Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl & Isabell Spengler, Kent Chan, Gjertrud Hals, Maryna Makarenko, Hugo de Almeida Pinho and Amalia Valdés
Our best machines are made of sunshine

Opening reception: Saturday May 4th, 3PM

Our best machines are made of sunshine is a group exhibition conceived by independent curator Vanina Saracino, developed and presented at Møre og Romsdal Kunstsenter in collaboration with MRK’s Artistic Director Jet Pascua. The exhibition presents a selection of works by Kent Chan, Maryna Makarenko, Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Gjertrud Hals, Amalia Valdés, and the collective work by Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, and Isabell Spengler.

Between late 2024 and 2025, solar activity reached its peak in the current eleven-year cycle. Some researchers have speculated that heightened solar intensity may correspond to shifts in human behavior, suggesting that increased radiation from our closest star could intensify emotional and social dynamics, even giving rise to humanity’s so-called “greatest madnesses” (Chizhevsky, 2018).

The sun radiates more energy in a single second than humanity has consumed throughout its entire history. Borrowing from Bataille, the central challenge of solar energy is not its scarcity, but how we learn to navigate its overwhelming abundance through intentional expenditure. While current discourse on renewable energy largely focuses on technological solutions and systemic challenges, the shift also requires an expanded understanding of energy—one that is post-anthropocentric, more-than-human, and rooted in metabolic interdependence. After all, “we are energy; our very being consists of the expenditure of quantities of energy” (Stoekl, 2007).

On October 3, 2024, the most intense solar flare in over a decade erupted. A sunspot extended its radiant arm outward, releasing charged particles that traveled toward Earth. Days later, its waves arrived—unseen, but measurable. What forces shape our lives in ways we cannot immediately perceive?

Can the connection between solar activity and terrestrial life offer a lens through which to contemplate excess, resonance, and the cosmic conditions of our daily existence? Within the complex and deeply heterogeneous fabric of humanity, how do we—as individuals, artists, and societies—navigate the currents of solar energy held within our very essence? How do we resonate with the dual pulse of stellar light?

About the works:

Hugo de Almeida Pinho’s video Solar Capital (2023) examines the complex politics of visibility and invisibility that shape our symbolic and historical relationship with the sun, focusing on solar capitalism and the ramifications of energy extraction.

Maryna Makarenko’s Sun Eaters (2023) draws from Eastern European science fiction to imagine a speculative evolutionary path in which humans metabolize sunlight like plants. Rooted in the geopolitics of military conflict and displacement, the work speaks of the urgency of transformation in the face of immobilizing systems.

In Amalia Valdés’ series of paintings Perpetual Memories (2022–2024), symbolic compositions draw from Pre-Columbian cosmologies, family constellations, and sacred geometries to form a personal mythology. Through these totemic paintings, personal and ancestral memory are linked and projected into the eternal cycles of light and energy.

Kent Chan’s 2-channel video Solar Orders (2024) envisions futures in which the sun becomes the central organizing principle of life. In response to the real-world expansion of the tropics due to climate change, the work affirms a reordered metabolism: one where energy, society, and planetary rhythms are aligned with the sun’s excess.

Gjertrud Hals’ sculptural series Eir and Scala articulate structures that hold, connect, and transmit. Drawing from her upbringing on Norway’s northwestern coast, Hals weaves intricate networks that evoke biological and cosmic systems. The sun, while never directly depicted, emerges as a generative force within a web of material and energetic interdependence.

Die Hörposaune (“The Hearing Trombone”, 2022) by Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl, and Isabell Spengler explores the resonant space between voice and body, playing with perception and acoustic embodiment. Through layered gestures and sonic experimentation, the piece affirms a multisensory entanglement, where energies circulate through and beyond language, echoing the sun’s own omnipresent pulse.

“Our best machines are made of sunshine” is drawn from Donna Haraway’s book A Cyborg Manifesto (1985).

About the artists:

Isabell Spengler is a filmmaker and artist working in expanded cinema. In her films and video installations, she analyzes and mediates diverging constructions of reality, imaginary worlds, and their representations. Developing new conceptual forms of structural, narrative, and expanded cinema, she has collaborated as a performer, director, and author with choreographer Antonia Baehr, composer*/performer* Neo Hülcker, artist/filmmaker Lucile Desamory, and Los Angeles-based sculptor Alice Könitz, among others. Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions and festivals since 1998, including Berlinale Forum Expanded (2007, 2009, 2010, 2012) and the Bremen Award for Video Art (2021).
www.isabellspengler.net

Antonia Baehr is a choreographer living in Berlin. Her pieces explore, among other things, the fiction of the everyday and the theatre. Baehr studied with Valie Export in Berlin and completed her Master’s degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently collaborates in duos with Lucile Desamory, Neo Hülcker, Andrea Neumann, Latifa Laâbissi, and Jule Flierl. Baehr is also the producer of horse whisperer and dancer Werner Hirsch (who appears in Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz’s film installations), musician and choreographer Henri Fleur, and composer/performer and ex-husband Henry Wilde.
http://make-up-productions.de

Jule Flierl is a dance and voice artist from Berlin. She develops practices that conceive of the voice as a dancer, translating dance into the auditory realm. Her practice lies between experimental choreography and somatic singing methods, in which she develops scores to unsettle the relationship between seeing and hearing. She revives and continues the legacy of Valeska Gert, an avant-garde dancer from 1920s Berlin, who first conceptualized the term SoundDance: to dance with one’s voice. She hosts the voice performance series FROM BREATH TO MATTER in Berlin. For 2021, she collaborates in different formats with choreographer Antonia Baehr and SoundDance artist Irena Z. Tomazin.
https://juleflierl.weebly.com/

Die Hörposaune is the first collaboration by Antonia Baehr, Jule Flierl & Isabell Spengler.

Kent Chan is an artist, curator and filmmaker based in the Netherlands and Singapore. His practice revolves around our encounters with art, fiction and cinema that form a triumvirate of practices porous in form, content and context. He holds particular interest in the tropical imaginary, the past and future relationships between heat and art. His works have taken the form of moving-image, text, performances, and exhibitions. He has held solo and two-person presentations at Gasworks, Kunstinstituut Melly, Bonnefanten Museum, and de Appel. He has exhibited in institutions and festivals including Tate Modern, Liverpool Biennial, Videobrasil, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Seoul Media City Biennale.
https://kentchan.cargo.site/

Gjertrud Hals is a visual artist whose work bridges textile traditions and sculptural practices. Educated as a tapestry weaver, she began experimenting early with fiber-based materials, gaining recognition in the late 1980s with Lava, a series of vessels made from cotton and flax pulp. Her practice incorporates techniques such as casting, weaving, and knotting, often using natural and found materials. Influenced by life on her native Norwegian island Finnøy, as well as by her extensive travel, Hals explores connections between local histories and global narratives. Her work has been shown internationally and is held in public and private collections.
https://www.gjertrud-hals.no/

Maryna Makarenko is a Berlin-based multimedia artist and performer working with video, performance, sound, and voice. A graduate of the Berlin University of the Arts, she explores speculative narratives and shifting states of identity and presence. Her work has been shown at Videonale.17 (Kunstmuseum Bonn), Images Festival (Toronto), Scottish Queer International Film Festival, Galerie Wedding (Berlin), and Mala Gallery (Kyiv), among others. She has received support from the Berlin Senate and the Elsa-Neumann Scholarship. Makarenko has been a lecturer at UdK Berlin, leading workshops on performance, embodiment, and feminist and queer strategies in contemporary art.
https://cargocollective.com/marynamakarenko

Hugo de Almeida Pinho is an artist and researcher based in Portugal with a background in Media Art and Media Philosophy (MA, HfG Karlsruhe, Germany) and Visual Arts (BA, University of Porto, Portugal). His work, exhibited since 2009, explores themes of perception, cinema, and the sun. Recent exhibitions include Endless Sun (Gnration, Braga 2024), Solar Capital (ACUD Galerie, Berlin 2023), and Matter Non-Matter Anti-Matter (ZKM, Karlsruhe 2022). He has participated in residencies at Cripta 747 (Turin, 2020) and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2018-19). Pinho is also an editor and author of several books, including Sun Burn (2024).
https://dialoguegallery.pt/artists/hugo-de-almeida-pinho

Amalia Valdés explores the intersection of ancient symbols, sacred geometry, and contemporary art. Rooted in collective unconscious, her work establishes a precise relationship between form and color, blending concrete art with ancestral knowledge. She often revisits and reinterprets Latin American symbols, including Andean calendars, while exploring astrology and universal harmony. Since relocating to Berlin from her native Chile in 2017, Valdés has expanded her practice by engaging with new materials and perspectives. Her work invites reflection on history, time, and how ancient icons can offer alternative perceptions of reality, reflecting the diversity of the contemporary world.
https://www.amaliavaldes.cl/

Vanina Saracino is an independent curator, writer, and lecturer whose work challenges anthropocentric and binary worldviews through an intersectional approach, focusing on lens-based and time-based art. She is currently curating a series of exhibitions that explore the sun as a cultural, ecological, and political symbol within the current energy transition. Since 2021, Saracino has lectured on Experimental Film and Media Art at Universität der Künste (UdK). She co-curated the Screen City Biennial editions Other Minds (Berlin, 2022) and Ecologies – Lost, Found and Continued (Stavanger, 2019). Saracino co-founded OLHO in Brazil (2016–2018) and has collaborated with institutions like EKKM, Kumu Art Museum, and Salzburger Kunstverein, among others.
https://www.vaninasaracino.com/