Tou Scene, Ølhallene
13 June - 13 July 2025
he 2025 edition of Stavanger Secession explores the concept of the accident—every kind of accident—from petit mort to industrial disaster, from a broken catenary to the climate crisis. It aims to examine accidents as one of the cardinal conditions of our existence. Inspired by philosopher Paul Virilio and his adage “every progress generates its accident,” the exhibition presents a museum of disasters and catastrophes, but also of happy accidents—from strokes of luck to love at first sight. In response to the multiplication of catastrophes—climatic, financial, terrorist, or technological—Virilio, one of the most subversive and singular thinkers of our time, sought “to make sensible, if not visible, the suddenness of the accident that casts a shadow over history.” He believed that “we must quickly try to reveal the glaring nature of disasters linked to new technologies.”
As early as 1972, the insurer Swiss Re calculated that human-caused disasters surpassed those caused by nature. More than fifty years later, such events have acquired a form of total ubiquity: computer bugs, train derailments, climate collapse, stock market crashes, microparticle poisoning, psychological warfare, terrorist attacks, infowars, urban pollution, pandemics... The accident is no longer an anomaly but a new chrome theology, whose temples are spread across airport hubs, pathogen research labs, and military-industrial complexes. It no longer occurs in isolation but cascades—its intensity and scale distributed homogeneously across all bodies and objects. We are traveling through the heart of the apocalyptic jackpot prophesied by William Gibson: an unstable ecosystem where collapse scenarios interpenetrate and feed each other, forming a monstrous, tentacular, insidious canopy. Yet alongside this, the exhibition also seeks to grasp the accident in its full moral ambiguity: the fall as a moment of revelation, doubt as antidote to the process by which opinion congeals into arrogance, and serendipity as a creative method.