024 - December 2026 

We start our 2025 programme already in December 2024. The high hall will serve as a rotating project space for the display of individual works acquired within the last five years.  

Høysalen will regularly accommodate new works from the collection and function as a kind of project space, showing complicated installations from the collection that mainly highlight female and queer artists in the collection from Sápmi/Northern Norway. The first work is Sissel Mutale Bergh's Hovrengåetie/Himmelhuden, The Sky Skin, Náhkkegoahti (2022). Mutale Bergh is a visual artist with a South Sámi background, currently living in Trondheim. She studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and the University of Technology in Durban, South Africa. Her work is often about her South Sámi history, how it has been erased, and how it can be revived and given new power. The installation Hovrengåetie/Himmelhuden, The Sky Skin, Náhkkegoahti, is specifically about the Sámi legend of the heavenly hunt and how language can be an entry point to a rediscovery of pre-colonial and pre-Christian Sámi cosmology. 

Layers of Time - Everyday Life in Svalbard 

25.01.2025 - 05.10.2025 

Three generations of a family with different connections to Svalbard meet through their different artistic expressions. Leif and Herta Grøndahl's historical photo albums from daily life on Svalbard have been edited and re-photographed by their daughter, artist and photographer Eva Grøndahl. The images are transformed again when the third generation, Eva's daughter Aggie Grøndahl Peterson, composes new music based on the memories, interviews and stories included in the exhibition. Through photography, re-photography and music, this exhibition offers a unique insight into people's lives and the changes that have taken place in Svalbard over time. The exhibition is curated by Dr. Charis Gullickson. 

Kven Biennial 

15.03.2025 - 08.2025 

The third edition of the Kven Biennial is a collaboration between Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum and Kvensk Kunstnerforbund, and focuses on contemporary art from the Kven minority community, some of which is already represented in the museum's collection. The participating artists are Rina Charlott Lindgren, Markus Lantto, Eili Bråstad Johannessen, Ingebjørg Vatne and Inger Emilie Solheim. The biennial will tour the region; Tromsø to Alta on to Svalbard, and through this collaboration we are helping to serve the Finnmark region. The exhibition will circulate through the participating venues from Spring 2025 through Spring 2026. The project will be led from Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum by Lise Dahl. 

Collection Exhibition - To Nature 

05.2025-12.2026 

To Nature is an exhibition drawn exclusively from the collection, addressing the idea of nature and its representations, both in the historical Romantic landscape paintings, which are so well represented in the collection, and in the works of Indigenous artists that deal with this relationship. The exhibition is curated by Lise Dahl. 

Everything Speaks 

20.02.2025 - 31.08.2025 

The opening exhibition for our new department in Bodø. The exhibition is drawn exclusively from the museum's collection, and is organized around three themes: The Gaze, Food Security and Food Sovereignty, Fish, Gender and Sexuality. It is curated by Eva Skotnes-Vikjord, Lise Dahl and Liv Brissach. 

Stay Away: Olaf Storø 

16.11.2024 - 14.09. 2025 

For Olaf Storø, his portraits of the polar bears are a kind of self-portrait; portraits of an artist based in Longyearbyen who has had enough of the tourists who come by plane and cruise ship. These visitors who are on the hunt for novel experiences venture out into the terrain by snowmobile, four-wheeler and boat as part of a so-called “sustainable tourism”. What is the animal’s perspective on these issues?  

This exhibition at Nordover focuses on Olaf Storø as a printmaker and allows us to take a closer look at his artistic process. Lithography, litho, or stone printing is a graphic technique for printing images. Olaf Storø (b. 1953 in Levanger, Norway) has worked with painting and lithography at his studio in Longyearbyen - the world's northernmost lithography workshop - for more than 20 years.