Tori Wrånes is this year’s Festival Exhibition artist. Since 1953, this has been a leading solo exhibition in Norway.

The exhibition transforms four main galleries into a vast installation – a living stage or an endless concert. The title Moon Bag refers to an everyday object and a symbolic notion – something one carries that is hoped to have value. But hope never exists in a vacuum – the word itself evokes the shadow of its opposite.

A carpet, reminiscent of a lunar landscape or a wave, meanders through the halls, connecting the rooms. Sound breathes through the spaces, like an invisible presence that pulls and releases. Monumental sculptural forms point towards questions about direction and control. Is it movement or stagnation? Who or what steers the course? A mouse darts by, invisible one moment, but unavoidable the next. A fleeting presence – an everyday rhythmic repetition. Is it a day, a month, or a year passing by? Wrånes’ works revolve around power dynamics and relationships – in the exhibition she plays with contrasts and scale, where small openings lead to unexpected spaces and monumental forms create new perspectives.

A central element of the exhibition are new sculptures showing “alloyed relationships”; a fusion of materials and relations—a physical bond that also suggests a psychological connection. Like in the work Mothers and Child 2, which shows one figure lodged inside another. Is it a case of protection or imprisonment? Is the relationship based on harmony or conflict? The exhibition reflects on relations, rhythm, and movement as both physical and symbolic counterforces. As a reminder that the body can be both a tool for survival and an expression of freedom. In Moon Bag, this is what sets the central pulse – an exhibition that lays structures bare, that defies binary contrasts and embraces the unpredictable.

The hope carried in Moon Bag is not a static condition, but a movement, a balancing act between light and darkness, moon and sun. At times it arises spontaneously, at others it requires an active choice, a risk born out of necessity. The joy and community that hope encompasses become a resilience that insists on existing even when circumstances oppose it. This complexity is a driving force in the exhibition, where hope is shown in its full ambivalence as a pulsating, contradictory landscape.

Tori Wrånes (b. 1978) lives and works in Oslo. Her works have been shown at venues including Accelerator Stockholm, Performa 13 New York, Lilith Performance Studio, Malmö, Biennale of Sydney, Thailand Biennale and Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Wrånes, along with Klara Kristalova and Benjamin Orlow, will represent the Nordic pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026.

The Festival Exhibition
The Festival Exhibition is Bergen Kunsthall’s flagship exhibition, established in 1953 and in connection to the first edition of the Bergen International Festival (Festspillene i Bergen). Each summer, we present a large-scale exhibition with new work by a Norwegian artist. The exhibition is considered the most important solo presentation for a Norwegian artist in their home country and creates a national debate about the contemporary art scene. Recent Festival Exhibition artists include Joar Nango (2020), Elisabeth Haarr (2021), Lene Berg (2022), Camille Norment (2023) and Toril Johannessen (2024).