Upcoming Program for 2026
What is it about?
Save the dates for our upcoming exhibitions in 2026!
And stay tuned for updates and news about more events 💫
May 30 - August
For History, Change Position
For History, Change Position is a commemorative exhibition about the porous Norwegian-Russian border that existed from around 1990 to 2022. For three decades, it left its mark on individual works and other artistic activities under a fairly starry sky.
The exhibition introduces the “Border Art Archive,” initiated by Kirkenes-based curator Hilde Methi, who, together with Dušan Barok, artist and founder of Monoskop.org, among others, collects works and curatorial work from this period in a permanent internet-based archive.
The exhibition title For History, Change Position is borrowed from a work by Kristin Tårnesvik from 2004. ‘For history’ refers to a specific mistranslation of ‘na pamjat’ (на память), which means ‘in memory of’.
September 5 - 12
Open Out Festival 2026: Dreaming in the Dark
Open Out Festival is an annual queer art festival taking place in Tromsø since 2017. Based on an open call, artists are invited to contribute to the one week long festival program consisting of a main exhibition, performances, workshops, social activities, parties and more.
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?
October - December
What is Owed to There / Then
What is Owed to There / Then takes its point of departure from artistic practices connected to land that is typically represented as empty, such as the Saharan desert and the Arctic tundra, but is in fact full of history, cultural practice, and resistance.
This is the first of several exhibitions taking place in North Scandinavia and North Africa connected to Myriam Amroun and Natasha Marie Llorens’ three-year research project on curatorial methodology centred on decolonial practices.