KLub by Saskia Holmkvist

KLub by Saskia Holmkvist is an exhibition that unfolds through acts of return, translation, and shared memory. Working across film, sound, and live gestures, Holmkvist revisits a remembered performance to ask how histories can be reactivated through listening. At the centre of the exhibition is Margaret (Back Translation) (2024), a new film responding to KLub (2001), a performance by Belfast-based artist Heather Allen commemorating the murder of Margaret Wright during the Troubles. Rather than restaging the event, Holmkvist traces its echoes—its images, voices, and silences—revealing what remains untranslatable across time and context.

Through a method she calls “back translation,” Holmkvist moves between forms to explore how meaning shifts in relation to others. The exhibition turns Fotogalleriet into a porous space where sound drifts, images circulate, and histories are held collectively. KLub is both homage and reactivation: a living situation where memory becomes a practice of solidarity, and translation becomes a way of staying with what persists.

During the exhibition months, live activations take place at the mic in Fotogalleriet and offsite at Sandaker Trialekteket in a forgotten bar (live streamed into the gallery). Formats include readings, vocal pieces, DJ interludes, and short responses to the film and archive. Times are kept concise; the room is tuned for listening.

At the centre of KLub lies Margaret (Back Translation) (2024), a new film in which Holmkvist “back translates” a 2001 performance by Belfast artist Heather Allen commemorating the murder of Margaret Wright. Through her encounters with post-Troubles Northern Ireland and its contemporary artistic community, Holmkvist connects a younger generation of women to a history they have only heard told.

Positioned between film, performance, and archival research, Margaret (Back Translation) reflects on how memory, archives, and historical trauma are mediated and reimagined through translation. The work unfolds as a dialogue across time and place—between three women of the same generation, two from Northern Ireland and one from Scandinavia—who never met. In tracing the afterlife of a fleeting performance, Holmkvist’s film becomes both a response and a renewal: a gesture of connection with a place marked by turbulence, and an inquiry into how new memories take form through acts of care and reinterpretation.

KLub begins as an exhibition that unfolds as an evolving situation — a rehearsal, a live recording, or the lingering memory of a public gathering. Sound carries between rooms; a lightbox glows KLUB in capital letters; the murmur of voices drifts between the gallery and a nearby bar. The architecture itself becomes porous, allowing the street to enter and the work to spill outward.

At the centre lies Margaret (Back Translation), 2024, Saskia Holmkvist’s film, which takes as its point of departure KLub (2001), a performance by the – artist Heather Allen from Belfast. That event, staged in front of a bar, marked a collective act of mourning for Margaret Wright, a woman murdered during the Troubles. Two decades later, its traces—photographs, a brief essay, the faint memory of a voice—re-emerge through Holmkvist’s lens. Yet rather than reconstructing the performance, Holmkvist listens to its reverberations: how memory, testimony, and image continue to circulate across time, language, and medium.

Her method, “back translation,” borrows from professional translation but extends it beyond language. It is a process of moving between forms—film, text, sound, voice—to expose what drifts or remains untranslatable. Through this approach, Holmkvist opens a space of listening that accommodates both clarity and misunderstanding, insisting that meaning is never fixed but continually rephrased through relation.This is also a social choreography. It invites voices into relation: not to agree, but to co-hold fragments. The camera, the mic, the room—each becomes a translation device. A practice of careful mis-/re-reading: a way of noticing how histories change in the act of being told again.

Continuing her long-standing exploration of female performance lineages and their role in shaping collective memory, Holmkvist engages Heather Allen’s KLub to honor a feminist genealogy of artists who have used performance to hold space for the political and the personal, the private and the public. The echo of Allen’s title becomes both homage and reactivation—a new KLub that draws strength from its predecessor while transforming its address.

In turn, the exhibition design mirrors this continuity of voices. The gallery operates as a live circuit: archival wallpaper enlarges documentation from Allen’s performance until it becomes part of the room’s surface; a glowing sign announces a gathering; and a live microphone invites interventions, readings, and sonic gestures, some transmitted from a nearby artist-run bar. The boundary between the exhibition and the street, between viewing and participation, becomes deliberately unstable.

KLub is, in this sense, an experiment in shared attention. It asks how we inherit and respond to events that we did not witness, and how collective memory can be sustained through acts of translation, repetition, and care. It is also a reflection on how solidarity travels, resonating with gestures of remembrance and resistance.

Corina Oprea

Saskia Holmkvist is an artist based between Stockholm and Oslo, and Professor of Fine Art at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Working across film, performance, and text, her practice explores translation as a critical and performative act—testing how histories, voices, and relations are rearticulated through listening.

Over the past two decades, Holmkvist has developed a distinctive approach she calls “back translation,” revisiting artworks and collective memories through dialogue, speculation, and re-enactment. Her work combines methods from ethnography and theatre to explore how knowledge and experience are mediated across time and context.

Holmkvist’s work has been presented widely, including at Fotogalleriet (Oslo), Gasworks (London), Henie Onstad Kunstsenter (Oslo), Index Foundation (Stockholm), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Frankfurter Kunstverein, and biennales such as Momentum, GIBCA, and RIBOCA. Her works are held in collections including Moderna Museet and Uppsala Konstmuseum.

Corina Oprea a curator, editor, and researcher whose work spans contemporary art, performance, and visual culture. Holding a PhD from Loughborough University (UK) titled “The End of the Curator – on curatorial acts as collective production of knowledge,” her practice moves between curatorial work, writing, and pedagogy. Oprea has served as Managing Editor of L’Internationale Online, Artistic Director of Konsthall C (Stockholm), and Curator of Timișoara 2023 – European Capital of Culture, and has held curatorial and academic positions at Moderna Museet and HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design (Gothenburg).

Currently IASPIS Guest Curator, she co-edited Climate: Our Right to Breathe (K Verlag, 2023) and explores decolonial methodologies, collective memory, and performance-based practices. Born in Bucharest, Oprea lives and works in Stockholm.

is an artist from Northern Ireland whose 2001 performance KLub memorialised the murder of Margaret Wright during the Troubles, activating the bar as a space of public remembering.

is an artist, writer, and organizer based in Oslo, Norway. In her artistic practice, that spans video and digital media, text and printed matter, collective making practices and pedagogical forms, Hagen constructs platforms and performative situations for critical reflection. From 2016-2020 she co-initiated, programmed, and ran the discursive platform and exhibition venue LOUISE DANY in Oslo with Daisuke Kosugi, from their home and adjacent shop front.

works towards a performative collapse of information, subjects, and places — seeking to open cracks in time from which alternative forms of storytelling related to fragments of places history and visuality may occur through curatorial strategies. At the core of this lies Sandaker Trialektek – an alternative library and exhibition space– dedicated to text- and time-based modes of articulation in relation to the notion of the local. Trialekteket is situated in the premises of a forlorn pub at Sandaker Senter, on the shadow side of the center’s representational potential as a social democratic utopia.

works with performance, text, and video. His practice explores questions of identity, attention economies, and how digital spaces affect bodies. Jorkjen stages situations as arenas for self-inquisition and humor, driven by ambivalent feelings. He is also part of the performance duo Koppen & Jorkjen.

is an artist and musician living in Oslo. Her practice spans media, including sculptural installations and instruments, experimental broadcasts, and sound works accessible as a telephone hotline. She is currently part of the group Three to The Three to The Heart <3, the duo Our Beethoven with John Andrew Wilhite, Vilde Tuv Trio, and the Norwegian artist collective Verdensteatret.

currently lives and works between Oslo and Amsterdam. His most recent series of works titled Starter-packs looks at ways in which the promise of a new outdoors hobby or the deeper knowledge of your family history is available for both production and purchase online.

is an artist with a background in choreography and dance and is interested in the idea of a live presence within the context of exhibitions, exploring the human body’s relationship to memory and the construction of history. The works probe the politics of presence, disappearance, and the afterlife of performance in the museum.

is not an abled cis straight male artist from the 60s or 70s and he does NOT hold an MFA from Paris, neither was Yiannis Moralis his main tutor. His works are not in the collection of the greek national gallery, neither in the collection of the greek national bank. In his work, he doesn’t celebrate “inherited” values and ideals of his fatherland. For implementation of his work he does not use material that can be found or produced by the greek nature. Last but not least, Lykourgos is not a man of honour and he doesn’t “honour his pants” (patriarchal homophobic Greek expression).