Bergen Kunsthall X Northing
Qi Tan med Maya Watanabe, Natasha Tontey, Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Dalena Tran og Andrew Yong Hoon Lee
19:00
This February in Bergen, two exhibitions find their origins in caves. At Northing, the solo exhibition by Qi Tan, “What’s Inside What’s Inside”, departs from the artist’s grandmother’s experience of a grotto in China. At Bergen Kunsthall, the group exhibition “Iter Subterraneum” takes inspiration from Ludvig Holberg’s novel about Niels Klim and his fall through a cave at Fløyen, a mountain in Bergen, toward the center of the Earth. Playing on the synchronicity, a collaboratively curated two-day event weaves together both exhibitions’ mythology and the perennial appeal of the subterranean.
On February 12, a curated screening delves into the central motif shared by both exhibitions: the cave as transitional space – between life and death, between the real and the speculated. During the evening, we will screen Qi Tan’s Silver Dragon (2024), Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Dalena Tran and Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s collaborative film, Quickly open your hand to free the light prisoner (2025), Of Other Tomorrows Never Known (2023) by Natasha Tontey, and Earthquakes (2017) by Maya Watanabe.
Silver Dragon (2024) is a 3D animated film inspired by Qi Tan’s unexpected discovery in a remote mica cave in Nesodden, Norway. The film returns to when, in the dimly lit space of a shimmering mica fragment, the artist saw the image of a mystical dragon.
The work will be screened alongside Thuy-Han Nguyen-Chi, Dalena Tran and Andrew Yong Hoon Lee’s collaborative film, Quickly open your hand to free the light prisoner (2025). The 20-minute moving image shares the story of German mathematician Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014) who, during the Vietnam War, gave lectures in a forest near Hanoi. In constructing what the artists conceive as a subterranean space for abstract thought, Grothendieck and his students resisted imperialist forces that claimed dominion from above.
Two other films engage with cosmological frameworks in Indonesia and Japan: Of Other Tomorrows Never Known (2023) by Natasha Tontey, and Earthquakes (2017) by Maya Watanabe.
Natasha Tontey’s practice continuously engages with the cosmology of Minahasan people, the indigenous community in the Northern part of Sulawesi island, Indonesia, with particular attention to their conception of technology. The stone revering culture – according to native cosmology, the first person ever to exist was a woman who gave birth through a stone – have historically viewed technology as both a risk and a solution, a “pharmakon”, manifested through their practices of astronomy, healing rituals, and equilibrium maintenance between human and nonhuman. The film Of Other Tomorrows Never Known (2023) delves into the native culture’s machine philosophy Minahasan as colonialism and industrialization have and continue to transform their land and worldview.
Finally, the last film brings us to the hollow of an empty Japanese theatre, where an artificial landscape lies in ruins. What preceded this disorder remains unclear. Maya Watanabe’s Earthquakes (2017) traces the devastation wrought by seismic events, a recurring reality in Japan, back to their mythological origin: the movement of Namazu, a giant catfish dwelling beneath the Japanese archipelago.
