Exhibition opening and performance: Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen

Join us for the opening of A Chimera Full of Love, Guilt and Frozen Vigor, a solo exhibition by Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, Thursday 28 May 18–20, at Oslo Kunstforening.

At precisely 18:15, the evening begins outside by the fountain on Christiania Torv, where a new performance will be presented in collaboration with musician Frode Haltli. Chimera Power and the Seven Women in Heaven (2026) is a newly commissioned performance in which text, music, and interaction unfold across different rooms, times, and moods.

Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen (b. 1970) is considered one of Denmark’s leading contemporary artists, and this is the first time her work has been presented in a major exhibition in Norway. The exhibition presents earlier and new work, including a performance developed specifically for the occasion.

This year marks the 190th anniversary of Oslo Kunstforening, Norway’s first art institution, founded in 1836, and the exhibition is part of the anniversary celebration. On the ground floor of our premises, visitors are invited into an in-depth exploration of the institution’s archive and exhibition history. Here, the historic plaster ceiling – adorned with mythical creatures and virtues drawn from the seventeenth-century worldview – serves as a point of departure for Cuenca Rasmussen’s presentation of her own ”archive material”. This material reflects an extensive artistic practice in which questions of identity, representation, and staging are central. Cuenca Rasmussen’s work frequently takes form as performance, which is subsequently carried forward and transformed across media including video, photography, sculpture, and installation – generating spaces where existential questions take shape and formal strategies unfold in dialogue with lived experience.

The exhibition’s starting point is the figure of the chimera – a fire-breathing hybrid creature from Greek mythology, composed of a lion, a serpent, and a goat within a single body. The figure operates as a metaphor for fragmented identity, the coexistence of contradictions, and the layered nature of personal history. Cuenca Rasmussen was born in Manila, the Philippines, where she lived until the age of eight, before her family relocated to Denmark. Across geographic and cultural contexts, the chimera becomes a recurrent motif for shifting political, cultural, and personal experiences – and for what the artist herself describes as in-betweenness: a liminal condition that resists fixed positions and categorisations.

The exhibition spans over two decades of artistic production, from the early performance work Cock Fight Song (2006) to more recent works including the sculpture Meteorite (2019), the video work 7 Stages of Gynophobia (2023), and the performance Chimera Power and the Seven Women in Heaven (2026), alongside new sculptures and photographs. Self-staging is a recurring theme across different forms of materiality – whether as a rotating sculpture, a fragmented body, or a figure carved in acacia wood. 

Together, the works bear witness to a persistent inquiry into art-historical hegemonies, patriarchal structures, and personal experiences of language and diaspora, in which the humorous and the serious operate in concert.