KO

KO

The Unfolding

22nd May-28th June 2026
Kunsthall Oslo, Kjølberggata 21 0653 Oslo

With works by
Mariem Abutaleb
Tauba Auerbach
Naum Gabo
Samia Halaby
Magnus Rakeng
Zarina Saidova
Gerd Tinglum

Above the tempests of our weekdays / Across the ashes and cindered homes of the past / Before the gates of the vacant future / What does art carry into this unfolding epoch?*

We are very pleased to introduce our new gallery space with an exhibition that celebrates art’s impurity and its social condition, but also its utopianism and resilience. The Unfolding brings together seven artists whose practices, in different ways, have embraced both idealistic experiments and functional design. The exhibition is conceived as a mosaic (as Mariem Abutaleb says, ‘A large surface is felt before it is fully seen’) and the project is accompanied by a limited risograph edition.

The exhibition begins with an art-historical note. Naum Gabo was studying engineering in Munich in 1912 when he met Kandinsky for the first time, but he was living in Oslo when, in 1915, he first began to apply the insights of his technical education to the creation of art and the invention of Constructivism, with its focus on time, space and material existence. Gabo’s earliest works, made within walking distance of our new gallery, are long-since lost, but we will exhibit three original versions of his very first monoprint, Opus one, and we will continue to ask, as Gabo and his fellow Constructivists did: what can art become when it’s not in the service of bourgeois subjectivity?

Mariem Abutaleb uses the gestures of Arabic calligraphy to create visual compositions that do not resolve into words or letters; they are the visual analogue of Zaum, the abstract sound poetry first introduced by the early Russian Futurists. Working only in black ink, Abutaleb also carefully defines the negative spaces in her work. ‘I aim to interact with space,’ she says, ‘Not to fill it.’

Tauba Auerbach’s polymathic practice finds poetry in the ways we represent the world’s underlying structures. This collection of printed maps – published by Auerbach’s experimental imprint Diagonal Press (“A diagonal line is the Z axis in a 2D drawing, the dimension that comes off the plane”) – explores the mathematical, aesthetic and political questions raised by the problem of projecting the surface of the spherical Earth onto a flat sheet of paper.

Samia Halaby’s radical abstraction is informed by American minimalism, Renaissance painting and Islamic art, but also by the early European avant-garde. A successful painter through the 1960s and 70s, Halaby taught herself to code in the 1980s and began making what she calls kinetic paintings using an Amiga microcomputer. ‘The task of pictures,’ she writes, ‘is to hold the content of their time that cannot be described in other forms. The introduction of time affected all aspects of this visual language. The constructivists and cubists wrote consistently about time as a new dimension in abstract painting. Kinetic painting became for me a realization of the writings of the revolutionary artists of the first decades of the 20th century.’ 

Magnus Rakeng’s paintings draw on the many typefaces and logotypes he has created for Norwegian companies and institutions over the last three decades (and we are very pleased to have become one of the institutions whose graphic identity Rakeng has remade), reclaiming and remixing these functional forms into something new that serves an entirely different purpose.

Zarina Saidova is an artist, designer and illustrator. For The Unfolding she is showing a project-in-process, sketches for a series of glyphs which are to be used to compose messages to non-human entities. Saidova does not, of course, believe that the plants will be able to read this invented language; rather she suggests that, in order to imagine other forms of consciousness, we must be prepared to remake our own way of thinking.

Gerd Tinglum is a conceptual artist best known for her rigorous treatment of the process of painting and the phenomenology of colour. In her new-commissioned work for Kunsthall Oslo, Tinglum combines the strict mathematics of her formalism with a more improvisational approach, working directly onto the gallery floor. The exhibition also presents older works on paper – over-painted pages from a Japanese Playboy magazine, and an unfolded painted origami bird – that explore how the meaning of the painted surface changes according to the underlying context.

Thanks to the artists; Cristea Roberts Gallery, Sophie, Helen and Alexia; Dar-Nur Art and Noor Alzabin; Difaf Gallery and Tony Sfeir; Sfeir-Semler Gallery and Léa Chikani; Allison Cooper and Diagonal Press. Kunsthall Oslo is supported by Kulturdepartementet and Oslo kommune.

*from The Realistic Manifesto (1920), Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner

The Unfolding

22nd May-28th June 2026
Kunsthall Oslo, Kjølberggata 21 0653 Oslo

With works by
Mariem Abutaleb
Tauba Auerbach
Naum Gabo
Samia Halaby
Magnus Rakeng
Zarina Saidova
Gerd Tinglum

Above the tempests of our weekdays / Across the ashes and cindered homes of the past / Before the gates of the vacant future / What does art carry into this unfolding epoch?*

We are very pleased to introduce our new gallery space with an exhibition that celebrates art’s impurity and its social condition, but also its utopianism and resilience. The Unfolding brings together seven artists whose practices, in different ways, have embraced both idealistic experiments and functional design. The exhibition is conceived as a mosaic (as Mariem Abutaleb says, ‘A large surface is felt before it is fully seen’) and the project is accompanied by a limited risograph edition.

The exhibition begins with an art-historical note. Naum Gabo was studying engineering in Munich in 1912 when he met Kandinsky for the first time, but he was living in Oslo when, in 1915, he first began to apply the insights of his technical education to the creation of art and the invention of Constructivism, with its focus on time, space and material existence. Gabo’s earliest works, made within walking distance of our new gallery, are long-since lost, but we will exhibit three original versions of his very first monoprint, Opus one, and we will continue to ask, as Gabo and his fellow Constructivists did: what can art become when it’s not in the service of bourgeois subjectivity?

Mariem Abutaleb uses the gestures of Arabic calligraphy to create visual compositions that do not resolve into words or letters; they are the visual analogue of Zaum, the abstract sound poetry first introduced by the early Russian Futurists. Working only in black ink, Abutaleb also carefully defines the negative spaces in her work. ‘I aim to interact with space,’ she says, ‘Not to fill it.’

Tauba Auerbach’s polymathic practice finds poetry in the ways we represent the world’s underlying structures. This collection of printed maps – published by Auerbach’s experimental imprint Diagonal Press (“A diagonal line is the Z axis in a 2D drawing, the dimension that comes off the plane”) – explores the mathematical, aesthetic and political questions raised by the problem of projecting the surface of the spherical Earth onto a flat sheet of paper.

Samia Halaby’s radical abstraction is informed by American minimalism, Renaissance painting and Islamic art, but also by the early European avant-garde. A successful painter through the 1960s and 70s, Halaby taught herself to code in the 1980s and began making what she calls kinetic paintings using an Amiga microcomputer. ‘The task of pictures,’ she writes, ‘is to hold the content of their time that cannot be described in other forms. The introduction of time affected all aspects of this visual language. The constructivists and cubists wrote consistently about time as a new dimension in abstract painting. Kinetic painting became for me a realization of the writings of the revolutionary artists of the first decades of the 20th century.’ 

Magnus Rakeng’s paintings draw on the many typefaces and logotypes he has created for Norwegian companies and institutions over the last three decades (and we are very pleased to have become one of the institutions whose graphic identity Rakeng has remade), reclaiming and remixing these functional forms into something new that serves an entirely different purpose.

Zarina Saidova is an artist, designer and illustrator. For The Unfolding she is showing a project-in-process, sketches for a series of glyphs which are to be used to compose messages to non-human entities. Saidova does not, of course, believe that the plants will be able to read this invented language; rather she suggests that, in order to imagine other forms of consciousness, we must be prepared to remake our own way of thinking.

Gerd Tinglum is a conceptual artist best known for her rigorous treatment of the process of painting and the phenomenology of colour. In her new-commissioned work for Kunsthall Oslo, Tinglum combines the strict mathematics of her formalism with a more improvisational approach, working directly onto the gallery floor. The exhibition also presents older works on paper – over-painted pages from a Japanese Playboy magazine, and an unfolded painted origami bird – that explore how the meaning of the painted surface changes according to the underlying context.

Thanks to the artists; Cristea Roberts Gallery, Sophie, Helen and Alexia; Dar-Nur Art and Noor Alzabin; Difaf Gallery and Tony Sfeir; Sfeir-Semler Gallery and Léa Chikani; Allison Cooper and Diagonal Press. Kunsthall Oslo is supported by Kulturdepartementet and Oslo kommune.

*from The Realistic Manifesto (1920), Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner