In the exhibitions PANSOCIALDEVELOPMENTCENTRAL & PARASOCIALAWAKENINGAPPARATUS, Haga Kristensen explores ideas around similarity, difference, and repetition through a series of doubled works. The artist has previously worked extensively with paired works and doubling as an artistic method, which takes on a new dimension at Kunstnernes Hus, with works created for the paralleled architecture. The exhibitions include a wide range of artistic expressions: paintings, etchings, textiles, photography, ceramics, utilitarian objects, mosaics, video, computer games, and musical theatre.

Each department is accompanied by individual texts, which interpret the works through opposing views on art’s social function. As such, the exhibitions become a stage for a performative splitting of art and the intentions we attribute to it. The doubling elements also manifest in a loss of reality, pointing toward the present age in which humans are increasingly confronted with their technological alter egos, and where AI-generated language shifts our understanding of what is real.

In the ceiling of each skylit exhibition space is a monumental painting depicting a crowd—a deliberate reference to Per Krohg's ceiling fresco in the building’s iconic central staircase, which illustrates the solitary artist’s “thorny path to greater heights.” Does Haga Kristensen’s depiction of these repeated, avatar-like figures question the role of the artist today? Or might they be commenting on how the space of art is increasingly shaped on the viewer’s terms—a viewer who is often more engaged in self-presentation within a digitalized, individualized public sphere than in authentic experiences? This, too, presents a thorny path.

Visitors can also explore the interactive video game ULTRAIDENTIFICATIONPAVILION, which allows you to enter the world depicted in the ceiling paintings. At the center of both rooms stands an iconostasis(a traditional image wall), serving as the set for the musical theatre piece The Lonelinesses of the Index Fingers (Part III). The piece will be performed twice and simultaneously in both exhibition halls during the opening on Friday, May 9.

The exhibitions invite the public to reflect on the boundary between sameness and difference, original and copy, the human-made and the algorithmically generated.

Steinar Haga Kristensen (b. 1980, Oslo) often grounds his work in a traditional approach to painting and sculpture, which he then embeds within distorted environments or propositions that displace established perspectives in the viewer. His practice is characterized by a repetition and perversion of his own artistic activity and motifs, forming the basis for new expressions across media and themes. Haga Kristensen was educated at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna and the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, where his graduation project (MA) took the form of a retrospective exhibition and the launch of a complete Catalogue raisonné. In 2021, he received the prestigious Lorck Schive Art Prize for contemporary art.

He has created site-specific works for the Oslo City Hall, Studio A, and the Faculty of Law at Tullinløkka in Oslo. Haga Kristensen has exhibited at La Loge, Centre for Fine Arts – Bozar, and WIELS Contemporary Art Center in Brussels; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art KODE, Bergen; Den Frie, Copenhagen; and Trondheim Kunstmuseum. Solo exhibitions include venues such as Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague; Passerelle, Brest; CAC, Vilnius; Kunsthal Aarhus; Établissement d’en face, Brussels; as well as Kunsthall Oslo and UKS, Oslo.

The exhibition is curated by Ida Kierulf. The supplementary texts available in the exhibition halls are written by Stian Gabrielsen, writer and Norwegian editor of Kunstkritikk.

The exhibition is supported by the Directorate for Culture, the Ingrid Lindbäck Langaard Foundation, the Visual Artists’ Remuneration Fund, the Irma Salo Jæger Institute, and the Bergen Center for Electronic Art.

Our summer exhibitions are made possible thanks to the generous support from Sparebankstiftelsen DNB. We also thank the Bergesen Foundation for its support of the exhibition.