SKULKESKOLEN
Poetry reading: poems by Anawana Haloba
16:30
Part of SKULKESKOLEN, 2–6 September 2026
Poems read aloud among the plants, in Anawana Haloba’s Gallery IV.
In Gallery IV, new poetry by Anawana Haloba will be read aloud collectively, among the plants that have grown through the summer as part of her exhibition From This Darkness I Shall Grow. The room is itself a community project: around fifty volunteers in Bergen, with varying gardening experience, answered an open call to grow seeds at home — sowing, watering, and sharing progress and photos in a shared group chat along the way.
The result is a living landscape of plants tied to resilience, regeneration, and resistance — hibiscus from Sudan, protea from Southern Africa, sunflowers from Ukraine — alongside empty beds standing in for plants that couldn’t be sourced for political, geographic, or climatic reasons, among them Palestine’s national flower, the Faqqu’a iris, which grows wild only in a small area of the Gilboa mountains and resists cultivation elsewhere.
Biography
Zambian-Norwegian artist Anawana Haloba has an extensive international career and is a significant voice in contemporary art. Haloba was recently featured in the solo exhibition “I Want to Tell You Something” (Jeg vil si deg noe) at the National Museum in Oslo. In 2025, she participated in the Berlin Biennale 2025 — “passing the fugitive on” — and was recently nominated for the Lorck Schive Art Prize and the Artes Mundi Prize for her groundbreaking work.
Anawana Haloba was born in Livingstone, Zambia, and lives and works in Oslo and Livingstone. She is one of the founders of the Livingstone Office for Contemporary Arts (LoCA), which has functioned since 2014 as an artist-initiated, non-profit library, research centre, and platform for collective experimental collaboration. Currently, LoCA is working on the “Mosi Oa Tunya Perennial”, a large-scale international exhibition to be presented in Livingstone, Zambia, and Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, from 12 September 2026.
Haloba was educated at the Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts in Lusaka, Zambia, and completed her bachelor’s degree at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo in 2006. She furthered her education at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and participated in the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in Washington, D.C. She is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Bergen.
Anawana Haloba is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, specialising in decolonial theory in artistic practice, at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and a guest advisor at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
