Laura Gaiger:
As Emperors Own Empires

The exhibition features monumental works painted on sailcloth, canvas, panels, and fresco, alongside floor-based pieces that visitors are invited to walk on. The paintings ripple through the space—they rise like sails, unfurl across walls, and spill onto the floor—creating a physical experience of the fluid and conflict-ridden relationship between humans and nature.

Thematically, the exhibition centers on the ocean as both political landscape and common resource, with particular focus on resistance to Norwegian industrial extraction in international waters. Gaiger collaborates with environmental activists from Svalbard, Shetland, the Philippines, Argentina and Canada. Their personal accounts of landscapes and struggles against companies like Equinor have informed many of the works, lending the exhibition a polyphonic, global perspective.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from C.L.R. James’ book ‘Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In’, in which he says of the Nantucket whaler ravaging the world’s oceans: ‘for the sea is his, he owns it, as Emperors own Empires’.

In large-scale oil paintings, Gaiger dwells on images of the sea as a shared landscape, highlighting historical figures who have envisioned new societies or found personal freedom at sea. Other works delve into intimate dreams and fears tied to the ocean, or reflect on the tension between the global sea as unruly yet exploited by wealthy nations.

By combining painterly techniques with spatial installation, Gaiger challenges both the tradition of landscape painting and the role of the viewer—who must quite literally step into the landscapes, and with them, into the ethical and political questions they embody.

A key work, rising to the full height of the gallery, incorporates a large, weathered, and torn sail. The piece gathers protest graphics from a cacophony of radical movements resisting environmental colonialism linked to the Norwegian state. References to Equinor reappear in unifying floor forms derived from oil maps and seabed topographies. Other works draw on memories from Gaiger’s residency in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, offering glimpses into how Norwegian state influence operates far beyond the mainland.

"As Emperors Own Empires" is a sensuous and politically charged exhibition that asks what it means to share, control, and relate to nature in an age marked by environmental crisis and geopolitical extraction.