Swedish artist Mariella Otto’s first major institutional solo presentation grew out of a residency in Portugal, where she worked with two of the country’s most important archives. The Torre do Tombo, the national archive founded in 1378, holds documents from the ninth century to the present, including records of the twentieth-century dictatorship, among them the secret-police files of the Estado Novo, the regime that ruled Portugal until 1974. Its fortress-like building curls in on itself. Guarding. The Arquivo Nacional das Imagens em Movimento, Portugal’s national archive of moving images, is similarly remote, set deep in the forest. Yet, its laboratory opens onto another kind of practice: an ongoing rescue operation for films at risk of disappearing, along with the machines that once played them.
For philosopher Achille Mbembe, the archive’s authority resides not only in what it contains, but in the material and spatial order through which those contents are kept, classified and encountered. For Otto, the two buildings embody the same question in radically different ways: how are a society’s narratives and memories modelled?
The films and sculptures here combine footage and reflections from both sites with other archival and personal material. One source is a 1998 seminar in Johannesburg, in which Jacques Derrida revisits the archive as a place of authority and repression, but also of spectrality: what disappears out of sight, does not necessarily disappear for good. Born in colonial Algeria, Derrida had been expelled from school as a Jewish child under France’s wartime race laws. Later in the film, his South African audience, living with the records of apartheid, questions whether his ideas hold there. Among the found material, Otto cuts to a 1975 film by Manoel de Oliveira, one of Portugal’s most celebrated directors—his name appearing in the titles as the camera sweeps through the dim backstage of his film set. Among the personal, Otto’s grandfather fails to film a graduation ceremony; not every gap in the record is censorship. Some are accidents, errors, or a machine that would not cooperate. Several voices speak at once in the exhibition, talking back to the archive’s official monologue.
Every recording is conditioned by choices: where the camera stands, what fits inside the viewfinder, what is cut away. In archives, such choices accumulate into collective memory. The white-gloved hands repairing a fragile document also repair our belief in it. Through these gestures, Otto traces how Western culture frames, preserves and restores a flattening image of itself, asking what remains outside that frame.
On the facade of Kunsthall Trondheim, the newly commissioned Hibernation (2026) perches four “gargoyles”. These salvaged 1990s CCTV cameras, refitted with spotlights, are wired to wake as you pass, answering movement with flickering light instead of capture.
...in statues, still image is curated by Adam Kleinman & Joe Rowley
Thanks & Credits:
The artist would like to give special thanks to: Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo, Cinemateca Portuguesa/ Arquivo Nacional das Imagens em Movimento, AiR 351: Luísa Especial , Cátia Ramos, Heitor Fonseca.
Contributors …in statues still image (video): Leonor Guerra, Ângela Ferreira, Lourenço Madureira, Juju Bento, Verne Harris, Tiago Baptista, Tiago Ganhão, Raquel Morais, António Garção, Ângela Ferreira, Massimiliano Simons, Jonas Jönsson, Gabriel Karlsson, University of the Witwatersrand, Orranäs Glassworks.
Translations: Juju Bento, Erlend Rødsten.
Technical assistance on sculptural works: Loke Berg, Erlend Rødsten, Jens Elofsson, Anton Agestam, Anna Andersson.
Kunsthall Trondheim gives thanks to Maria Ammentorp, Noah Brännström, Annika Svendsen Finne, Mickis Gullstrand, Ula Jern, Marc Pricop, Cas van Son, and the many hands at the Kunsthall behind this exhibition.
Exhibition is supported by Kulturdirektoratet, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee and Air 351.