Good news for people who like bad news
The alarm goes off.
7:30.
No.
7:30 is for people who are still trying.
8:00.
No.
8:00 is for people who answer emails before they have a pulse.
9:00.
No.
9:00 is for meetings, forecasts, PowerPoint decks and motivational posters.
10:30.
Do I have a cigarette?
Fingers scrape across the bedside table, through dust, old receipts and a life reduced to pocket size.
There.
A crumpled pack.
Light up.
Nicotine hits the chest like a soft head-on collision.
Shouldn’t I be at work by now?
The question hangs in the air alongside the smoke – diffuse and without an address.
12–14 December 2025
Sandakerveien 121 – The Printing Halls
Old newspapers slowly yellow at the edges. New newspapers are piled
on top, filled with headlines screaming about crises, records and
historic days – while the air in here can barely be bothered to move.
Good News for People Who Like Bad News is a time capsule
disguised as an exhibition. A place somewhere between the age of the
printing press and the aftermath of the internet’s arrival.
Damn you, World Wide Web.
The project looks both backwards and inward: towards Schibsted’s
relatively short but intense period in Nydalen’s printing halls, and
towards Nydalen’s much longer industrial history – a story in which
paper, machinery, noise and working life have gradually been replaced by
servers, presentations and silence with excellent acoustics.
The title is a site-specific nod to the building and the history
embedded in its walls. But it also reflects the perspective through
which the exhibition is presented: a personal, skewed and at times
tender journey through a life that has, to a large extent, been
overlooked by society.
There are no major headlines here.
Instead, there are small gestures, details and accidental traces.
The things that happen between the lines.
A life lived somewhere outside what is considered important. A
presence that is there, but never quite registered. Like a small note at
the bottom of a page no one finishes reading.
Designed and curated by Vacant Editions, the exhibition is conceived
as an installation. Graphic works, original artworks and small air-dried
clay sculptures come together to form an analogue archive of a life
lived on the periphery.
Here, the handmade meets the sketch-like and the almost-finished.
Fragments move between poster, note, object and diary page. Things that
do not necessarily explain themselves, but which, together, begin to
tell a story.
The works are created by Lardon, Per Øyvind Skjærvold Johansen,
Jørgen V. Bergh and Jens Kristian Hognestad, and produced by Vacant
Editions.
Together, they draw a map of a life lived at the margins.
A map of what was not prioritized.
What fell between the systems.
What continued to exist even when no one was really asking for it.
Good News for People Who Like Bad News is an exhibition for everyone who knows that the most important stories do not necessarily make the front page.
Sometimes they live in the margins.
Sometimes in the basement.
Sometimes on a bedside table at 10:30.
And sometimes, that is the good news.
