Unstable Present. Review of MUNCH Triennale ‘Almost Unreal’

If it were not for its lullaby, Icaro Zorbar’s The Pace of Time (2025) would have been easy to miss. Nothing in the work demands attention, yet something quietly beckons: a quiver, a tremor, a machine hovering at the edge of its own duration. Under its pressure, the real and unreal draw level, unfolding in fragile contact.

The second MUNCH Triennale ‘Almost Unreal’ frames itself as an exhibition for an age of destabilised perception. Co-organised by the institution’s Tominga O’Donnell and guest curator Mariam Elnozahy, its premise is founded on a now-familiar anxiety – that the boundary between the real and unreal is becoming increasingly indiscernible. The Triennale aims to respond to this condition, introducing its ambitions through the language of portals and inviting visitors to ‘other realities’, ‘parallel universes’ and ‘alternative ways of seeing.’⁰¹ This framing extends a series of possibilities reactive to the uncertainties of the present, a moment saturated with synthetic images, algorithmic mediation and a growing sense that our perceptual habits are no longer adequate.

To give form to these propositions, ‘Almost Unreal’ assembles works from more than twenty artists, spanning historical and emergent technologies: holograms, music boxes, weaving looms, gaming engines, machine learning. The exhibition does not simply return to older technologies; it mobilises them across material, temporal and perceptual registers, holding them as operative mechanisms, historical citations and sensory structures.

Elsewhere, historical material is digitally reworked or resituated. Ann Lislegaard’s anthropomorphic transformation of Yvonne Rainer’s Trio A⁰² translates an influential performance into a speculative distant future, while Charlotte Johannesson’s hand woven No Future (1977) appears less as a sovereign declaration of its moment than as a recurring condition. This persistence is underscored by the inclusion of her imposing Terror (1970; 2016), the later digitally woven The Brain is Wider Than the Sky (2019), as well as a series of digital graphics that together carry Johannesson’s concerns across changing technological contexts.

Other works approach technology through obsolescence, cosmology and mythology. Portals are built from ‘obsolete’ technologies in Natasha Tontey’s Macho Mystic Meltdown: Oikouménē (2025). By contrast, Mazenett Quiroga’s Technology of Enchantment / Enchantment of Technology (2025) articulates indigenous cosmologies through technological objects themselves, linking mineral mining in the Amazon to the extractivist infrastructures of digital culture. Set against a stellar grey backdrop, the work inverts the logic of the computer to expose its material entanglements. Emilija Škarnulytė turns instead to Baltic mythology, approaching cosmology less through circuitry than through water and geology, situating the Baltic Sea as a repository of layered histories that resist linear or extractive frameworks. Together, these works establish a complex set of temporal strategies that refuse dichotomous categorisation.

These temporal reactivations carry a particular weight within MUNCH, an institution structured around an artist whose work is marked by repetition, variation and return, and by an ongoing attention to how artworks persist through material and perceptual change.⁰³ In this sense, they also resonate with broader tensions within Norway, where forward-looking environmental policies and technological investments are frequently associated with narratives of national progress, even as economic and material infrastructures remain shaped by long-term oil and gas extraction.⁰⁴ At moments this borders on the nostalgic, yet tactility and a purposeful return are positioned in fragile opposition to the accelerating, extractive logics of contemporary computation. This orientation emerges as a core curatorial focus, framed by O’Donnell as an attempt to offer ‘complex webs of knowledge, association and material exploration’,⁰⁵ a relational approach that, at least in intention, seeks to reach beyond the spectacle of technological novelty.

Inside the galleries, these ambitions are met by a visual field that is steady in its estrangement. The walls are washed in a saturated blue, evocative of the computer’s ‘blue screen of death’ – a colour whose technological associations hold the exhibition in a suspended clarity: recognisable yet displaced, and quietly disorienting. Against this field, Simone Forti’s multiplex Huddle (1975) hologram sets the stage. Tangled bodies appear and dissolve as temporalities in flesh open and close before they can be grasped. Later, Infopsin’s Patch Opal (2025) extends this visual logic into a darker register. Based on live-action role play and translated through Unreal Engine into a post-apocalyptic choreography, the work’s grid-like structure and exposed wiring assert a stark, infrastructural presence. The screen seems to draw the blue inward, absorbing it into a landscape of fractured movement and unstable terrain.

In this context, it is no coincidence that the Triennale’s language of portals and alternate realities emerges amid an increasingly techno-fascistic climate, extractive computation and the disorienting hum of algorithmic production. Its development feels reactive to a genuine cultural urgency, a point underscored by the inclusion of McKenzie Wark’s keynote in the opening programme, which traced these pressures through provocation rather than synthesis.

Similarly, at the level of encounter, this urgency does not resolve into a single position. Instead, ‘Almost Unreal’ activates a wide range of inquiry – technological, embodied, speculative, temporal and ecological – such breadth aligns with the Triennale format itself, which often privileges expansive rather than tightly bounded themes. While the exhibition proposes a provisional conceptual frame, it is ultimately the artists’ situated engagements with the real and unreal – shaped by lived experience, material practice and speculative interests – that stretch this frame outwards, producing a plurality of positions and generating relations through adjacency rather than consolidation.

This very openness also shapes the exhibition’s more disorienting moments. As these threads accumulate, disperse and at times dissolve into one another through the many artworks on display, the experience begins to mirror the unstable perceptual conditions the Triennale sets out to address. For visitors already moving through a world saturated with synthetic images, algorithmic cues, and shifting temporalities, the profusion of inquiries can feel less like orientation and more like a reflection of the perceptual instability the exhibition engages. ‘Almost Unreal’ registers the complexity of our present moment, even as it struggles to hold that complexity in a coherent frame. This tension around cogency can be understood as a condition shaped by this fragmented moment that the exhibition seeks to address.

Part of this intensity stems from the exhibition’s spatial and institutional containment. Unlike city-wide biennales, where multiplicity is absorbed by different sites, ‘Almost Unreal’ is staged entirely within MUNCH, spread across several floors of the building. Instead of producing a cumulative arc, the exhibition unfolds as a series of openings – brief engagements that shift as one floor gives way to the next. This rhythm recalls other institution-bound biennials, including the Whitney, where thematic trajectories accumulate inside a single institutional frame rather than across multiple sites. In such structures, ideas surface in parallel rather than sequentially, creating the impression of a centre that is continuously deferred.

Amid the exhibition’s shifting temporalities, Icaro Zorbar’s The Pace of Time (2025) feels uncannily present. Rather than projecting the visitor outward towards speculative futures, alternate realms or technological imaginaries, the work draws attention back into the density of the now. Its fragile choreography of components speak not of another time but of this one: of a reality felt through the body before it can be conceptualised. While it does not speak to any issue directly, it crystallises a feeling: circling within a delicate system, dancing to a tune we recognise but struggle to name, sustained by forces that lie just beyond comprehension. In a Triennale preoccupied with portals and projections, this work opens no elsewhere. It shows the visitor where they already are.

Set against this grounded sense of the present, the exhibition’s broader curatorial approach appears in a slightly different light. ‘Almost Unreal’ reflects a wider tendency to conceptualise technology as a theme rather than a material condition that structures how art is produced, circulated and perceived. Within this framing, technology can assume a spectacular role, an inclination heightened in biennial or triennial formats where the presentation of the new carries its own momentum. Such staging can gesture towards urgency while softening the harder questions around extraction, labour and the political climates in which these tools are developed. The exhibition acknowledges these pressures and at moments also visualises the anxieties they generate, yet its many trajectories tend to disperse rather than sustain critical examination.

Zorbar’s work stands apart because it resists this outward pull. In its wavering parts, the real and unreal meet without distraction or spectacle. For a moment, the Triennale’s questions steady, not as speculative futures or alternate realities, but as a quiet invitation to pay attention to the unstable present we already inhabit.