You could cut it with a knife
Hanni Kamaly, Melanie Kitti
April 11–May 18, 2025
Vernissage: Fri 11 April, 18.00–21.00

Please join us for the opening of our spring exhibition.

“You could cut it with a knife” is a common English idiom used to express tension so palpable you can slit it with a blade. As the world grapples with this very sensation, the exhibition takes it as its material, and presents artists who work at the precipice of discomfort. It plays with the raw friction of existence: strain, unease, the pull between worlds, forces working in opposition, the moment just before breaking point. Offering no assertive answers or solace, it instead explores the space in between and its potential.

Melanie Kitti presents fresco paintings depicting figures placed and trapped within frames. Limbs twisted into shapes, soft colours bleeding into each other. Some of the figures are human-ish, some animal-ish. This claustrophobic feeling extends from the artist’s refusal to be placed in a square. Kitti is interested in form and formlessness, the meeting point between language and painting, and the aftermath of the clash. 

Hanni Kamaly’s practice unearths narratives of subject making through sculpture, film and performance. Kamaly cuts into racial and colonial history to emphasise moments of dehumanisation and the construction of the Other. In this context the artist’s rigorous research manifests through video and their signature steel sculptures suspended in motion, balancing on needle-like legs and anchored on the gallery’s floor. Each sculpture is named to memorialise and to never forget.  

You could cut it with a knife is a meditation on resistance and release, a fragile balance held together by forces that threaten to tear it apart.

About the artists:

Hanni Kamaly (b. 1988, Norway) is an artist whose interdisciplinary works involve sculpture, video and performance, investigating the process of alienation and the devaluation of the subject. Kamaly graduated with an MFA from Malmö Art Academy in 2016, and also studied at Bergen Academy of Arts and the International Art Academy of Palestine.

Central to Kamaly’s practice is the human body, working as a home of the subject as well as a projection for norms, ideologies and power structures. Using post-colonial theory as a starting point, they explore how the idea of the Other is shaped and consolidated through historical writing and visual culture. Kamaly was the 2023 IASPIS Studio Grant Holder at ISCP, New York. Their work has been widely exhibited at institutions and spaces, including: Malmö Konstall (2025), Sharjah Art Biennial 15 (2023), 34th Biennial São Paulo (2022), Accelerator, Stockholm (2022). 

Melanie Kitti (b. 1986, Sweden) is an artist, author and community organiser, educated at the Academy of Creative Writing, the Royal Danish Art Academy in Copenhagen and the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo.

She co-launched Destiny’s, a gallery in Oslo in 2016, and co-founded Abhivyakti, a non-profit, multidisciplinary magazine in 2021. Her writing is featured in texts mending critical psychiatry with the arts in the critically acclaimed anthology ‘Hjertet er en fold med heste’, published in 2022. Her authorial debut Halvt urne, halvt gral, from 2022 is published by Gyldendal and Ellerströms, and was followed by borte / borta in 2023, published by Laboratory of Aesthetics and Ecology.

Kitti’s works have been shown in solo and group exhibitions in venues including Carl Eldhs Ateljémuséum, Stockholm (2024), O-Overgaden Copenhagen (2023), Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2022), ARIEL, Copenhagen (2022).

Curator: Tawanda Appiah
Technicians: Jenny Berg, Petter Dahlström Persson