Professor Pedro Gómez-Egaña is Festspillkunstner 2027

Pedro Gómez-Egaña, holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Bergen (2012) and is a professor of Sculpture and Installation at the Academy of Fine Art

– I used to live in Bergen, and I remember all the discussions around Festspillutstillingen (The Festival Exhibition). I remember there was always a lot of speculation about the reasons for a certain artist to be chosen for this. I also know that these exhibitions have always received a lot of scrutiny, like there is suddenly a magnifying glass on this show. Being a foreigner, I didn’t use to understand exactly the place this recognition had. But slowly I’ve come to understand it. I know it’s not the right way to go about it, but if I’m honest, what I feel the most right now is that I don’t want to let people down.

The Festival Exhibition is considered one of the country’s most important solo exhibitions. It is curated and produced by Bergen Kunsthall and runs parallel with the Bergen International Festival.

– For a few years I have been working on a number of projects dealing broadly with “the underground” as a theme. Here, some of the questions that appear concern extraction, mining, science fiction, and many mythologies that point to the historical and cultural power of the subsoil. The exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall will be called Geodeath; it draws on various cultural sources, particularly musical and religious folklore, and presents a large installation that enacts the passage into the underground at the intersection of faith, sexuality, and death.

Gómez-Egaña works within an extensive artistic field where sculpture, installation, sound, and performance are part of a dynamic interplay. His exhibition will be spanning four galleries of Bergen Kunsthall.

– Looking at the underground allows us to connect with what we choose to hide, what we choose to extract, how we think of infrastructure, and how we relate to sustenance and extraction in dialogue with other animal species, minerals, etc. In this case in particular, I enjoy the overlap between the underground and the subconscious. As is commonly understood in psychology, learning what lies beneath the surface says a lot about who we are.

Photo: Carlos Tobón, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin.

Being a teacher

– Being a teacher constantly influences my thinking and my affect. It isn’t only about topics and ideas, although I am constantly in awe of my colleagues’ and students’ work and knowledge. The influence is more about how I see myself as someone who can be in the world with a degree of agency and porosity, which, in turn, is a fundamental state of being for making art.

Pedro Gómez-Egaña was born in Colombia. From the age of 6 he thought he’d be a concert violinist. As a teenager he left for the USA to study violin performance and music composition in a conservatory, but repetitive strain injury interrupted his career as a violinist and threw his life upside down. 

– One of the biggest lessons I learned in my journey from musician to injury to a new career path is that it sounds linear when I tell it, but it isn’t linear at all. In many ways, I am still a musician, and my thinking back when I was a composer had a lot to do with objecthood. The story of my career is like a big elastic chunk of mud that can get organised in millions of ways; sometimes my childhood feels very present, and then sometimes I feel like an “elder”; sometimes I navigate what I do with a feeling of total naivety and blindness, and sometimes I seem to fall into a role of knowledge-holder. Being a professor at the academy has been a very real interaction with these personas, and with the pliability of matter that is the curiosities embedded in my body, my tools and the interactions that are constantly shaping who we are. I’m sure my students recognise this —that I’m a mess, haha, but that I am growing comfortable with this messiness day by day.

After some years of treatments, surgeries, and the struggles and lostness having to change his career dream Gómez-Egaña ended up taking a degree on a practice between composition and performance art at London’s Goldsmiths College. Later as an artist in residence at the Laban Centre for contemporary dance he carried out a research project with the British Council at Goldsmiths College and Universidad Nacional in Bogotá. Here he started teaching and finding an interest in the art academy as a site for exploration and not just as a rite-of-passage into professional life.

– I have always been very resistant to the idea of the academy as a place that trains you for a professional future. I love to think of the academy as a destination in itself, one where things can happen in a way that can’t happen anywhere else. I think that this conviction is what my students get from me. I rarely talk about what we should do in relation to their “future” or the “world outside”. Instead, we team up to make the most of what the present circumstances allow. Sometimes this is about privileged access to spaces and resources, but sometimes it’s simply the enjoyment that a group of very different people ended up together in a room with the objective of learning something, anything!, in a very dedicated way. I kind of love this overlap of structure, mystery and purpose.

Photo: Carlos Tobón, Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin.

The exhibition “GEODEATH” opens at Bergen Kunsthall on Thursday 27 May 2027.

About Pedro Gómez-Egaña

Pedro Gómez-Egaña was born in Colombia and resides and works in Oslo. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Bergen (2012) and is a professor of of sculpture and installation at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín (2026), MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge (2025), Podium Oslo (2023), KODE Kunstmuseer in Bergen (2021), and Yarat Contemporary in Baku (2019). He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Lyon Biennial, the Steirischer Herbst Festival in Graz, the Istanbul Biennial, the Contour Biennial, Performa 13 in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (MAMBO), the Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo, the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo, the Kochi- Muziris Biennial, the Marrakech Biennial, the Brussels Biennial, and Colomboscope in Sri Lanka, among others.
Pedro Gómez-Egaña is represented by Zilberman Gallery (Berlin/Istanbul).