SKULKESKOLEN
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As part of Another Sun — a curatorial programme on the poetics and politics of the subsurface — Bergen Kunsthall presents SKULKESKOLEN, a five-day collective study bringing together artists and researchers from 2–6 September 2026.
Empires never really end, they just change form. Their colonial continuities haunt on through enduring architectures of extraction, determining our relations to the ground and the so-called blessed and cursed geographies we inhabit. As empires update and adapt, new regimes of value emerge, redrawing the boundaries between life and non-life, land and landlessness, while the ground continues to be organised as an inexhaustible resource. Refusing the inevitability of these conditions, SKULKESKOLEN gathers artists and practitioners to explore what other technical and social arrangements remain possible.
Bergen and the surrounding region become both site and material for the school. Moving between mountains, pleasure gardens, industrial infrastructures, archives and contested energy landscapes, participants encounter different ways that land is narrated, measured, cultivated, extracted and remembered. Across these sites, practices of listening, walking, storytelling, mapping, role play and collective observation become techniques for thinking through other relations to the ground and to the forms of life, knowledge and history held within it.
The first three days unfold as a collective study group. The programme then opens into a series of public lectures, conversations, screenings, and shared sessions that invite publics into the processes of collective study initiated during the school.
Participants include Abdalla Eltayeb, Alpha Maid, Anne Marie Deacy, Ase Brunborg Lie, Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Jennifer Mehigan, Dylan Kerr, Eimear Walshe, Hanni Kamaly, Ina Hagen, Karina Sletten, Katarina Dorothea Isaksen, Kathryn Yusoff, Dr. Memory Biwa, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Olan Monk, Rawia Elhag, and Tom K. Kemp.
The first edition of SKULKESKOLEN is co-curated by Jade Meili Barget and Nora O’ Murchú and developed in partnership with the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick in Ireland. The programme is generously supported by Culture Ireland, as part of Cultúr 2026: Sharing Ireland’s Culture, the culture programme for Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union 2026, Fritt Ord, KORO, Kulturrådet/Arts Council Norway, Mondriaan Fund and Sparebanken Norge.