Our second major show with Karl Dunér marks the first phase of a project that will culminate in 2025 with two books, an exhibition, and a theater production. The first book will be published to coincide with this exhibition.

Didyme to Apollonios, brother and sun, greetings.
You should know that I do not see the sun because I cannot see you, for I have no other sun but you. I thank your brother Theonas.
(Take care of) what I sent to your father … Theon, son of Athenaios, your friend …

This letter, originally sent in the 2nd century CE, was unearthed in 1896 from an ancient garbage heap, alongside over 500,000 other papyrus fragments. These remnants preserve the memory of the lost city of Oxyrhynchus—receipts, letters, police reports, plays, philosophical texts, and countless other writings created and discarded over nearly a millennium.

This exhibition takes this particular garbage heap as its point of departure. It marks the first phase of a project that will culminate in 2025 with two books, an exhibition, and a theater production. The first book will be published to coincide with the exhibition at Galleri Duerr.

In his previous exhibition, Paraboler (Parabolas), Karl Dunér drew inspiration from one of the heap’s many theatrical fragments—Aeschylus’ lost play The Myrmidons. In this new exhibition, Dunér expands his focus to embrace the garbage heap in its entirety. The project, titled Sophögen (The heap), began in the winter of 2023 in collaboration with translators Jan Stolpe, Lars-Håkan Svensson, and Daniel Samuelsson.