Anawana Haloba
The Festival Exhibition 2026: "From This Darkness I Shall Grow"
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Bergen Kunsthall is proud to present Anawana Haloba as this year’s Festival Exhibition Artist. The Festival Exhibition is one of Norway’s most important contemporary art exhibitions and is considered one of the most prestigious commissions for an artist based in Norway. The exhibition is curated and produced by Bergen Kunsthall and has run in parallel with the Bergen International Festival since its inception in 1953.
Anawana Haloba’s artistic practice moves across sound, text, installation, video, and performance. Drawing on oral traditions, craft practices, music, and ritual structures, her work approaches art not only as a form of representation but also as a way of producing and transmitting knowledge. Her installations often unfold as spaces of listening, relation, and passage, where histories are not presented as fixed narratives, but encountered as layered, shifting, and embodied presences carried in voices, materials, gestures, and acts of telling.
In the exhibition “From This Darkness I Shall Grow”, Haloba explores the relationship between the individual and the community, not as something stable or resolved, but as a space of negotiation shaped by different experiences, stories, and voices in transition. Bringing historical sources into dialogue with lived and embodied experience, she attends to how colonial violence, displacement, and political structures continue to shape the present, while also tracing forms of resistance, care, and continuity that persist within and against them.
The title of the exhibition is inspired by Aboriginal Australian poet and filmmaker Romaine Moreton’s poem, I Shall Surprise You By My Will from the poetry collection Post Me to the Prime Minister, and points towards a transformative movement from oppression to agency.
This movement resonates throughout Haloba’s work, where darkness is understood not only as a site of injury but also as a place from which other forms of relation, memory, and speech may emerge. In this exhibition, craft traditions and polyphonic ritual structures are approached as living forms through which social memory, endurance, and resistance are carried forward.
Among the Tonga people living along the Zambezi River in Zambia and Zimbabwe, song, oral traditions, and ceremonial practices play a central role in connecting landscape, history, and community. In the ceremonial musical tradition Ngoma Buntibe/Budima, sound is formed through fluting and layered instrumental resonance, creating a dense collective sound structure. Built up through repetition and alternation, the lead flautist plays a tune to which the group responds depending on where they enter in the sequence. Through improvisations and shifts in rhythm and expression, the soundscape gradually evolves in complexity. The layered polyphony weaves together voices and memories, evoking passage, continuity, and the enduring relation between the living and the dead. In Haloba’s work, this polyphonic structure becomes not only a formal reference but also a way of thinking about collectivity, transmission, and the ethics of relation.
Through her engagement with the patterns, materials, and methods of Tonga culture, the exhibition also enters into a longer conversation around craft, labour, memory, and the political force of making. Here, a dialogue emerges with the late textile artist Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970), in whose tapestries Haloba finds affinities with wickerwork and textile traditions connected to Tonga knowledge systems. What is at stake is not only a parallel in technique or material use, but the capacity of craft practices to hold historical experience, articulate resistance, make structures of oppression visible, and carry ways of knowing that have often been marginalised within dominant histories.
Throughout the exhibition, Haloba brings together sound, sculpture, image, and living materials in works that ask how histories of loss, displacement, survival, and belonging can be sensed, shared, and reconfigured. “From This Darkness I Shall Grow” presents artistic practice as a space for critical listening and collective reflection, where forms of knowledge carried in voice, ritual, craft, and relation remain active in the present.
About Anawana Haloba
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.
Haloba’s work has been shown in both solo and group exhibitions, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; Oslo Kunstforening, Norway; GAMeC in Bergamo, Italy; SKMU Sørlandet Art Museum, Kristiansand, Norway; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., USA; Palais Populaire, Berlin, Germany; Rauma Biennale, Finland; ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum Berardo Collection, Lisbon, Portugal; KODE, Bergen, Norway; the Venice Biennale in 2009; the Sydney Biennale in 2008, Australia; Manifesta 7, Bolzano, Italy; the Sharjah Biennial (2008, 2011, and 2019); as well as the biennials in São Paulo (2016), Shanghai (2016), Lyon (2017), and Bucharest (2021). Furthermore, she has participated in the Fellbach Triennial in 2022, Germany; MOMENTUM 12 in 2023, Norway; and SURVIVAL KIT 14 in 2023, Latvia.
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.
With support from
Bergesenstiftelsen
Familien Brynildsens Legat
Fond for Lyd og Bilde
H. Westfal-Larsen og hustru Anna Westfal-Larsens Almennyttige fond
Kulturrådet
Norske kunstforeninger
The Festival Exhibition
The Festival Exhibition is one of Norway’s most important contemporary art exhibitions, and is considered one of the most prestigious commissions for a Norwegian artist. The exhibition is curated and produced by Bergen Kunsthall and has been presented concurrently with the Bergen International Festival (Festspillene) since its inception in 1953. Recent Festival Artists include Tori Wrånes (2025), Toril Johannessen (2024), Camille Norment (2023), Lene Berg (2022), Elisabeth Haarr (2021), Joar Nango (2020), Tone Vigeland (2014), Marianne Heier (2012), Leonard Rickhard (2009), Elmgreen & Dragset (2005), AK Dolven (2004), Bjarne Melgaard (2003), Olav Christopher Jenssen (2000) and Marianne Heske (1993).
Bergen Kunsthall
Bergen Kunsthall is a centre for contemporary art, presenting exhibitions and events by international artists. The live programme features over 170 events annually, developed with a range of local, national, and international partners, and includes everything from concert series and club nights to performance productions, the new Live Studio initiative, and a discourse programme. The institution offers an extensive education and public programme for visitors of all ages. The institution was established as Bergens Kunstforening in 1838 and, since 1935, has been housed in the functionalist building designed by architect Ole Landmark, with exhibition rooms, a café, and a bookshop. Bergen Kunsthall is supported by the Ministry of Culture, the City of Bergen, and Vestland County Council.
