KODE in Bergen is presenting The Purpose of a System is What it Does, a solo exhibition by Gardar Eide Einarsson, at its Stenersen venue for temporary exhibitions. The show opened on 30 October 2026 and runs until 28 February 2027, and it is the most extensive museum exhibition of the artist's work to date, spanning 25 years of production through more than 125 works, including new pieces commissioned specially for the occasion.

The exhibition takes its title from a phrase coined by the British theorist Stafford Beer: the purpose of a system is what it does. According to KODE, the show highlights how Einarsson's work foreshadowed much of the populist condition the world now finds itself in, charting a descent into a present age of conflict and illiberalism. It is part of the museum's ongoing series devoted to mid-career artists with personal and professional connections to Bergen, where Einarsson studied in the late 1990s.

Einarsson works across installation, painting, sculpture, printmaking, video and photography, drawing on his own ever-expanding archive of photographs and collected material. He consistently uses found materials to explore the visual and social culture that surrounds us, and his works return to questions of power, control and resistance.

A catalogue is to be published by Skira Arte in December 2026, with new perspectives on the practice by Dieter Roelstraete, Huey Copeland and Mathias Faldbakken, and an essay by the exhibition's curator, Synnøve Marie Vik. Einarsson was born in 1976 in Oslo, studied at the National Academy of Fine Art in Bergen from 1996 to 2000, at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, and on the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in New York. His work is held by institutions including MoMA in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm and SFMOMA in San Francisco.