Studiestart 2026: Tale fra kunstner Anawana Haloba

Good afternoon—and welcome.

To those of you entering this Art Academy for the first time: welcome to the beginning of a new uncertainty.

To our returning students: welcome back to the work you thought you knew, and which I hope will surprise you again.

To my colleagues in teaching, research, administration, technical support, libraries, workshops, cleaning, maintenance, and every part of this institution: welcome back to the shared labour of making education possible.

I would like to begin with words that some of us know from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

I return to these words because I think education, at its most alive, must interrupt the single story. It should not replace one single story with another. Rather, it should teach us to notice what has been excluded, to recognise who has been made invisible, and to listen for what cannot easily enter the dominant language.

In my practice, I understand this interruption through what I call **Imaginative Reclaim**. It does not mean returning to a pure or intact past. It begins from the tear and asks what can be re-entered, re-voiced, refigured, and restaged after rupture. I will return to this idea later.

For me, this is not only a teaching principle. It is also an artistic urgency.

I have come to believe that teaching and learning must be interchangeable positions. In every act of teaching, one must also be prepared to unlearn and relearn.

Twenty-four years ago, I arrived at Oslo Art Academy, fresh in my early twenties, full of uncertainties, and in a whole different cultural landscape unknown to me. I learned from one of my professors, the Austrian philosopher and cultural theorist Robert Pfaller, that knowledge is relational. In his philosophy class, I found myself revisiting African philosophies through an encounter with Plato. Although I had already been exposed to Plato during my teacher-training diploma, something unexpected happened: a theory that seemed distant brought me back to methods and ideas closer to my own formation. 

What stayed with me was not only the reading. It was the way Robert connected emotionally and intellectually with his students. He did not ignite curiosity by displaying the complexity of what he knew. He created conditions in which we could recognise that we, too, were capable of thinking, and recognise the potential for surprise in our own comprehension and creativity.

That is the quality I aspire to as a teacher and student.

Teaching is not the delivery of completed knowledge from the person who knows to the person who does not. It is the building of an encounter in which all of us may be changed. The teacher brings experience, responsibility, and structure. The student brings knowledge, history, intuition, resistance, and questions that the teacher cannot predict.

This does not mean that all positions are identical. A teacher has power. An institution has power. A curriculum has power. A reading list tells students which voices have been authorised to explain the world. A timetable tells us which forms of attention are valued. A workshop, a lecture hall, a budget, a visa decision, a language requirement, or the accessibility of a building can determine who is able to participate. 

Pedagogy therefore happens not only in the classroom. It is made through the entire institution and its relation to the outside world.

Therefore, to undo the incomplete story, we must ground reading and knowledge-sharing across philosophies, cultures, methods, films, music, and artistic practices. In all this, students bring their experiences, histories, movement, and love that come to sit alongside theoretical texts shared in the course, because knowledge enters us through more than one door. A rhythm may clarify what a definition cannot. A moving image may allow us to feel the political construction of a gaze. A sound may make history present before we have found the words for it.

This is not a rejection of theory. It is an expansion of how theory can be encountered, tested, and carried into practice, and how you as students can find yourselves.

It is through this insistence that we begin to undo the authority of the incomplete story. Not to produce a final, complete story—because no one person, curriculum, or institution can do that—but to create a more responsible relation among stories.

This is why unlearning matters. Unlearning is not forgetting. It is learning to recognise the assumptions that have become so familiar that they feel like facts. It is asking: Who produced this knowledge? Under what conditions? Who benefits when it becomes the only explanation? What other forms of knowing have been dismissed as anecdote, ritual, craft, memory, superstition, or merely personal experience?

And relearning means returning differently. It means allowing what we encounter to change not only our opinions, but our methods.

As creatives, and as many of my colleagues present here work across fields, we know the importance of histories—our backgrounds and positionalities—and how they feed into our practices. Now, I will share a bit from my artistic practice, in which I work through Dialogue, (Re)Pair, Imaginative Reclaim, Writing as Making, sound, sculptural vessels, experimental operas, and collaborative pedagogy.

It begins with my formation in the political landscape into which I was born, and with the experience of moving from Zambia to Norway and becoming aware that Blackness, the Black female body, exile, and the politics of belonging would shape how my voice was heard.

Given this, I understand that you all come with unique histories and backgrounds, different oralities, and a pressing question arises. I ask the institution and ourselves: What must change when the available structures of knowledge have already failed to recognise the life of the object, the force of oral knowledge, or the histories they have rendered invisible?

I learned that pedagogy could not simply be an activity added to an artwork. Cooking together, listening to elders, gathering artists and curators across generations, building a place, and sustaining relationships were part of the artistic and research method.

Hospitality became a research condition. Dialogue became a material. The classroom expanded into kitchens, courtyards, workshops, stories, songs, objects, and long conversations.

But I also learned that Dialogue is not automatically good. It can fail. It can reproduce hierarchy. It can ask the person who has been injured to perform their pain so that others may learn. Oral traditions can carry wisdom, but also exclusions, patriarchies, and silences. Community does not mean agreement.

Our pedagogical task is therefore not to romanticise dialogue or participation. It is to create conditions in which people can speak, question, correct, refuse, remain silent, and still belong.

I have already alluded above that everything exists in a volatile multiplicity, in relations and communities that are supposed to be in dialogue, encompassing a “we” factor. The “we” is made of related subjectivities—never identical nor fixed, but always shifting. A politically informed community is not one that sings a single chorus. Instead, it is a charged proximity of individuals, each with separate yet connected responses, histories, trauma, and inheritances. Each person is a site where power lands and memory is edited; silence is produced, all in full exchange with creation.

With that in mind, I would like to bring you closer to the times we are living in. We begin this academic year in a world that is asking very difficult things of its artists.

We live amid ecological breakdown, wars and forced displacement, attacks on democratic life, widening inequality, accelerated technologies, and an economy that can turn every human gesture into data, content, or profit. We are surrounded by images, yet we struggle to see. We have unprecedented means of communication, yet public language is increasingly reduced to slogans, certainty, and hostility.

In her 2026 commencement address at the Rhode Island School of Design, Julie Mehretu spoke to artists and designers about working within contradiction, taking responsibility for inherited worlds, and using creative practice to imagine what does not yet exist. What I take from her address is not that artists are heroic figures who will rescue society. It is that artistic practice trains capacities that the present urgently needs.

Artists learn to stay with an unresolved question. We learn that materials answer back. We learn to notice what changes at the edge of perception. We learn that failure may contain information. We learn to hold grief and beauty, anger and tenderness, the personal and political, without forcing them too quickly into one conclusion.

These capacities are not luxuries. But neither are they innocent.

Art has been used to liberate and to dominate; to build community and to manufacture national myths; to reveal violence and to aestheticise suffering; to open public imagination and to increase market value. To call oneself an artist is not yet an ethical achievement.

The question is: what relations does our work produce? Whose voice does it carry? Who is asked to become visible? Who is allowed opacity? What worlds do our materials depend upon? What institutions authorise the work—and what responsibilities follow from that authorisation?

So what might the role of the artist be today?

First, can the artist be a listener—not a silent observer at a safe distance, but someone willing to be changed by proximity? Listening is not waiting for our turn to speak. It is recognising that another voice may alter the structure of our question.

Second, can the artist be an unlearner: someone who examines inherited categories and asks whether they are adequate to the lives they claim to describe?

Third, the artist can be a builder of relations and infrastructures. Sometimes the work is not only the object in the exhibition. It is the studio culture we create, the library we share, the meal we prepare, the workshop we maintain, the people we invite, the credit we give, and the conditions under which others can make work.

Fourth, the artist can be a keeper of complexity. The public world often rewards immediate certainty. Art can protect the unfinished, the contradictory, the difficult, and the not-yet-known. This is not an excuse for vagueness. It is a disciplined refusal of the single story.

And fifth, the artist can make counter-futures perceptible. Here, I return to Imaginative Reclaim. It does not mean returning to a pure or intact past. It begins from the tear and asks what can be re-entered, re-voiced, refigured, and restaged after rupture.

The artist’s role is not to repair the world alone. Some wounds do not close. Some histories do not return whole. The task may be to refuse numbness, to make a space where damaged histories can be encountered differently, and to insist that another relation is possible.

To our new students: you do not need to arrive here with a complete voice. A voice is not a possession discovered once and then defended forever. It is formed through attention, practice, history, doubt, relation, and change.

Bring the knowledge with which you arrive. Bring your languages, family stories, obsessions, popular cultures, uncertainties, pleasures, and ways of making. But do not protect them from every question. Let the encounter deepen them.

To returning students: return not only to what you have mastered, but to what remains difficult. Ask whether your methods still serve the questions you now have. Make room for surprise.

To faculty: may we resist teaching ourselves as finished. May we offer rigour without using difficulty as a gate. May we teach canons while revealing how canons are made. May we create classrooms in which disagreement does not become expulsion, and care does not become the avoidance of challenge.

And to administration and all who maintain this institution: pedagogy depends on the structures you shape. Care is present in contracts, rooms, access, time, staffing, equipment, language, and the distribution of resources. The values of a university are not only written in strategic plans. Students encounter them in every procedure.

All of us are responsible for the ecology of learning.

I want to close with a teaching carried by our ancestors: they taught us not to conquer nature, time, and the cosmos.

To me, this is not a nostalgic sentence. It is an instruction for the present.

Do not conquer the material—listen to what it can and cannot become.

Do not conquer time—learn from what came before, and make room for those who come after.

Do not conquer the world through a single explanation—enter into relation with its multiplicity.

Perhaps this is what an academy of the arts can offer now: not certainty, not mastery over everything, but practices of attention, imagination, responsibility, and relation.

Let us begin this year willing to teach and to be taught.

Let us undo the single story without pretending that we can complete every story.

Let us make work that is beautiful when beauty is necessary, difficult when difficulty is honest, and urgent without surrendering complexity.

And let us remember that the world does not need artists because we stand outside it and explain it.

The world needs artists because we are inside it—implicated in it, responsible to it, and still capable of imagining how we might live otherwise.

Welcome to the new academic year.