In The Unlikely Event of...
Site-specific sound installation at MOMENTUM 13 Nordic Biennial of Contemporary Art, in Moss, Norway 2025: In a 2x2m wooden shed overlooking the fiord, visitors are surrounded by a sound work in which the safety information we receive as travelers is a primary sound source. The work brings the world into the shed at the heart of the Alby cultural landscape and offers space for imaginary travel; over the fjord, across the ocean to another continent, a railway station in Alaska, a city in Ethiopia, a bullet train in Japan. The work revolves around themes of travel, safety, and the tipping point between everyday triviality, poetry and potential disaster. 



Photo above: Installation view at MOMENTUM 13. Photo: Eivind Lauritzen © 2025 Galleri F 15.
Materials: Shed (2X2m) placed on a field with a wide view, bench, multi-channel sound, speakers, amplifiers, playback device, audio recording of ambient sound as well as safety information from boats, trains and airplanes.

13th Momentum Biennial. Between / Worlds: Resonant Ecologies.
June 13–October 12, 2025 
Curator: Morten Søndergaard
Galleri F15, Moss, Norway.
https://momentum.no/

SELECTED REVIEWS, In The Unlikely Event of... at Momentum:
Klassekampen: review by Nicholas Norton 23. July 2025. (translated from Norwegian)
(...) Maia Urstad has constructed a small pavilion overlooking the sea. A sophisticated soundscape consisting of train signals, route announcements and voices announcing boarding and alighting in different languages ​​gives a sense of the complexity of the technological systems that surround us when we travel. The train network here becomes a living, pulsating organism that we usually only see the surface of – incomprehensible in its extent. One might think of it as a central nervous system, where we are transported back and forth as electrical impulses: on this journey one feels like a small component in a large and hyper-complex system (…)

Kunstavisen, Review by Andreas Breivik, June 19, 2025 (translated from Norwegian)
The world's director
(...) Maia Urstad's contribution blurs the boundaries between art and reality. «In The Unlikely Event of...» also consists of a fascinating visual element. In a small shed overlooking the Oslofjord, Urstad has installed seven speakers that play a hissing soundtrack, with spliced-together recordings from trains, boats, public transport, and the kind of messages telling about safety routines of a vehicle, the use of seat belts and life jackets. Inside the shed, it feels like being on a journey. At the same time, the shed frames the sea view, as if it were a landscape picture.
The strange thing is, that the things that move out there – seagulls, people, the Bastø ferry and the waves towards the shore– seem to follow the same rhythm as Urstad's music. Seeing the surroundings in this way is almost magical, because it seems as if Urstad has directed the seagulls and set the whole world in motion (…)

Kunstkritikk / Nordic Art Review: By Mariann Enge 25.06.25
(…) In Maia Urstad’s In the Unlikely Event of… (2021/2025), visitors can step into a small shed overlooking a freshly cut field that slopes down towards the sea and listen to a range of travel-related sounds – more specifically, various safety announcements. The pastoral landscape lends these announcements an absurd quality while also stirring personal travel memories and reflections on how futile safety measures can feel in the face of real catastrophe (…).