HILDE HAUAN JOHNSEN
SAODAT ISMAILOVA
OLOF MARSJA
INA OTZKO
ANGELO PLESSAS
ALF MAGNE SALO


Curated by Vanina Saracino and Adriana Alves


North Norwegian Art Centre is pleased to present Seven times the color of the sun. The exhibition is the second chapter of Solar Kin, a long-term curatorial project that follows artistic explorations of post-carbon imaginaries in the context of the global transition from fossil fuels to renewables, particularly solar energy. It approaches the sun as a vital source of life and a central figure in ancestral cosmologies, while tracing its contemporary reframing as a symbol of ecological promise. In this transition, hope, contradictions, and shifting structures of power and accountability intertwine.

In the Mayan creation myth, as retold by Robin Wall Kimmerer, after several failed attempts to find the right material to craft humankind, the gods tried using sunlight. The beings that emerged were described as “seven times the color of the sun”. Radiant, skilled and powerful, they placed themselves above all other species and natural processes, as if the very light that gave them form had become a source of blindness, rather than vision. The project draws on this image to consider humanity’s place and responsibility today.

If the first chapter of Solar Kin, titled I converse with fire, traced the arc from sacred ancestral fires to the burning of fossil fuels, Seven times the color of the sun turns toward a broader understanding of energy: beyond its role as a productive force, and into an essence that traverses all beings, from the vast reach of solar radiation to the minute scales of matter. It approaches the sun not only as material resource, but also as a symbolic, affective, and spiritual dimension of life in an era increasingly shaped by technological mediation, fractures, and dissonances.

Drawing from Indigenous epistemologies and Norwegian folklore, as well as Zoroastrian cosmologies and Greek mythologies, the exhibition brings together artists who engage these inheritances in relation to the imperatives of the present and the horizons of what is to come. Their works weave ancestral knowledge with contemporary technologies, spiritualities, and material practices, foregrounding energy as relational, vital, and alive. In doing so, the exhibition opens a space for imagining non-extractive, interdependent ways of inhabiting the world.

In the video installation Melted into the Sun (2024) Saodat Ismailova revisits the ambiguous figure of Al-Muqannaʿ (“The Veiled One”), a dyer who became a spiritual leader and political agitator in eighth-century southern Central Asia. Drawing on elements of Zoroastrianism, Mazdakism, and Buddhism, his syncretic, millenarian movement challenged the prevailing order, questioning land exploitation, centralized authority, and religious repression. His legacy was later appropriated by the regional Soviet propaganda machine as a nativist heroic example of rising up for the communal sharing of property and wealth. Embracing a cyclical understanding of history and knowledge, Ismailova reimagines Al-Muqannaʿ’s teachings, interpreted by the influential Uzbek poet JontemirJondor. Filmed in part at the solar furnace of Uzbekistan, this visual journey through time reflects on Al-Muqannaʿ’s reputed use of illusion and science for demagogic ends and reflects on the central role technology and the manipulation of the Earth have played in sustaining power structures since ancient times.


In Ina Otzko’s interdisciplinary practice, ecological, social, and planetary questions are explored through a contemplative and embodied approach, with a focus on relationships and time. The neon work iamnowhere (2025) evokes the sensation of being here and nowhere at once, a threshold state, carrying the potential for grounding and connection. Together Elsewhere (2025) originates from a thirty-minute live performance on a platform in the sea, set against the mountain range of The Seven Sisters on the Helgeland coast of Northern Norway. Here, the artist leans forward onto a staff pressed against her chest, maintaining a fragile balance through the interplay between body, breath, material, and surroundings. Behind her, the mountains rise as witnesses of a distant past, reawakening legends of trolls turned to stone by the first touch of sunlight. Through silent activism, Otzko re-envisions our relationship to the Earth, land, and water – not as possessions or resources, but as a living weave of invisible bonds in continuous transformation.

Throughout his career, Alf Magne Salo (1959–2013) developed a distinct abstract vocabulary in which light, color, and rhythm are central. Drawing from the organic forms of Sámi culture and duodji as well as from impressionism, cubism, and modernism, he translated Arctic light phenomena and landscapes into saturated fields of shifting forms. Bright yellows and reds echo the intensity of the midnight sun, while darker tonalities recall the long winter darkness of the North. Nattsol (Night Sun, 2006) embodies this sensibility, evoking the luminous transitions of the Nordic summer night. The sun also anchors his series De fire årstider (The four seasons, 1987), four large oil paintings on wood panels commissioned for the Center for Northern Peoples in Manndalen, now presented in an exhibition context for the first time. Conceived as solar portals, the series folds seasonal phases into one another so that different states of light and warmth coexist, conveying a cyclical continuity.


For the Sámi, duodji is a cosmological material practice, though it is usually mistranslated as handicraft. In this tradition, duodji implies more than a finished object, encompassing the journey of materials, their transformation, their aesthetics and the way in which sustainability, function, form, and meaning are intertwined. This ethos also resonates in the work of Olof Marsja.


Marsja’s sculptural practice engages with his Sámi heritage while interweaving contemporary materials and narratives to propose an entanglement of old and new traditions that resists a singular historical narrative. His work unfolds as an exploration that, with equal seriousness and humor, plays with questions of identity, history, and our contemporary condition. He often combines organic and synthetic elements, allowing traces of handcraft and irregularities to coexist with technologically elaborated processes. The resulting hybrids reference duodji as well as pop aesthetics, everyday life, medieval art, comics, and myths, appearing at once familiar and uncanny. The sculpture Å vår! (Oh, Spring!, 2024) presents a human body with a sunflower head, recalling both totemic presences and cartoon-like figures. With its arms spread wide in an open embrace, the figure welcomes the return of the sun after the winter darkness. The sunflower, long a symbol of vitality and solar energy, here becomes a hybrid being, pointing to kinship across species and to our dependence on the more-than-human world.


Hilde Hauan Johnsen’s Colour Prism from Nature IV (2022–2024) is a large-scale textile installation made of silk, dyed with plants gathered in the border regions in Sápmi: Krokfjell, where Norway, Russia and Finland meet, and Goldajärvi, where Sweden, Finland, and Norway converge. Over the course of two years, the artist collected plants that yielded twenty colors, each shaped by the specific conditions of its habitat—climate, soil and water. The work considers light, color, and pattern as both physical phenomena and cultural forces. Sunlight becomes visible in plant pigments, yet it also shapes the way we see, identify, and negotiate our place in the world. Hauan Johnsen connects the slow, material process of plant gathering and dyeing to broader questions of mobility and belonging: plants cross boundaries on their own or travel with animals, people and goods, carrying traces of histories through time. By rooting her practice in contested landscapes, she foregrounds the entanglement of ecology, politics and knowledge. The installation captures a fleeting moment of color from specific sites while also pointing to broader cycles of change, resilience, and the more-than-human stories carried across shifting borders.


Living and working between Athens and Kymi (Greece), Angelo Plessas creates rituals, systems, and experiences where technology, spirituality, and expanded forms of queerness meet. Since the early days of the internet—itself a site of myth and transformation—the artist has explored how the spiritual and the networked world mirror each other. His work draws from ancient cosmologies, folk traditions and cybernetic mythologies, blurring the borders between human and machine,virtual and material. Plessas composes rituals through code, weaves circuits of meaning, and invites all beings, human and non-human alike, into shared transmissions. The multimedia installation composed for this exhibition brings together the works Karma Dome (2019) and a collection of quilts, including the two new pieces Sole Solaris (2025). Rainbow Unit Ceremony (2025), conceived as the opening act of this show, is a guided meditation that channels solar energy as an active principle that animates all kinds of relations. Beginning from the eye, an organ of vision shaped by the exposure to sunlight, Plessas leads a multiscalar journey through the energy flows of our organs, from the molecular level up to a cosmic scale—as if our pulse already belonged to the sun.

References:
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2013

Photos: Kjell Ove Storvik