Summer Exhibition 2026

We live in a time of upheaval, where fundamental ideas about peace, reconciliation, and respect for human rights are crumbling, and uncertainty is growing. Yet beauty still exists, both in reality and in art. Perhaps our perception of what is beautiful and good even becomes sharper precisely when darkness encroaches.
This year’s summer exhibition, Scherzo – Faroese Contemporary Art, presents some of the most prominent voices on the Faroese contemporary art scene. Nine artists whose works span a wide range of expressions and materials—painting, printmaking, sculpture, textile, sound, video, and text—but who are united by a shared vital expressiveness, intensity, and edge.
Participating artists are Hansina Iversen, SUPERVISJÓN by Lív Mariu Róadóttir Jæger and Lasse Jæger, Randi Samsonsen, Jóhan Martin Christiansen, Silja Strøm, Jens Dam Ziska, Dan Helgi Helgason í Gong, and Vár B. Samuelsen.
The exhibition is curated by Kinna Poulsen, who last year published the book Í Eygnahædd on contemporary art in the Faroe Islands, recently released in English as AT EYE LEVEL – On 21st Century Contemporary Art in the Faroe Islands.
The title Scherzo, borrowed from the world of music, refers to lively and playful compositions that can also carry a hectic, unsettling, and agitated mood—as in the poem Scherzo from 1938, written by Bergliot Heinesen. She was the lesser-known younger sister of William Heinesen, a bohemian who did not conform to the rigid expectations placed on women at the time. The exhibition pays tribute to her, as well as to other outsiders and lost troubadours who did not do what society expected of them.
On the curatorial approach, Kinna Poulsen says:
“Like the poem Scherzo, the exhibition creates its own dramatic and poetic universe; a stalactite cave of Faroese contemporary art, focusing on the beautiful, the sensory, and the embodied life—on grand creation and decay on our beautiful, old, and worn earth.”
The opening reception will take place when the exhibition opens on Friday, June 12 at 3:00 PM.