Seven times the color of the sun
Opening: October 4, 2025, Exhibition dates: October 5 – January 4, 2026
Venue: NNKS – North Norwegian Art Centre (Svolvær, Lofoten, Norway)
Curators: Vanina Saracino (IKT Member) and Adriana Alves
Artists: Hilde Hauan Johnsen, Saodat Ismailova, Olof Marsja, Ina Otzko, Angelo Plessas, Alf Magne Salo
North Norwegian Art Centre is pleased to present «Seven Times The Color of The Sun». The exhibition is the second chapter of Solar Kin, a long-term curatorial project that follows artistic explorations of post-carbon imaginaries in the context of the global transition from fossil fuels to renewables, particularly solar energy. It approaches the sun as a vital source of life and a central figure in ancestral cosmologies, while tracing its contemporary reframing as a symbol of ecological promise. In this transition, hope, contradictions, and shifting structures of power and accountability intertwine.
In the Maya creation myth, as retold by Robin Wall Kimmerer, after several failed attempts to find the right material to craft humankind, the gods tried using sunlight. The beings that emerged were described as «seven times the color of the sun». Radiant, skilled and powerful, they placed themselves above all other species and natural processes, as if the very light that gave them form had become a source of blindness, rather than vision. The project draws on this image to consider humanity’s place and responsibility today.
If the first chapter of Solar Kin, titled «I converse with fire», traced the arc from sacred ancestral fires to the burning of fossil fuels, «Seven times the color of the sun» turns toward a broader understanding of energy: beyond its role as a productive force, and into an essence that traverses all beings and matter, from the vast reach of solar radiation to the minute scales of matter. It approaches the solar not only as material resource, but also as a symbolic, affective, and spiritual dimension of life in an era increasingly shaped by technological mediation, fractures, and dissonances.
Drawing from Indigenous epistemologies and Norwegian folklore, as well as Zoroastrian cosmologies and Greek mythologies, the exhibition brings together artists who engage these inheritances in relation to the imperatives of the present and the horizons of what is to come. Their works weave ancestral knowledge with contemporary technologies, spiritualities, and material practices, foregrounding energy as relational, vital, and alive. In doing so, the exhibition opens a space for imagining non-extractive, interdependent ways of inhabiting the world.
The exhibition is curated by Adriana Alves and Vanina Saracino.