26th April-8th June 2025
Please join us for the opening on Friday 25th April from 7-9pm.
Kunsthall Oslo proudly presents Sérénade Enchantée: Mélodie du Refuge, the first institutional solo exhibition in Oslo by textile artist Damien Ajavon.
This new body of work plays with the idea of the secret garden, a theme that Ajavon has been interested in for many years; Sérénade Enchantée: Mélodie du Refuge is a multisensory installation that brings together textiles, ceramics, scent, sound and performance. The garden emerges here both as a place of retreat and a symbol of power that carries the histories of colonial occupation and class division. Ajavon enters this space to rework its structures. Drawing on both African and European textile traditions, they challenge and reimagine prevailing ideas of beauty and privilege.
In collaboration with the musician Francesca Heart, visual artist Simon Tegnander Wenzel and architects Arbeidsgruppa Ny Von, Ajavon opens the garden to others. Together, they ask: can spaces like these, once called “paradises” (from the ancient Avestan word paridaiza, meaning “enclosed garden”) ever truly be shared? For Ajavon, the garden represents a threshold between nature and culture, control and care. The garden becomes an intimate, but permeable space. It shelters that which cannot always be seen. It nurtures forms of life and kinship that resist dominant norms.
Damien Ajavon (b. 1990) is a French, Senegalese, and Togolese textile artist. Their practice draws on a rich range of craft techniques and inherited knowledge. Over the years, they have studied hemp weaving and cashmere dyeing in Italy, hat felting in Quebec, pattern making in New York, digital knitting in Norway, and traditional Manjak weaving in Senegal.
Ajavon holds an MFA in medium- and material-based art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and is currently based in Skien, Norway. In 2024, they took part in The Curse of an Unstoppable Appetite at the Greenlight Triennale, exploring the politics of consumption and ecological urgency. Their work has been shown across national and international platforms, earning recognition for their distinct contribution to contemporary textile art. Ajavon took part in the Sparebankstiftelsen DNB stipend exhibition in 2023, and is currently exhibiting at TSSK in Trondheim as part of the Hannah Ryggen Triennial. Ajavon is also one of four artists commissioned by KORO to create permanent public artworks for the entrance halls of Norway’s new Government Quarter, one of the largest state art projects in the country.