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I am truly proud to inaugurate the gallery’s new space at Sinsen and, at the same time, celebrate Femtensesse’s five-year anniversary with a group exhibition featuring works by Damla Kilickiran, Eline McGeorge, Inga Sund Hofset, Marthe Ramm Fortun, and Mohamed Mohamed.

The exhibition springs from Eline McGeorge’s Cosmo Deren Weave (A World of Our Own), a shimmering tapestry she created in 2012. The piece interweaves a portrait of the Ukrainian-born American avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren into the helmet of Russian cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. Cosmo Deren is set within a landscape composed of imagery from the “No Cuts” protests and the Occupy movement in London in 2011, and strips of emergency blankets, a material invented for space travel and associated with protest, crisis and displacement. 

Guided by the spirit of Maya Deren, the exhibition brings together works that navigate across time and space, exploring dreams, memories, and spirituality. 

Damla Kilickiran’s Dark Entries takes form from the artist’s own visual archive, sourced from public spaces in Oslo. It consists of ornaments and shapes that bear the traces of having been forgotten, like remnants of a bygone era. Rather than relying on familiar representations, Kilickiran gravitates toward the strange and estranged, favouring these over images that depict a world perceived as diluted. Cast into a door-like form cut from XPS boards—a construction material commonly used for façade insulation—the concrete-grey drawing in papier-mâché has loosened from its mold, undulating between image and sign, the private and the public, the inner and the outer.

Inga Sund Hofset’s painting Midst. Before evokes a specific event, viewed from multiple angles and distances simultaneously. The expressive motif in earthy tones, reveals an inner world that echoes the outer—where reality, illusion, and dream converge, layer by layer, in oil on canvas.

Marthe Ramm Fortun’s Testament, created in Paris in 2024, stems from her research into the archives of feminist writer Natalie Clifford Barney, founder of the Temple of Friendship in Paris. Fortun embodied her testaments through performances blending prose and poetry, infused with the texts of Clifford Barney and other female voices. Her work confronts the violence of contemporary conflicts and the preservation of women’s histories in memory.

Mohamed Mohamed’s video work Prisoners Cinema explores the phenomenon in which people who spend extended time in darkness begin to perceive hallucinatory light. Inspired by Maya Deren’s observation that the “blackness of night erases the horizontal plane of the earth’s surface,” the work contrasts the conservative nature of the day with the liberating potential of the night. It reflects on nighttime labor and the invisible forces that shape our surroundings, especially through an encounter with an electrician whose work literally brings light into the night. Shot over four days with the help of twelve friends, the characters drift through the narrative like sleepwalkers, questioning what it is that we actually see. The film is a love letter to the imaginary: a path out of darkness and an attempt to reconnect with the divine, or the energy that arises from being together.

Warmly welcome!

Jenny

This exhibition is kindly supported by Arts Council Norway and Oslo Municipality.