Event

AFM x Ultima | Icaro Zorbar: And they call it present

Portrait of the artist Icaro Zorbar and an installation view of Beatriz Gonzalez exhibition
Icaro Zorbar

Playback machines are wound up, and unstable apparitions of light and sound emerge in this new performance by Icaro Zorbar presented in collaboration with Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival 

Tickets: 180,- / 100,- / free

The event takes place in the exhibition space. Ticket includes free admission to the museum the whole day (free for museum members) 

Every recording begins with the promise that something might outlast the moment from which it came. A voice becomes a trace. A gesture settles into matter. Vibrations find a surface on which to remain. 

Yet recordings never simply preserve. They continue to change. Every playback alters what is heard; every encounter leaves another trace. Time keeps working long after the event itself has disappeared. 

For more than two decades, Zorbar has built what he calls assisted installations. These delicate set-ups of analog machines, sound, light and living matter depend on human care, their duration brief and finite, like a music box that must be wound before it can play. Nothing runs entirely on its own. 

And they call it present, built from objects, gestures, recordings and spoken reflections, brings this practice to the museum. Through a careful sequence of activations, Zorbar gradually composes an environment in which each action subtly transforms the next. What appears exists only briefly, whether as a voice and its echo, a repetition, or an interruption. 

Icaro Zorbar is a Colombian artist based in Oslo. His work has been presented internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennial, the Lyon Biennale, the Modern Art Museum of Bogotá, Kunsthalle Osnabrück and the MUNCH Triennale. 

Zorbar compares the duration of his assisted installations to the frame around a painting: the mechanism defines the work’s temporal limits, unfolding only once activated, and only for as long as it can run. 

Presented in collaboration with Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival 10—19 Sep, 2026 


Exhibitions

Beatriz González

Astrup Fearnley Museet presents a retrospective of Beatriz González (1932–2026). Bringing together over 150 artworks this major exhibition explores the artist’s influential practice from the 1960s to the present.