Open Out 2026: Dreaming in the Dark

5 – 12 September 2026 ✦

Dreaming in the Dark brings together 18 international artists for this year’s Open Out Festival. Across exhibitions, performances, workshops, excursions, music, conversations, and collective moments, we’ll gather in Tromsø to dream together.

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PROGRAM

Saturday 5 September

19:00 Opening night

Please join us when the exhibition opens its doors with a performance, tunes, food and drinks. There will be an opening speech to thank all our contributing artists and get things started.

After that, the evening is yours: chill out, mingle with artists, hide in a corner, or simply hang out with your friends. Come as you are, stay for a while, and make yourself at home.

Our opening performance this year is
A stain of light on my screen, traveling down through your pixels
by Melisa Yağmur Saydı
Videos captured during night walks, animation clips and DIY visual effects are blended live through a mapped MIDI controller, accompanied by atmospheric sound effects.
Through a poem that appears in sequence, the artist reflects on her relationship with the objects she records as she continually archives her surroundings, questioning how meaning is ascribed to recorded material and how memory is structured.
The constant visual flux, fragmentation and pixelation serve as poetic tools, conveying a metaphor for how memory constructs itself by continually rebuilding, interpreting and altering lived experience. Within the dreamy atmosphere of a night walk, the performance unfolds as a meditative process, inviting the audience to immerse in its slow, introspective pace.

Sunday 6 September

12:00-17:00 Festival exhibition open

11:00-13:00 Box of Dreams
Workshop with Anne Lindgaard Møller for all ages
What do you dream about in the dark? What do you dream for the future? What if we turn the world around?
Welcome to a workshop for all ages where we will explore dreams and the Camera Obscura. Each participant will create and decorate a box for their dreams using paint, pencils, glitter, glue, scissors, brushes, needles and more.
Afterwards, we will transform the boxes into Camera Obscuras, using sunlight as the light source (weather permitting).
*Children under 10 must be accompanied by an adult.*
This event is a Negotiating Darkness Artist Research Network event.

13:00-14:00 Guided tour of the festival exhibition

14:00-18:00 The ones we meet in wondering
Mask-making workshop with Kai Feldhammer, part one
In this two-part mask-making workshop we will engage with the surrounding nature of Tromsø Kunstforening, connecting to our bodies and senses.
What are the stories carried by our environment, or which ones do we bring into it? And who are the beings — plant, animal, mineral or mythical — that inhabit these places and stories?
Throughout the workshop we will encounter the creatures that our masks might portray. They are creatures of many names and shapes, of transformations and cycles. They are the ones we meet in the dark, in dreams and in questions.
*Part 2 takes place Thursday 10th from 16.00–19.00.*

14:00-16:00 Tea with T
A tea ceremony with Prokhor Gusev
A performance–tea ceremony inviting you to ask weird, awkward, or even “stupid” questions — about TEA and about T (T = transgender experience).
No lectures. No correct answers or wrong questions. Just tea, time and a shared space to listen, speak and sit with uncertainty.

16:00-17:00 Queer Geographies of Darkness
Lecture by Irina Shirobokova
Historically, darkness was assigned as a strategy of erasure aimed at negating, conquering or controlling “the other” as dark and dangerous, and therefore unknown and ungeographical.
In this lecture, following queer and feminist methodologies, geographer Irina Shirobokova will attempt to unsettle this structure and respatialize traditional spatial hierarchies where dispossessed Indigenous, Black, queer or female bodies, sexualities, stories and lands were considered as “dark” / “ungeographical other”.

Monday 7 September

12:00-17:00 Festival exhibition open

15:00 Darkness and capitalism
Reading with Ruth Aitken
In the dark we will “read” together several short texts exploring different ways in which our relationship to darkness has been shaped by the economic structures in which we live.
We will discuss the texts and how light, driven by economic forces, has invaded every aspect of our lives and our environments.

17:00 Special opening of the Ravishing Beauty Salon
with Karin Keisu and Josse Thuresson
Mysterious and ordinary things will happen in the Ravishing Beauty Salon. For its opening night, come and let yourself be pampered — or use your special talents to give others a new haircut, colour or ravishing manicure.

19:00-19:30 Heaps of Cake
Poetry reading by Ada Adu Rączka

Tuesday 8 September

12:00-17:00 Festival exhibition open

15:00 Queer Dreaming
Shared reading with Mona Astrid Fonnes
Listen to a short story read aloud without knowing its title or author in advance. We pause to share thoughts and associations as the story unfolds.
The story is carefully selected for this year's festival theme.
*No preparation needed.*

16:00-17:00 Guided tour of the exhibition

17:00-19:00 Tea with T
Tea ceremony with Prokhor Gusev
A performance–tea ceremony inviting you to ask weird, awkward, or even “stupid” questions — about TEA and about T (T = transgender experience).
No lectures. No correct answers or wrong questions. Just tea, time and a shared space to listen, speak and sit with uncertainty.

19:00 Collective dinner
Open to all! Come and cook with us and together with one-night-only special chef Kaeto Sweeney.
The food we cook will be vegetarian and vegan.

Wednesday 9 September

12:00-17:00 Festival exhibition open

10:00 Queer mountain hike!
A collective, beginner-friendly hike.
Please wear hiking shoes or sturdy sneakers, bring a warm layer and some water for hydration.
**Meeting point:** Tromsø Havn Prostneset, outside the main entrance, Samuel Arnesens gate 5.

16:00 Provocation and Care: Failing and Falling
Embodied practice workshop by Dasha Sedova
Drawing on Contact Improvisation and contemporary dance practices, we will experiment with yielding, losing balance, redirecting momentum and discovering new pathways through negotiating with gravity.
In this physical exploration, we will see how falling can become a source of responsiveness and resilience — something to embrace rather than resist.We will look at selected dance videos and texts and discuss how the dominant narrative of falling/failure can be reimagined.

19:00 first kiss before anything once
Performance by Kaeto Sweeney

Thursday 10 September

12:00-17:00 Festival exhibition open

16:00-19:00 The ones we meet in wondering
Mask-making workshop with Kai Feldhammer, part two

20:00-20:30 PERMISSION
Live performance by AM sin

21:00-late KARAOKE NIGHT
One beautiful night a few years ago, our dear friend Olga set the karaoke floor on fire with her singing and karaoke-hosting skills. Since then, it has become a tradition for Open Out to host a karaoke night.
Be warned: every style is welcome, which means you can expect wild changes of songs, great performers as well as first-timers, and always a supportive crowd that will cheer you on!

Friday 11 September

12:00-17:00 Festival exhibition open

13:00-16:00 Riso printing workshop
with Marion Bouvier & Annka Lewerenz / MONDO Books
An introduction to the technique of Riso-printing — an artistic form of printing that is a great introduction to thinking in layers, experimenting with colour layering and colour mixing, and exploring a technique historically much used to print manifestos, pamphlets, posters and zines, and more recently artistic prints.
At the end of the workshop, you will make your own set of prints to take home.

16:00-19:00 Collective Listening through Imagination
Performance workshop with Sonia Killmann & Simone Seales
A participatory performance workshop exploring collective listening and imagination.
Participants will be invited to perform selected Sonic Meditations by Pauline Oliveros alongside text scores, as well as engage in active listening within a collective improvisation space.
This workshop offers a moment of still exploration in sound, without screens or much visual stimuli.
We will simply explore our daydreams in the dark.

Saturday 12 September

12:00-17:00 Festival exhibition open

12:00-14:00 DJ workshop for FLINTA*S
Hosted by Andrea Conradsen aka DJ Shabby Chic and special guests AM sin.
A workshop for FLINTA*s (female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans and agender people).

13:00-16:00 Poster JOY - drop in
Poster printing with Jo Ravn Abusland and Tine Semb
We welcome you to make your own printed gems with Poster JOY Queer Culture Network Norway & Sápmi.Come visit the pop-up station, explore the tools of this nomadic printhouse and make your own poster. No pre-skills required!
Poster JOY is a queer artist culture network for Norway/Sápmi, established in 2025, working with analogue poster production and distribution. Poster JOY brings together queer, trans and non-binary people. Allies are very welcome!
Representing Poster JOY: Jo Ravn Abusland and Tine Semb / Karmaklubb* & IGWTLI publishing.

14:30-17:30 dyke monster dreaming
Performance by Cajsa Godée, Xirley Harthey Ubilla and Mariê Mazer

20:00-late CLOSING PARTY
Join us to celebrate the last night of Open Out!
Let's cheer for our new connections, friendships and experiences with food, good company, a safer space to be queer, to dance, to chat, to chill on a sofa, good music and even better people.

Dreaming in the Dark

Queerness is a state of becoming that sometimes begins in the dark.If darkness is not an absence, could it then be a fertile condition for queer world-making – where bodies drift, shift, dissolve, and reassemble into new constellations of relation? Where magic can occur? Where dreams are the only light you see?

In moments when we are blinded by an experience we have not learned to handle, we listen to our inner voice, and navigate our way through the dark towards the sparks of desire and love. We let go!

Here in Tromsø, the dark season is not only a metaphor but a lived atmosphere, a slow, enveloping teacher that reshapes rhythm, perception, and relation. By embracing this darkness, we learn to listen more closely, to trust non-visual forms of knowing, and to attune to the subtle, queer capacities that emerge when light no longer dictates how we move through the world.

In darkness and in dreams, things are complex, fluid, shape-shifting: places of possibilities, of new beginnings, of odd encounters. What are the dreams you dream in the dark?


Open Out Festival 2026 is generously supported by:
Tromsø Kunstforening
Tromsø kommune
Troms fylkeskommune
Sparebank 1 Nord-Norge