Stavanger Secession

"To exhibit the accident. All accidents, from the most banal to the most tragic, from natural disasters to industrial and scientific catastrophes, but also the happy accident—from a stroke of luck to love at first sight. Exposing accidents so that we are no longer simply exposed to accidents."

Stavanger Secession seeks to continue this inquiry, investigating the existential shift we are experiencing as we enter an era of continuous accidents. As humanity’s Promethean ambitions reach unprecedented heights, accidents emerge as revelatory moments—exposing our civilizational hubris, the cursed byproducts of speed and innovation, and capitalism’s theological obsession with frantic rhythms. Accidents are no longer singular events; they constitute our environment. We drift through an infinite junkspace of casualties—an accelerationist, ubiquitous jackpot where we drink daily the milk of our own excess. Bingo: catastrophe is no longer a shared reality. One needn’t go through purgatory to fall from paradise into hell—just change the channel. If 16th-century baroque churches opened their doors to divine apocalypse, today Hollywood and social networks have taken up the mantle, powering catastrophe in its secular, ex abrupto form.

The accident is the ghostwriter of advanced capitalism—the secret architecture holding together the fractured parts of our society, which no longer acts but reacts. Jules Verne foresaw that our love of heights would meet an Icarian fate. Yet we failed to trust the poets; instead, we placed eschatological faith in risk assessment committees, safety protocols, and predictive algorithms. To borrow Hannah Arendt’s words: “Progress and catastrophe are the obverse and reverse sides of the same coin.” If museums have already seized the idea of progress, we will take its opposite: the accident. We won’t be speaking of ships, planes, or artificial intelligence—but of wrecks, crashes, and bugs. For if every technological invention is entangled with speed, then every accident becomes an opportunity to pause—and should be seized as a hermeneutic portal into our reality. It is time to open the museum to the unexpected, the forbidden, the denied—and thus, to what modernity deems transgressive: the accident.

Accidents can also be a source of wonder. The very idea of the accident runs through the history of the avant-garde. From Stéphane Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance to the Surrealists’ encounter between a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, art has always been a site for formal and political collisions. Stumbling, falling, and getting burned are part of learning. Accidents are our first contact with reality and mark the passage into adulthood. Transgression—and its corollary, the accident—serve, in childhood, to reveal boundaries by crossing them; those boundaries are constantly redefined by the luminous gesture that violates them.

From the primordial accident caused by Prometheus, to the epiphanic accident—Saint Paul, struck blind by God and thrown from his horse—Stavanger Secession will trace a genealogy of accidents: from the most triumphant to the most tragic, from the benign to the fatal.