Deborah Schamoni

Stavanger Secession 2026 – To Live and Think Like Pigs – takes the pig as its point of departure: the animal endowed with a refined sense of smell but also the insult; the vilified mammal; the cyborg body genetically modified by globalized agro-industry; and the cartoon figure with synthetic pink skin. The pig is a world-being, carrying a truth not only about the obscuring power of modernity and its violence, but also about humanity’s capacity to inscribe its most unbearable traits into the bodies of others: greed, gluttony, impurity, excess, and filth. To live and think like pigs is to exist at the intersection of industrial automation, the mass management of bodies, the comfort of anthropocentrism, and the process through which the other is rendered abject. For the third year in a row, the main exhibition of Stavanger Secession returns to Ølhallene at Tou Scene and will explore the following sentiments through a selection of video, installation, sculpture, literature and drawing by Norwegian and international artists, architects, authors and filmmakers.

Rebecca Ackroyd’s Agent of Chaos presents a cast replica, cheap and kitsch, of the 17th-century Belgian bronze trickster known as Mannekin Pis. Deformed through repetition, Ackroyd transforms the iconic Mannekin into a symbol of the basest level of the Manosphere, his small act of rebellion reduced to a one-liner. Ackroyd’s Agent has traveled far and wide, first starring in her exhibition Period Drama (2023, Kestner Gesellschaft Hanover), before going on to appear in Mirror Stage (Venice Biennale 2024) and, most recently, the first edition of the Stavanger Secession (2026). Like his bronze original, Agent of Chaos is a functioning fountain, whose patinated aluminum allows him to be placed both indoors and outdoors.