Lila de Magalhães and Thora Dolven Balke at Entrée, Bergen

What does it mean to be a good host? Is it about creating a welcoming, enveloping atmosphere? Connecting physically and emotionally with your guests, even offering your body as nourishment? As mammals walking the earth, we are hosts to an entire world of life—forces that either nurture or challenge us in a constant dance of growth and decay. The human impulse is to crack open the egg, to pick at the growth, to carve into the belly of the whale once it is pulled from the deep.

Entrée is thrilled to present Modo Host, a collaborative duo exhibition featuring the works of Lila de Magalhães and Thora Dolven Balke. Through their work, they explore the fine line between care and consumption, hosting and inhabiting. Both artists share a close connection to Brazil. Lila, born and raised there, moved to Los Angeles, where she now lives and works, while Thora made roots there after a residency in Rio de Janeiro. In their own ways, they share the condition of being simultaneously familiar and a guest.

Like looking through a microscope at a teeming cluster of life, Lila de Magalhães’ work invites viewers into scenes where humans are joyfully intertwined with other species in moments of time-stopping surrender. Her ceramic sculptures and embroidered, dyed bed sheets, depict biomorphic creatures writhing, burrowing, and merging with each other and human forms. This play with scale—both in size and time—echoes themes in Thora Dolven Balke’s photography, sculpture, and video. Her work captures subjects in a state of suspended potential—such as cetacean fetuses photographed at the Sandefjord Whaling Museum— prevented from fulfilling their promise of enormity and movement.

At the heart of the exhibition is a welcoming display supporting both artist’s works. The table, shaped like a spill and engraved with de Magalhães’ ink drawings, is overflowing with soap that trickles down the inside of the legs. The exhibition’s mood shifts from earthy pinks, browns, and greens—evoking soil, fleshy mouths, and flowers—to the reds and iridescents of insect wings, pale yellow-greens of snot and seashells. A sharp, white electric light illuminates the space, drawing everything—large and small—toward it in an endless, aimless circling.

The exhibition is kindly supported by Art Council Norway, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond (BKV) and Bergen Municipality.