On Minks, Time, Change, and Beauty: Tove Kommedal’s Hommage

Entering the exhibition Hommage by Tove Kommedal, on view at Kraft Bergen through the 12th of December, 2025, I saw traces of a return to simplicity. The exhibition revolves around the concept of time and the dying practice of breeding minks in Norway. Six works are carefully placed in the space, four of them displayed on the white walls and the other two hanging from the ceiling. The design of the show refuses linearity and invites the visitor to wander. I obliged. A sense of returning home, both in a domestic sense, and as a return to nature, seems to be everywhere. But it is not that simple.

Wandering in circles, from one work to the next, I ask myself why Kommedal invites us, at the same time, to look back and forward. Then it hits me that the strength of Homage lies in this simplicity, which is present throughout the exhibition. But that is not all. Along with the plainness of the materials and forms chosen by the artist is a refusal of the current norm of avoiding the risk of appearing politically incorrect. For me, what makes Hommage worth a visit is a dialectical dance between its desire to stay simple and its attempt to resist simplification. Whether it succeeds or not is another story…

Novelist Clarice Lispector once said that it takes tremendous effort to achieve simplicity. While trying to get closer to Kommedal’s Hommage, I found myself wondering if she agrees with Lispector. I found hints of Kommedal’s effort in so many of the works; from her choice of materials and forms, to the titles of each piece, to the carefully selected marks and remains left behind for the attentive viewer to discover. Moreover, the exhibition refuses to take a polemic stance in a world reigned by polarized discourse. It presents a political issue, the fur industry, without simply choosing one side. It has the courage, or naivety, of placing itself between past and future, and knowing the fragility of such a position.

Kommedal’s choice to use cheap, accessible materials, most of which can be found in the home, such as cardboard, recycled paper, pins, ribbons, cocktail sticks, cotton thread, and polyester, strengthens the presence of one of the protagonists of the show: minks. The forms with which she chose to design the show, circles and lines, strengthen the presence of the other protagonist: time. When we pay attention to the co-existence of these two characters, we notice that the show can be read not only as a story that seeks to honor the dead. It is also an invitation to reflect on change, more specifically on the role of sorrow and the reconciliation it makes possible.

The exhibition text reminds us that minks were brought to Norway from Canada and USA at the end of the 19th century to be farmed. The mink fur industry was born then, and it has a date to die. 2025 is the last year that breeders are allowed to exploit minks in Norway. Should this industry have died a long time ago? Should the new regulations have been implemented already? Should this industry never have been born in the first place? I found myself dancing with these questions, as I am also a creature of this polarized method of reflection. Then Hommage til mink (2025), a large work made of recycled paper, animal fur, sticks, and cotton thread, shaped as a circle, caught my attention and invited me to go elsewhere for a moment. Someone had accidentally touched it, so the piece was moving. Seeing its gentle waves, it was easy to imagine the work as a giant dream catcher, inviting us all to imagine other ways of life, other cosmogonies. In my own heart and head I returned to indigenous communities that long ago existed in Guaxupé, the land where I was born. My grandmother taught me that among the tribes inhabiting our first home, before the colonizers arrived, were the Tupi Guaranis. Their way of life was very different from ours. Like my grandmother, they knew how to tell the time by looking at the sun. They believe that we humans are relatives of all that is. All animals are our relatives; we are not superior to them. Although that is the case, they also hunted and used the skin of animals to survive and build their world.

After my tiny thought exercise, I returned to Hommage with different eyes. I don’t think Kommedal is trying to say that the exploitation of minks was not wrong. It is undeniable that, in its capitalistic form, it is cruel and unnecessary. But is that all that there is to it? Now, in this time of change, Kommedal invites us to reflect on the role that minks had in keeping humans and rural communities in Norway warm and alive. And more than that, she invites us to return to what once was, in order to reflect on where we want to go, how, and with whom we are willing to share the world.

Kommedal’s work Pappskaller (2025) especially invited me to stay with this last question (and with several others related to it). It is a sculpture made of several small masks, each one perforated by a pin. From far away (and without reading the exhibition text or the titles of the pieces), I first assumed the little creatures constituting the sculpture on the left wall, all placed in an imperfect circle, were made of ceramic. When I got closer, I could see the material, which, I assume, by the title chosen for the work (Cardboard Shells in English), the artist wanted to expose. The pins on each one of the little sculptures reminded my gut of violence; a violence that was easy to miss depending on where one is standing. I walked to the next work, Pikedrom (2025) ( Girls’ Room) shaken by the reminder that our search for belonging is often suffocated by an imposition to fit in. For fear of not belonging, sometimes we unquestioningly repeat norms and habits common in our childhood homes. Or we do the opposite: we loudly question them without ever coming close enough to truly see them.

It was difficult for me not to view the artworks through a feminist lens. Almost immediately, I was aware of the fact that all works can be read as a representation either of circular or linear time. According to philosopher and writer Fanny Söderbäck, in the patriarchal story women are taught to exist in circular time. They are responsible for the maintenance of life, which demands a lot of repetition, mostly inside the domestic sphere. While men, the providers, are expected to exist in linear time, outside the house. They are the ones who go into the world and are responsible for implementing progress and development. Söderbäck also claims that the first wave of feminists mistakenly demanded that for women to be free, they needed to be allowed to enter linear time. In her view, neither linear nor circular time can help us make the necessary changes that are essential for us to share the world with one another. In her view, what we need is what she calls revolutionary time. That is, a mode of relating to time that neither represses nor repeats the past. When embracing revolutionary time, one returns to the past with her feet in the present, aware of how much we do not know, and with her imagination directed towards the future. The return to the past is intrinsically related to change. I smelled a desire to embrace revolutionary time in Hommage. I wonder if that was the reason why Kommedal designed the show as this invitation to wander around, back and forth from one work to another.

Indigenous Guarani and queer activist Geni Nunez claims that for reparation to become a possibility, we first need to be able to see what we are trying to repair. And how can a society see, if each of our hearts, hands, eyes, and bellies exist in different places? Standing in front of Pikedrom, it hit me how easy it can be to inherit a way of life and not question it. I felt a sense of unease and also curiosity. At the same time, the colorful ribbons where the fragments of dead minks were hanging reminded me of popular religious parties in my first home. Kommedal chose to place so many tails of minks close to one another, piled up, as if they were fighting with each other for space to exist. Not because there was no place for all of them, but because they all needed to be together. In the exhibition, there is a recurring aesthetic playfulness regarding a sense of togetherness and loneliness.

Then Post-Minkhus (2025) reaches out to me. This sculpture, which can also function as a filter through which one can experience the whole show, is made of sixteen wooden frames, each in the format of a house. Standing behind it, I see all the pieces again. I find myself wondering if I were unable to stay with Kommedal’s Hommage in a non-anthropocentric way. I wonder where the show could carry me if I were to listen to the mink ghost, jumping from one symbolic house to the other. I try to translate what it is trying to tell me, in a language I have not yet learned. Is the ghost mink saying that yes, yes, it is true that we should not oversimplify, but let's also not forget that beauty is political?

Staring at those tails fighting for space, the circular mandala of skins, the house structures, I remembered Geni Núñez’s claim that we need to reforest our imaginations and let go of the failed and violent idea of development. Instead, what the world needs is involvement. That is, that we regain the capacity of seeing ourselves not as superior nor as the center of the world, but as a part of all that is. I wonder if Hommage can be read as an invitation for just that; engagement with what is. Perhaps, to get involved with what is, we need to regain the capacity to stay with what is controversial, problematic, and unjust.