by Jayne Wilkinson // Nov. 28, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Ghosts.
During McKenzie Wark’s keynote address at the opening weekend of Oslo’s MUNCH Triennale, she commented on the impossibility of the realist novel as a contemporary form, given how technology now fractures daily experience into hyper-individuated encounters. Realist literature originated in the 19th century as political commentary through relatively unembellished and relatable accounts of everyday working and social life. Today, such shared realities are rapidly diminishing into the voids of digital slop, so much of which is predicated on individualized algorithms. “Figital tech,” a term Wark uses to describe our addictive anxiety machines, is so embedded in every niche of experience that to narrate characters or plots with any sense of appreciable realism becomes inscrutable. In tandem with realist critiques, the 19th century also gave rise to a fascination with the supernatural as a parallel genre that expressed, with horrid fascination, the unfolding industrial era and the techno-anxieties of an insecure future yet to be envisioned.
MUNCH Triennale: ‘Almost Unreal,’ 2025, installation view // Photo by Ove Kvavik, courtesy of Munchmuseet
This is the charged context in which ‘Almost Unreal’ sets out works by 26 artists that function, portal-like, at the nodes between various realities and their other(s). Like the inaugural edition, the Triennale’s scope broadly critiques technological practices and co-curators Tominga O’Donnell and Mariam Elnozahy smartly extended this prompt to consider historical connections, including holograms, computer-generated textiles and hand-rendered CGI, alongside gaming, video projections and sculptural installations. Throughout, the walls are a bright royal blue, which becomes an omnipresent staging device that recalls both the “blue screen of death” from early Windows operating systems and the chromakey illusionism used to isolate subjects and create simulated versions of reality (blue was the color first adopted by Hollywood for this purpose).
MUNCH Triennale: ‘Almost Unreal,’ 2025, installation view // Photo by Ove Kvavik and Munchmuseet
Many works are described as portals or thresholds, with artists working in mediums that reflect on embodied uses of technology. Simone Forti’s petite but compelling hologram opens the exhibition, requiring audiences to closely circle it, inspecting and mimicking the repetitive movements of the illusionary bodies in space. For Forti, experimenting with holograms was about slowing down and isolating movement, but in this context the hologram also nods to ghosts and glitches, things that aren’t real but seem so, and the (very human) desire to believe in something that doesn’t exist.
Alice Bucknell: ‘Earth Engine,’ 2025, still // Courtesy of the artist and MUNCH
The paralleling of reality with haunting—of technological pragmatism with the unexplained qualities of glitching, the figure of the ghost as perpetually unresolved, both there and not there, physical and immaterial—was expressed succinctly in a handful of works that made planetary haunting and extinction their subtext. Alice Bucknell’s newly-commissioned ‘Earth Engine’ uses a video game format to query what humans think we know about the Earth, instead imagining that humans are not the protagonists on a planet that “plays you back.” Interrogating the widespread use of GPS, remote sensing, satellite tracking and the increasing use of “ground truthing” AI technologies, Bucknell’s back-to-back video and game installation creates the uneasy sense of twinned digital worlds, where the specters of extinct species—both humans and large fauna—are never able to rest. In the game version, the more one hurries, the angrier the weather becomes in response, as though the planet was (finally) able to rebel against the crush of capitalist acceleration.
MUNCH Triennale: ‘Almost Unreal,’ 2025, installation view // Photo by Ove Kvavik and Munchmuseet
Elsewhere, Emilija Škarnulytė’s massive hanging textile spans two floors of the museum with gauzy single-cell organisms cast against an oceanic blue, shimmering in the low winter light streaming through it. Cellular forms recall the origins of all terrestrial life in water and, simultaneously, the distressing realities of eutrophic oxygen-depleted dead zones, where little marine life can survive; many of these such shifting zones exist in the Oslofjord, visible through the museum’s panoramic atrium. In Sven Påhlsson’s meticulously hand-rendered digital video, an unending upward scroll of a coastal rainforest conjures the dark, wet, mysteries of the deep forest but here in a form of quiet memorial to an ecosystem without creatures. Modelled after a region in West Norway where North American Sitka trees were imported and now threaten local ecologies as an invasive species, it offers a meditation on the conditions of the few ancient forests left on Earth. Digital reconstruction may soon be the only way to experience some of the planet’s most biodiverse environments.
Sven Påhlsson: ‘Finding Bambi,’ 2023, film, single screen // Courtesy of the artist
Many of the artists address tangents of these planetary specters: Himali Singh Soin’s speculative reconstruction of a clairvoyant enlisted by British colonial forces to facilitate Arctic exploration; Priyageetha Dia’s ‘Spectre System,’ a science fiction account of the haunted spaces of plantation labor on the Malay Peninsula; or Natasha Tontey’s unusual engagement with a childhood story of her father, who was once thought lost at sea only to be found alive but permanently altered by paranormal experiences and “living a boundary life between the real and the virtual.” Perhaps one of the most elegiac accounts of ghosts in the present-day was Firas Shehadeh’s film, ‘Dreamcore,’ which inhabits the fictional city of Grand Theft Auto V to draw pointed solidarities between his homeland in Palestine and Indigenous activist movements across Turtle Island. His ability to create a space somewhere between dreaming and reality, between a restless ghost roaming a deserted city and a hopeful apparition gazing out to the sea of a future yet to come was profound.
Priyageetha Dia: ‘Spectre System,’ 2024, installation view // Courtesy of the artist
In her accompanying essay, co-curator Tominga O’Donnell quotes Gayatri Spivak’s invocation that we must train our minds out of the crisis of imagination we currently find ourselves in, using literature and art as our guideposts; McKenzie Wark’s lecture, titled ‘Epistemic Crisis,’ made a similar case for art that could intervene “to rehabilitate the senses.” This appeal to art as a way of training our imaginary capacities was most directly addressed in Sara Sadik’s collaboration with teenagers from the Parisian suburb of Seine-Saint-Denis. In an unedited, humorously frank round-table summit, they debate serious questions about what a utopic future would be, addressing solutions for housing, food, social media and global conflict. Nearby, computer-generated textile artist Charlotte Johannson’s small weaving echoes the widespread feeling that it must somehow be possible to counter the specters of the technological present through creative thought: “the brain — is wider than the sky.”
Exhibition Info
MUNCH Triennale
Group Show: ‘Almost Unreal’
Exhibition: Nov. 15, 2025–Feb. 22, 2026
munch.no
Edvard Munchs Plass 1, 0194 Oslo, Norway, click here for map
