Moder Evgenia

In connection with Ultima 2026, Marte Gunnufsen's exhibition Mother Evgenia is on view in Festsalen, on the ground floor of Oslo Kunstforening. Mother Evgenia is a multimedia spatial installation based on the life of Aino Theisen – an exceptionally gifted pianist who left a promising international concert career to enter a monastery as a Russian Orthodox nun under the name Mother Evgenia. The work examines this radical life choice and asks what happens when artistic virtuosity and discipline are transformed into a life devoted to prayer, silence and contemplation. The installation consists of film, sound, icons – and a self-playing grand piano.

The film shown in the exhibition was shot outside Tvedestrand in Agder, where Mother Evgenia lives together with a priest in a Russian Orthodox monastery that clearly distances itself from Putin and the Moscow Patriarchate. The film follows Mother Evgenia in the monastery's workshop, where frescoes and icons are made, and offers a glimpse into a liturgical everyday life marked by prayer, silence and choral singing.

A transformed grand piano, fitted with electromagnets and contact microphones, forms a central element of the exhibition space. The self-playing piano is controlled by custom software developed in collaboration with Jonas Meurer-Lunde. The sound is dispersed through a multichannel speaker system, and the musical foundation consists of fragments from the film in which Mother Evgenia herself plays the piano.

Gunnufsen's artistic practice revolves around outsiderness, with particular emphasis on subcultures and groups existing outside established communities, and explores how people on the fringes develop strong identities and alternative forms of belonging. This has led to collaborations with, among others, drag artists, people with albinism, sex workers, bondage practitioners, strippers, and deaf people. It is also through this perspective that Gunnufsen approaches the story of Aino Theisen.

Marte Gunnufsen and Aino Theisen also share a common background. Gunnufsen herself trained as a classical pianist and piano tuner, and she and Aino Theisen both grew up in Lillesand, where they had the same piano teacher during childhood. At the same time, they have taken very different paths in life since then. In Mother Evgenia, Gunnufsen explores asceticism, uncompromising life practice – and the inner tension between a life devoted to music and a life devoted to silence.