BERGEN.- Bergen Kunsthall presents the group exhibition Everything Is So Alive! with works by Dora Budor, Tianzhuo Chen, Nikita Gale, Ventura Profana, Tracey Rose and Tejal Shah.

Everything Is So Alive! offers a hopeful exploration of the possibilities for cohabiting the ruins of a world moving into collapse. Rather than viewing collapse as mere destruction, the exhibition embraces it as a generative force. It considers collapse as a moment of new beginnings, where brokenness is understood as a condition to embody and negotiate, rejecting the neoliberal logic of repair.

“After decades of queer theory evolving around world-making, Jack Halberstam describes his concept of unworlding as “not antiutopian. It is a project that understands that utopia is delayed until we unmake the world that we are currently living in” (Halberstam, “Unworlding”, Journal of Architectural Education, 78:2, 272-276, 2024). This concept explores the idea of dismantling the dominant frameworks and systems that shape our understanding of our existence. It emphasises the importance of breaking free from oppressive structures—social, political, and environmental—developed out of Western thought. Unworlding suggests an undoing of the existing world order, creating space for new possibilities that emerge from the collapse of these systems.

Through strategies of storytelling, preservation, and engagement with Indigenous knowledge systems, Everything Is So Alive! offers perspectives on navigating the state of brokenness. Beauty can be found in chaotic city soundscapes, kinship can be found in wastelands, and connections—both human and non-human—can be found in light and shadow, in forests and in the depths of the ocean. The new and existing artistic works depict forms of past, present and future life that seem like fiction: personal visions of hell and heaven; the appearance of a whale as a blessing; a motorised character traversing the galleries; caffeinated and intoxicating stimulants for managing contemporary life; and a frozen performance. Where do we go from here?

The exhibition insists on movement in circles and in all directions. The planets will continue moving, with or without us. And everything that moves is alive. In stillness, we sat on the Bergen mountaintop, and she said, Everything Is So Alive!. After all, there are futures that await us.

Curated by Nora-Swantje Almes and Silja Leifsdottir.