Neglected and Abandoned

The Map Leads the Way.

Neglected and Abandoned – Part I took place in September 2025.

No banners. No opening speeches. No white cubes.

The exhibition takes place in the shadows – in the forgotten spaces
of the city. Empty buildings, darkened basements, backyards and places
waiting to become something else. Places the city has abandoned, or
already forgotten. We enter them and bring them back to life.

This is not decoration. This is art that refuses to play by the rules.

Raw walls. Dust. Silence. Artworks that do not ask for permission.

The audience may stumble upon them, encounter them without a filter – or walk past without ever knowing what they missed.

Neglected and Abandoned is the first chapter. A counterpoint to an urban development that gradually polishes away character, chance and memory. As old structures are demolished, rebuilt and homogenized, the traces of the people and stories that once inhabited them disappear as well.

We reclaim the ruins. Not to preserve them as museums, but to use them. To fill them with art. With people. With new narratives.Together with Christian Houge, we ignite the city’s forgotten spaces.
His portraits, created through the historical wet plate collodion process, open another kind of space – a space for human vulnerability, presence and rawness.

At a time when almost everything is filtered, edited and polished, Houge’s portraits insist on the opposite. They do not seek perfection,
but presence. The human being without a mask. Eyes that refuse to smooth things over. Skin that carries traces. Faces that cannot be reduced to a surface.

Chemical veils, scratches, stains and unpredictable imperfections make each image alive. What would be considered a flaw in a digital world becomes part of the work here. Chance is allowed to exist. It becomes part of the truth.

Where technology seeks control and perfection, collodion opens itself to the unpredictable. To slowness. To the tactile and the fragile.

The resulting images do not necessarily seek to be beautiful.

They seek to remain. They haunt.

The people depicted are not presented as ideals, but as carriers of vulnerability, strength, experience and fracture. The portraits become a counter-image to the staged reality of the present – a reminder that
what is real is never completely smooth, and that imperfection is not a weakness, but a trace of life.

When these portraits are placed within Oslo’s abandoned spaces, a direct resonance emerges between image and site.

Faces encounter raw concrete, dust and silence. The photographs meet buildings that themselves carry traces of time, use, decay and neglect. Both speak of what has been, what remains, and what is in danger of
disappearing.

A dialogue emerges between the human and the space.

Between skin and concrete. Between the living and the abandoned.

Houge’s work also engages with people at the margins – subcultures and ways of life that often exist outside the established centre. People and expressions that do not necessarily fit the polished image of the city.

This is where a central connection to Neglected and Abandoned emerges.

What does not fit the smooth narrative, what creates friction, what the city would rather conceal or forget, is given space.

And perhaps it is precisely within these spaces in between that something new can emerge.

Cities are never finished. They are living organisms in constant transformation. When something is demolished, it does not necessarily disappear. Traces remain in the walls, in memory, in people and in the places left behind.

Everything falls. Everything decays.

Concrete fractures. Ideologies rust. Communities erode.

But the ruin never truly dies.

It gnaws at us. It reminds us of what was. It opens a void – and within that void, something else may begin to grow.

Where the city fractures, new expressions can emerge.

New communities.

New ways of seeing.

New ways of being.

Neglected and Abandoned is therefore not only about what has been left behind. It is about the potential contained within what has been abandoned.

About seeing value where others see decay.

About finding beauty in the unfinished.

About making space for what does not fit.