Laura Gaiger:
Tragedies and Triumphs of the Commons

The exhibition features monumental works painted on sailcloth, canvas, panels and fresco, along with floor-based pieces that invite viewers to walk directly on the artworks. The paintings swell through the space—rising like sails, unfolding across walls, and pooling across the floor—offering a physical experience of the fluid and contested nature of our connection to the natural world.

Thematically, the exhibition focuses on the sea as a political landscape and a shared resource, with particular emphasis on resistance to Norwegian industrial extraction in international coastal regions. Gaiger has collaborated with environmental activists from Svalbard, Shetland, the Philippines, Argentina, Canada and Uganda. Their personal accounts of place and their struggles against companies such as Equinor have informed many of the works, bringing a polyphonic and global perspective into the exhibition.

The title references economic theories of the commons—competing ideas that shared resources either inevitably lead to overuse and collapse (William Forster Lloyd), or that they can be successfully managed through collective stewardship (Elinor Ostrom). In large oil paintings, Gaiger lingers on seascapes in particular as common spaces, highlighting historical figures who have sketched out new societies or found freedom at sea. Other works delve into personal dreams and fears around the sea, or reflect the tension between the global ocean as persistently ungovernable, and yet as a space exploited by rich nations. By combining painterly techniques with spatial installations, she challenges the genre of landscape painting and the role of the viewer—who must literally step into the landscapes, and thus into the ethical and political questions they raise.

At the heart of the exhibition is a large-scale, sculptural work that rises to the full height of the gallery. Painted on a weathered, torn sail, the piece gathers protest slogans from a cacophony of radical movements resisting environmental colonialism in which the Norwegian state is implicated. References to Equinor are echoed in the pooling shapes of the floor works, which are derived from oil survey maps and seafloor topography. Other works incorporate insights from the artist’s 2024 residency in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard, examining how Norwegian state influence extends beyond the mainland and affects local communities.

“Triumphs and Tragedies of the Commons” is a sensory and politically charged exhibition that reflects on what it means to share, control, and relate to nature in a time of ecological crisis and geopolitical extraction.