No Man's Land

Welcome to a new sound installation by Skade Henriksen, presented on the facade of Tromsø Kunstforening.

Opening: Friday August 18th at 6 pm
With food, drinks and a short conversation between artist Skade Henriksen and curator Espen Johansen
The installation can be experienced by the entrance of TKF until August 31st

This sound work unfolds in the uneasy quiet of an Arctic border zone. A place where military alertness meets geological time and where presence can be measured by absence as well as by occupation. Through layered voices and textures, Henriksen navigates between definitions: buffer zone, terra nullius, monuments, wasteland. Each term carries its own histories of exclusion, displacement, and control - from military report to personal memory and from political commentary to botanical detail.

By placing the listener in this sonic borderland, the work invites reflection on how landscapes are shaped not only by what is built or destroyed, but by what is deliberately left untouched. Strategic invisibility shapes the land: no landmark buildings to provoke its neighbor or tempt desire, little infrastructure to defend. It is a buffer zone in name and practice — a place expected to absorb the shock before it reaches elsewhere. Yet despite of this calculated invisibility, the landscape itself resists erasure. Like the Gironlasta (dwarf willow), the world's smallest tree, that creeps along the ground, flowering in the short Arctic summer.

Skade Henriksen (b. 1988, Finnmark) works with sculpture, installation, drawing, photography and sound. Skade combines the poetic with a semi-scientific approach to artistic research. With a background as a research technician, she uses scientific instruments and records as a working method and reference point in her works. Landscape is a consistent theme in her artistic practice. She has recently exhibited at Preus Norway's National Photo Museum (2023), LÁ art museum in Iceland (2024), and is presenting a solo exhibition at Alta Museum (2025). Henriksen is a PhD research fellow at the Art Academy, University of Bergen.

This intervention is curated by Espen Johansen, as part of his PhD work at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and The Faculty of Fine Art, University of Bergen.

Hand out for exhibition can be read here

Visual profile/design: Thanee Andino