Saskia Holmkvist looks back to where we are now
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KLub Saskia Holmkvist Curated by Corina Oprea
Fotogalleriet, Oslo November 14, 2025 - February 22, 2026
As they come into focus for visitors this winter to Fotogalleriet in Oslo, the driving concepts behind KLub ricochet around the storefront space. What meets the eye as an almost sparse exhibition speedily plots its course in multiple directions at once, both backward and forward in time. As one wanders, soft echoes and tensile strands start to connect the images, surfaces, and sounds of artist Saskia Holmkvist’s exploration of past events in Belfast, Northern Ireland. One is the deeply sad, 1994 killing of Margaret Wright during the Troubles; another is a 2001 performance in memoriam by Heather Allen. The exhibition booklet includes Holmkvist’s 2019 email to Allen, who apparently never responded, as well as the Swedish artist’s 2023 follow-up email. “I wish to respect your refusal,” Holmkvist then wrote, along with some post-pandemic updates for Allen about the project.
This parasocial reveal yanks KLub into the present, as does the high-definition reenactment of a woman’s conversation with two men at her front door, one of a few methodically paced scenes that comprise Margaret (Back Translation), a 2024 film by Holmkvist that loops toward plastic lawn chairs arrayed in a back corner. Grainy in contrast, and rippled the way copies of copies of copies ripple, Wallpaper (after Heather Allen) fills the adjacent wall. The buried, blown-up image comes from a PDF about a number of “works made shortly after the Good Friday peace agreement,” including Allen’s elusive performance. Since 1994 is, in some ways, easier to research today than 2001, KLub also works as needed advocacy for ever-more-urgent digitization and preservation efforts. Affixed like a stamp to the upper corner of a photo of a postcard, a SanDisk SD card in its tiny case might trigger tiny panics in those who were alive when Margaret Wright died. So many of us still have these little memory chips, even if we can’t immediately find them. They’re filled with low-res images we might never see again.
None of this comes across like a stumped detective’s frustration. The negative space that gives each element of KLub its provocative isolation (and, therefore, its shape) is presented as content itself, activated by our contemplation of what it does and cannot contain. Perhaps one really can be at peace with all the slipping-away and not-knowing, without having to stop asking what happened and how. As curator Corina Oprea writes in an introductory text, KLub “asks how we inherit and respond to events that we did not witness.” To age is, in some sense, to grow ever more familiar with how infinitely large that number of unseen events is. It’s one’s curiosity about them that counts.
Zachary Whittenburg
Zachary Whittenburg has been a journalist, administrator, photographer, and grantmaker in arts and culture since 2008. A regular contributor to Dance Magazine and former dance editor at Time Out Chicago magazine, he has written for numerous additional publications including Critical Correspondence, Critical Read, Dance International, Flavorwire, Pointe, and Total Theatre UK.