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Traitors, Jóhan Martin Christiansen"And it is in honour of their crimes that I am writing my book."
With these words, Jean Genetsets the tone for his novel Our Lady of the Flowers (Notre-Damedes fleurs), in which Paris is portrayed through characters on the fringes of society. We encounter drags, pimps, and perhaps most of all, betrayal and death. Genet’s characters contain many identitie sat once – within one person, we meet all people, both their beautiful and their dark sides.
The traitor is a figure thatevokes both fear and fascination – someone who steps outside the community and thereby becomes visible. In Traitors, Jóhan Martin Christiansen explores this duality: the beautiful and the shameful, the body and its transformations, morality and its aesthetics.
During his residency at Trykkeriet, Christiansen has created a series of twelve new copper etchings in both small and large formats. The works take their starting point in Michelangelo’s sculptures of thieves and other classical art-historical motifs, which are digitally reworked. Here, the figures are stretched and manipulated until they appear androgynous, crushed, or distorted – bodies in dissolution, neither male nor female, sinful nor innocent.
Across the picture surfaces, restless lines have been scratched, gathering and dissolving the motif at once. In some areas they condense into clusters; in others they tremble at the edges, as if the image itself quivers with doubt. Fragmented words and phrases weave into the works – echoes of themes of sexuality, exclusion, and betrayal.
History is full of traitors: from Judas Iscariot to Cassius and Brutus, from Victorian moralism to the broken hearts of pop music. In Genet’s writing, the traitor becomes a mirror figure for humanity itself – complex, double, unavoidable. In a similar way, Christiansen’s Traitors seeks to capture this ambiguous tension between body and language, guilt and desire, myth and the human.
Jóhan Martin Christiansen (b.1987) is a Faroese artist living in Copenhagen. His works span various media such as installation, plaster reliefs, printmaking and video and often explore questions related to materiality: How do we handle a specific material, and how are materials handled within a specific context – physically, emotionally, and philosophically? His artworks often contain small meaningful details in terms of materials, titles and form that invcoke themes such as landscape, home/homelessness, language and translation, queer body, baroque, pop music and historical events. Christiansen graduated from Malmö Art Academy and has since completed the interdisciplinary course Of Public Interest at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. In 2023, he founded the artist-run project space Bonne Espérance. His most recent exhibitions include Kongegaarden (Korsør, 2024), Kohta (Helsinki, 2024), The North Atlantic House (Copenhagen, 2020- 2021), Møstings Hus (Copenhagen, 2020), and the National Gallery of the Faroe Islands (2016).
The residence and exhibition are supported by the Faroese Ministry of Culture & the Nordic Culture Point
Stems, Kristen Keegan
Throughout 2025, Kristen has been on a flexible artist-in-residence at Trykkeriet. Given this prompt & invitation, she has explored ways of approaching printmaking linked to her current practise in painting and botanical dyeing.
The resulting explorations challenge traditional notions of print through the use of unrepeatable actions, applying plant matter as both print matrix and dye extraction concurrently. The plants featured within these printsspan two continents and two landscapes the artist is familiar with–both rhizomatic & slow-growing.
Stems thereby considers the notion of the indicator– both of ancient woodland, and of the processes evinced within each print. The peripheries ofthe print process are here foregrounded. Test strips and ghost prints, a seamless gradient, or thinking in transparent layers.Things in a landscape not immediately apparent, but made visible through print.
Kristen Keegan (b. 1988, Canada) has been based in Norway since 2017. Her work explores multifold approaches to image-making and abstraction –recently, through craft traditions such as botanical dyeing and printing. Open, conversational material processes give rise to diverse outputs, including painting, artist books and installation. In whatever iteration, her work considers embodied ways of seeing, using the language of colour to make room for slowness, attention, and ease.
Kristen completed her Master’s in Fine Art at The University of Bergen in 2019 and has since exhibited at venues throughout Scandinavia, including Entrée, Kunsthuset Kabuso, LNM, Konst epidemin, Årsutstillingen, Høstutstillingen and Hordaland Kunstsenter. She has participated in residencies in Finland, Iceland and Norway, as wellas The Banff Centre in Canada. Her work is held in public collections including the University of Bergen, Stavanger Library,and KODE museum. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include CommonOpulence: wishcraft (Art Gallery of Grande Prairie, Canada,2025) and a three-person exhibition at SOFT Galleri (Oslo, Norway,2026).
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Fjøsangerveien 70A, 5068 Bergen, Norway, Fjøsangerveien 70A, 5068 Bergen, Norge, Bergen, Norway
