Extended program Fall 2026

All events in the foyer are free

● Season Opening
Thursday 20 August / 18:00
Foyer

Welcome to the season opening! We kick off the season with bubbles and a welcome speech from our new theatre director, Jon Refsdal Moe. For the occasion, artist Javon Bennett will create a cake/edible sculpture. Bennett is part of the artist collective Rot Society, which is current with the performance Alimentary School this season.

● Keynote Lecture: The World Ends, Masculinity Endures
Thursday 27 August / 17.30-18.30
Foyer

In the preparatory work for the performance Male Fantasies by Pia Maria Roll and Mohamed Mohamed, Ana Teixeira Pinto’s essay Male Fantasies: The Sequel has been a reference for Pia Maria Roll. In September, Pinto will publish a new book, The World Ends, Masculinity Endures, in which Pinto takes as a starting point the concept of “cyber-feudalism” and asks what happens when citizens are gradually rendered redundant, and which ideologies legitimize this development. In connection with this, we have a keynote lecture by Ana Teixeira Pinto, and after the performance there will be a conversation between Pinto, Roll, and her company.

The World Ends, Masculinity Endures by Ana Teixeira Pinto
In this talk, I argue that, contrary to what proponents of terms like “cyber-feudalism” suggest, when we speak about the dawn of a new cyber-feudal era, we are not really describing the end of a specific mode of production. Rather, we are witnessing the retreat of the state’s most socially integrated facet. Cyber-feudalism, as I understand it, names the moment when the majority of the population, no longer relevant to the primary mode of accumulation, can be disposed of. This, I contend, is what underlies the ongoing assault on political and civil rights: without incentives to sustain their populations as members of a political community, states will seek to suspend the rights they had previously granted, and this is the stage we are now in.

Trump’s murderous alacrity, his use of maximum brute force with a minimum of justification, violence that is technically precise yet morally illegible, open contempt for international law, and absolute impunity, are the epiphenomena of this transition. The cruelty is not the point; the cruelty is the affect. The point is to unmake citizens and govern the rightless as wards.

When states abdicate the work of sustaining populations, they leave a void—not only in material provision but in meaning. That void, I argue, must be filled by an ideology capable of naturalizing the notion that neglect is not a breakdown but a restoration of order.

If cruelty is the affect, artificial intelligence the infrastructure, and the unmaking of citizens the political project, then my central claim is this: masculinity, understood as an ideological formation, is what performs the ideological work and supplies the moral grammar for this transition.

Taken together, cruelty as affect, masculinity as grammar, the unmaking of citizens as project, and artificial intelligence as infrastructure constitute the ideological and material apparatus of an emerging new mode of governance, and it is these coordinates that this talk maps out.

Ana Teixeira Pinto is an author and cultural theorist. She is a professor of art theory and digital cultures at HGB Leipzig and editor for Sternberg Press’s book series On the Antipolitical. Her texts have been published in publications such as Third Text, Afterall, e-flux journal, Hyperallergic, Ibraaz, artforum, and Berlin Review. She co-organized HKW Berlin’s conference and podcast series The White West, and co-edited the subsequent publication Fascism, Unreason and the Paradox of Modernity (Sternberg Press/MIT).

The Keynote Lecture will take place in English.

● After-talk
Thursday 27 August
Foyer

After the performance Male Fantasies, there will be an after-talk with Ana Teixeira Pinto, Pia Maria Roll and Mohamed Mohamed. The conversation will be moderated by Mike Sperlinger and will take place in English.

● After-talk
Saturday 26 September
Foyer

Welcome to an after-talk with Rosalind Goldberg and dramaturg Maja Zimmermann right after the performance Ornate Saturation. Maja Zimmermann is a dramaturg and curator working within contemporary dance and performance. Alongside her freelance practice, she has collaborated with a number of choreographers and artists, mainly in Berlin and in international contexts, on performances, research processes, and interdisciplinary projects. She is currently part of the programming team at PACT Zollverein in Essen, Germany, where she co-curates festivals, platforms for new artists, open studios, and other public events. With a background in visual arts and dance studies, she works at the intersection of dramaturgy, curating, and the development of formats for dialogue and exchange, with a particular interest in relationality, care, and bodily practices.

The conversation will take place in English.

● Breakfast Conversation with Maritea Dæhlin and Ifrah Osman
In collaboration with Black History Month
Tuesday 6 October / 09.00-10.30
Foyer

Every season, Black Box teater invites the artist Maritea Dæhlin to curate and moderate breakfast conversations with invited guests. We serve a simple breakfast, coffee, and tea, and invite the audience into the conversation. This time, Maritea Dæhlin has invited Ifrah Osman.

Ifrah Osman is a curator and educator based in Oslo, and works as a curator assistant at the Astrup Fearnley Museum. With a background in peace and conflict studies, her work encompasses exhibitions, public programs, textual contributions, and curatorial projects. Among other things, she has been a program developer at Kunsthall Oslo, and has worked for and in collaboration with MUNCH, The National Museum, KORO, Bergen Kunsthall, and The Academy of Fine Art at KHiO. Her practice is research-based and oriented toward art-historical investigations into how works and artistic practices are read, assessed, and attributed value in relation to power, taste, and the contemporary.

Maritea Dæhlin is an artist who lives and works in Norway and Mexico. Her work spans theatre, video performance, performance art, sound art, and stage text. Her artistic practice is characterized by the multilingual, non-linear, and at times absurd. Dæhlin was previously an associated artist at Black Box teater (2021–2022).