Ina Hagen

ABOUT
During her residency, Ina Hagen will write the script and score for a new live work centred on the tongue fern. This prehistoric plant, which transforms into coal in its fossilised form, serves as an entry point into a reflection on the politics of fire and the politics of denial driving today’s gravest atrocities. In this new work, the artist will trace the mythologies and methodologies that sustain a relationship to the Earth’s core, one that justifies violent invasions, military coups, genocide, and environmental devastation as legitimate means of accessing minerals and combustibles.

Grounding this piece is a theoretical framework informed by Michael Marder’s work on the politics of fire as articulated in Pyropolitics: When the World is Ablaze (2014) and Susan Griffin’s writings on the relationship between our personal histories and the conflicts of our time in A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War (1992).

This project is the continuation of research conducted during an artist residency at WIELS Contemporary Art Center, Brussels, Belgium (2024), supported by OCA – Office for Contemporary Art Norway, and a residency as GRASS Fellow at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland, facilitated and funded by Baltic Art Center, Visby, Sweden (2025). The work developed during these residencies, as well as Bergen Kunsthall’s Live Studio residency, will be presented in a solo exhibition at VOLT in Bergen in November 2026.

BIOGRAPHY
Ina Hagen is an artist and writer living and working in Oslo, Norway. In her artistic practice, which spans video and digital media, text and printed matter, collective-making practices, and pedagogical forms, Hagen constructs platforms and performative situations for critical reflection. In recent years, a key theme has been the ways in which Norwegian energy colonialism is legitimised and normalised through industry self-presentation in the media, and its consequences on individual, societal, and planetary levels. More broadly, Hagen aims to critically interrogate hegemonic narratives, with an interest in the artistic process as a form of civic participation.

IMAGE CREDIT
Credit: image courtesy of Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven. Photo: Jenny Rosentreter