Hale Tenger
Hale Tenger is one of the most important artists of her generation. A sensitive observer of the power relations that shape and change our realities, Tenger has spent over three decades exploring how to navigate the search for freedom, and understand better our action in the world through the poetics of image, sound and language.
HALE TENGER / BORDERS / BORDERS is the first museum survey of the artist’s work. Spanning Tenger’s practice from the 1990s to the present, this exhibition features iconic multimedia installations alongside significant works in video, sculpture and sound, foregrounding the ways in which Tenger’s concern with history, politics and human psychology shape narratives of belonging and exclusion.
Though covering more than thirty years, the works presented in this survey continue to speak to urgent global concerns of rising authoritarianism, the erosion of the public realm, restrictions on freedom of movement, media control and crackdowns on dissent, while encapsulating Tenger’s enduring preoccupations: the cyclical recurrence of war and peace, the tension between violence and gentleness, as well as hegemony, human oppression and the subjugation of more-than-human life forms.
This exhibition demonstrates Tenger’s unique construction of ‘affective atmospheres’ through the layering of sound, image and language. Her installations unfold slowly, revealing a subtle interplay of presence and absence, truth and fiction, past and future. These are works that don’t offer resolution but rather create spaces for reflection—on how history is constructed, how narratives are weaponised, and how we might find new ways of being within, and beyond, borders.