Toril Johannessen
Deterrence and Reassurance

Bergen Kunsthall and Mondo Books are pleased to announce the launch of the book Deterrence and Reassurance, produced in connection with Toril Johannessen’s 2024 Festival Exhibition of the same title.

With the 2024 Festival Exhibition “Deterrence and Reassurance”, Toril Johannessen transformed the exhibition spaces at Bergen Kunsthall into an arena where military presence, borders, and geopolitics overlapped with everyday life. The audience walked barefoot on discarded military materials, read maps that blended security zones with local knowledge, and gained insight into how language and landscape bear the traces of historical and ongoing power politics. Each visitor was given a sensory experience of a situation otherwise often conveyed through political discourse or military documentation.

In the book, produced after the exhibition closed, we have invited three authors to expand on the historical, military, and cartographic themes that unfold in the exhibition. Through their theoretical reflections, they alternate between illuminating the fundamental political and social conditions of our current situation and engaging in dialogue with Toril Johannessen’s methodical artistic practice.

The texts are written by Hanne Hammer Stien, Philippe Rekacewicz, and Ingeborg Hjorth. Additionally, the publication features paper inserts with Johannessen’s own notes and photographs, spanning from the project’s inception to the exhibition’s opening. Petri Henriksson at Blank Blank Studio is responsible for the book’s visual design, and the editors are Silja Leifsdottir and Mai Lahn-Johannessen.