MARGUERITE HUMEAU AT KISTEFOS

Kistefos is honoured to announce The Garden of Resuscitation, a major new site-responsive commission by Turner Prize-nominated artist Marguerite Humeau, to be inaugurated in the sculpture park in August 2026. The project marks the 60^th addition to the Kistefos Sculpture Park.

Conceived specifically for Kistefos and marking one of the artist’s most ambitious installations to date, the work unfolds across sculpture, ecology, ritual, and time. Through a series of sculptural interventions and seasonal processes, Humeau transforms the museum’s surrounding forest, long intertwined with the site’s historic pulp mill, into an artwork itself. Comprising an evolving installation shaped by interdependence, regeneration, and collective experience, the work resuscitates a relationship with the forest that may have been forgotten. Expanding the boundaries of what a site-responsive artwork can be, the project develops across an entire living ecosystem and over generations of transformation.

Known for creating speculative ecosystems that blur distinctions between myth, natural science, memory, and the animate world, Humeau’s practice brings us into contact with other modes of being and coexistence.

THE GARDEN OF RESUSCITATION

The Garden of Resuscitation (2026) is situated within the southern forest zone along the river at Kistefos. Conceived as a living and evolving environment, the work extends across the landscape itself, where ecological systems, sculptural forms, rituals, and seasonal transformations become part of a single interconnected network.

Reconstructing the life of a spruce tree in reverse, the project follows what Humeau describes as a “journey from the dead” — transforming a former landscape of industrial extraction into a site of ecological reverence, regeneration, and ritual. The work traces a speculative cycle of renewal through roots, fungi, plants, river currents, and interdependent species, proposing an alternative understanding of the forest as a sentient, metabolising entity.

At the heart of the project stands a monumental sculpture of a resuscitated spruce tree recomposed with elements of its parasitic and symbiotic species. Sculptural and ecological interventions drawn from site-specific materials, forms, and ecological relationships, are presented throughout the site, including a boardwalk; benches cast from paper-pulp leaves; mounds of waste mulch – sourced at the nearby paper factory – sustaining mushroom cultures, as well as cultivated plants grown specifically for the production of a continually evolving elixir. Glass vessels containing this elixir and annual communal gatherings invite visitors to physically engage with and embody the rhythms of the forest itself.

The Garden of Resuscitation imagines decomposition not as an ending, but as a process of transformation through which new forms of life, rituals, stories, and mythologies can emerge. The evolving recipe for the elixir, together with the annual gatherings and rituals, is intended to be transmitted across generations — inevitably transformed through repetition, memory, and reinterpretation.

SAVE THE DATE – PRESS PREVIEW

August 20th, 2026 at Kistefos Museum

Press preview

10:00–11:00 CET

Official opening ceremony and inaugural elixir gathering

12:30–13:30 CET

We are delighted to invite you to the official opening reception of Marguerite Humeau’s new permanent commission at Kistefos — a ceremonial inauguration of ritual, transformation, and celebration set within the landscape of the sculpture park.

The programme will include the inaugural elixir gathering, followed by a conversation between Marguerite Humeau and William Flatmo, Commissioner and Director of the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation.

For inquiries or registration, please contact:

Maria Sandvik: maria@kistefosmuseum.com

Tel+47 996 49 229

ABOUT THE WORK

Marguerite Humeau: The Garden of Resuscitation, 2026

The Garden of Resuscitation includes the forest in its ongoing entirety: the trees, plants, moss, fungi, animals, river currents, shorelines, the forest memories, and cycles of transformation that shape the site across time, histories, presents and futures, the moisture, the light, the earth, everything living and non-living that has existed, exists or will exist on the land in the future, the forest’s metabolisation processes. The work further encompasses a boardwalk, benches cast from paper-pulp leaves, mounds of paper-factory waste mulch and the mushrooms they sustain, a six-metre tall resuscitated tree sculpture, a recipe for an evolving elixir, glass vessels containing elixir, cultivated plants and trees cared for specifically for the production of the elixir — including fireweed, raspberry, yarrow, pine, spruce, and birch, an annual gathering, a forager, a gardener.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Marguerite Humeau (b. 1986, Cholet, France) lives and works in London. She received her MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2011.

Solo exhibitions of her work have been presented at HAM Helsinki Art Museum, Finland (2025); ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishøj, Denmark (2025); ICA Miami, USA (2024); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2021); Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany (2019); Museion, Bolzano, Italy (2019); New Museum, New York (2018); Tate Britain, London (2017); Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2017); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2017); Nottingham Contemporary, UK (2016); and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2016).

Humeau’s work has been included in the 15th Gwangju Biennale (2024), the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Cecilia Alemani (2022), and the 23rd Biennale of Sydney (2022).

In 2023, Humeau realised the 160-acre earthwork Orisons in the San Luis Valley, Colorado, curated and produced by Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum — one of the largest earthworks ever created by a solo female artist. In 2026, she was nominated for the Turner Prize for her exhibition Torches, presented at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art before travelling to HAM Helsinki Art Museum (2025–26).

ABOUT KISTEFOS

Located on the grounds of a historic pulp mill north of Oslo, Kistefos is a unique cultural destination combining contemporary art, architecture, industrial heritage, and natural landscape. Today, Kistefos comprises an industrial museum, two art galleries, and a sculpture park featuring major site-specific commissions by leading international artists. Kistefos was named one of the world’s “must-see cultural destinations” by The New York Times in 2020,

The award-winning gallery building The Twist, designed by BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group, functions simultaneously as museum, bridge, and sculpture. Spanning 60 metres across the Randselva river, the building has become an international landmark for contemporary architecture.

SCULPTURE PARK

The sculpture park at Kistefos is continuously expanded through new commissions and today includes 59 works by artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Mark Manders, John Gerrard, Olafur Eliasson, Yayoi Kusama, Ida Ekblad and Dana Schutz.

Many of the works are conceived specifically for the site and engage directly with the landscape, industrial history, and changing natural environment of Kistefos. Ranging from monumental installations to more subtle interventions, the collection evolves continuously through shifting seasons, weather conditions, and the surrounding landscape

ART

This season, Kistefos presents two new exhibitions: Fish, Fish, Duck, the first Nordic solo exhibition by London-based painter Issy Wood at Nybruket Gallery and When I’m In My Painting in the Twist, featuring works by Ragna Bley, Ida Ekblad, Oscar Murillo, and Albert Oehlen, artists represented in the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation Collection.

INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE

The history of Kistefos began more than 130 years ago with the establishment of A/S Kistefos Træsliberi by consul Anders Sveaas in 1889. The factory produced wood pulp on the site until the mid-1950s. Today, the preserved industrial buildings and machinery form part of a living museum experience, connecting the site’s industrial past with its contemporary cultural programme. The river Randselva — once the foundation of the factory’s operations — continues to run through the entire site and remains central to the identity and history of Kistefos. Kistefos in its current form was established in 1996 by Norwegian businessman and art collector Christen Sveaas, grandson of Anders Sveaas.