Bianca Hlywa

Directly outside Oslo’s Teknisk Museum sits a cargo container. In it is a heating chamber which all objects to be exhibited must go through in order to kill off anything living that might cause harm inside the museum.

Bianca Hlywa’s film The Heat Treatment documents conservation workers at the museum, tracking how the process of heat treatment evolved from past practices using toxic insecticides to treat objects, rendering them forever poisonous and causing nerve damage to conservators. The practices discussed reveal the ‘anti-life’ attention necessary to create the everlasting objects of the museums’ bizarre collection. Life and death intertwine within the museum’s walls, with the heating chamber central to the museum’s battle for ecological-hyper control over entropy.

The Heat Treatment is shown as part of Teknisk Museum's exhibition Klima2+. It has been developed following Bianca Hlywa’s participation in PRAKSIS residency 16, Live or Buy, which was developed with Nina Sarnelle, Ida Falck Øien and HAiKW/. It is made with support from The Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

The premier of The Heat Treatment takes place alongside the launch of Mattering Oil - six artistic interventions temporarily transforming Teknisk Museum into a creative gallery-laboratory to probe relationships to fossil fuels.