Jamie Fitzpatrick: Kunsthall Trondheim

National Theatre

A solo exhibition presented at Kunsthall Trondheim, 4 June – 27 September 2026, featuring a new body of ambitious sculptural work, installed alongside sound and painted theatrical landscape sets, co-commissioned with Outer Spaces. 

In 'National Theatre', Fitzpatrick makes visible the backstage machinery of how nations build their identities through the revision and valorization of images. Monuments, history painting, and national anthems are presented as ideals of patriotic selflessness, but these visual and sonic regimes tend to betray their outward sincerity, slipping easily into operating as ideological machines, devices for transforming pastoral fantasies of belonging into weapons that justify territorial claims, entrench hierarchies, and muffle counter-narratives. In a deliberate estrangement of such unifying civic myths, the artist stages sardonic monumental sculptures and theatrical landscape paintings inspired by AI-generated renderings of preservationist rhetoric.

This solo presentation, the artist's first in Scandinavia, strips away the varnish from art's complicity in power, using the British experience as a case study to expose the treacherous agency of the stories we tell ourselves about who we are.

Through several new commissions, Fitzpatrick's focus shifts between utopia and dystopia, showing how nationalist aesthetic practices also conjure fictive environments that house an ideal country, to be traversed in thought and mind, rather than on foot.

Work for the show has been realised in Fitzpatrick's Outer Spaces studio at Fountain Bridge in Edinburgh.