Film Programme, Transit
Places We Meet - Art in Public Spaces
Stavanger, November 21 - November 22, 2025
Public spaces are where our private lives intersect with wider forces. As we move through parks, squares and streets, we rarely pause to consider how these spaces are also shaped by the global – by circulating energy, flowing capital, and shifting climates. The film programme Transit explores how shared urban spaces both reflect and are affected by contemporary patterns of resource use, climate change and capitalist cycles, and how our bodies experience these geopolitical and economic systems in everyday life.
In Stavanger, Norway’s oil capital, the tension between local prosperity and global consequences is especially palpable. The city’s identity is tied to oil and minerals – resources that have generated wealth while binding Stavanger to the climate crisis and the global economy.
Transit takes this paradox as its starting point: the local public realm, marked both by natural riches and by the distant markets and political decisions that shape them. The programme sheds light on our relationship with nature – from what we exploit as raw material and capital, to what we recognise as home and environment.
The works in the programme range from the sensory to the conceptual. Some films address the senses and the body directly – with poetic imagery, tactile close-ups and evocative soundscapes that allow the audience to feel the place and situation. Others are more conceptual and analytical, inviting reflection on political structures and social systems. What unites them is a thematic openness: each film can be read through both poetic and political lenses, as visual poetry on the relationship between humans and nature, and at the same time as commentary on climate, consumption and power.
Transit is presented both in the museum cinema and in the urban environment as looped short films shown “in transit”. This dual presentation mirrors the programme’s central idea – that these themes do not belong solely within the art institution, but play out directly in our everyday surroundings. Whether seated in a darkened auditorium or passing quickly by a screen outdoors, audiences are invited to see their environment with fresh eyes. In this way, Transit becomes a link between the intimate and the collective, between Stavanger’s own streets and the world beyond, and between poetic experience and political recognition.
The artists participating in Transit are Anette Gellein, Iván Argote, Wang Yuyan, Aleksandra Domanović, New Mineral Collective, Linda Lamignan, Jenni Laiti & Carl-Johan Utsi, Nanna Elvin Hansen and Ase Brunborg Lie.
The film programme is made in collaboration with Stavanger Art Museum.
A programme with timelines will be released shortly.