Sonia BARREIRO, Lisa BROMS, Jenni ÖSTERLUND, Sahar TARZI

Meet me in the hollow

Vernissage 22.05. 18 - 22

22-24 May 2026

MLAG

Halfdan Kjerulfsgate 4, 5017, Bergen.

Opening Hours: 1-4 pm Saturdays and Sundays or by appointment

Curated by Viola Dóra Lenkey



MEET ME IN THE HOLLOW The feeling of safety so often involves the desire to disappear. Why do we need to become invisible to feel safe – and where do we go when we disappear? Meet me in the hollow brings together four artists to explore how safety is constructed in moments of uncertainty. Through installation, prints, and sculpture, the exhibition considers the ways individuals create spaces of refuge – physical, emotional, and symbolic – shaped by memory, fear, and the need for protection.

Here, safe space is not a fixed location but an act: something performed, imagined, and continuously reshaped. It emerges through gestures of transformation and disappearance – hiding behind a locked door, retreating into childhood fantasies, reshaping memory, or dissolving into other forms. In these moments, invisibility becomes a strategy of self-preservation.

The works trace how these impulses unfold across different situations: a public bathroom turned into a private refuge – a communal space that belongs to no one and everyone at once – Barreiro reveals how the simple act of locking the door can transform this moment into something deeply personal. To seek shelter is also to negotiate visibility. A non-place becomes a refuge: a site of privacy, care, and temporary invisibility. The faces and expressions depicted in Barreiro's prints extend this further, reflecting the quiet urgency of that need: to be seen only when we choose to be.

Österlund approaches the question of visibility from the perspective of survival. She raises the question of whether disappearance is required in order to survive. Her practice holds the tension between disappearance as an individual strategy and endurance as a collective condition – asking who holds responsibility when the stakes exceed the self. Her hanging installation carries a military aesthetic, yet the softness of the textile introduces a striking contrast, emphasising the importance of care and emotional preparedness alongside physical survival.

Broms constructs personal mythologies through the merging of human and animal forms, exploring how childhood fantasy and imagination can become a shelter for identity. Her large scale equestrian sculpture invites the viewer to move deeper into fantasy to construct one’s own narrative while it reflects gently on the tradition of equestrian statues based on the idea of power and domination. Broms offers a different approach for connection and noticing our surroundings. The merge of the female body with the horse feels like a mythology built from the inside out, a shelter shaped by the self.

Tarzi works with the tension between remembering and forgetting, tracing how memory shapes and erodes the self. Her work reflects on the difficulty of recognising which memories are grounded in reality and which are not. Just as a mirror does not reflect reality but shows only fragments, constructions, and instability, her sculpture holds the same unsteady truth. The fragments of the mirror hanging above the torso allude to the identity crisis that can be triggered by a flood of memories. In the moment of forgetting, one's identity can be shaken – a fragility to which the missing parts of the bust sensitively allude.

Together, they suggest that safety does not reside in external conditions alone, but in the internal structures we construct and inhabit. The hollow becomes a shared space – a private shelter – where vulnerability and care can co-exist. It is not a place of resolution, but of temporary holding space.

The question lingers: are we hiding alone – or is there someone else in there with us? 



Curated by Viola Dóra Lenkey



Supported by the City of Bergen