With an ambitious two-day programme of both talks and performances, Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo discusses and showcases what performance can look like in the museum: the practical problems that it poses as well as the philosophical and political implications it carries. In the Moment hosted questions such as: How do you preserve something that is immaterial? What is the performance of a museum during a genocide? And how can we build a structure to be alive inside?
Under the title, In the Moment, Nasjonalmuseet presents both an artistic programme with a performance concert by Meredith Monk and two commissioned performative works by Sagg Napoli, Elina Waage Mikalsen and Jassem el Hindi curated by Geir Haraldseth as well as a discursive programme curated by Håkon Lillegraven with 10 presentations on how performance art and art institutions influence each other today.
In the opening speech for the discursive programme, a seminar titled Institutional Genealogies – performance art and the museum, the mic coincidentally stops working the moment curator Håkon Lillegraven mentions “freedom of speech”, acting as a sort of omen for the rigidity and resistance of museums and other art institutions, when politics start seeping in through the walls. As we all know, art museums are ancient institutions with problematic histories, and they haven’t always adapted to a changing world with new practices and politics, new ways of writing and performing history and unruly bodies insisting on being alive inside these rigid structures.
The programme of In the Moment moves in this friction between the museum and the performance, offering us lots of questions, but also some answers, possible paths that future museums and performances can tread. This text is a soup of my experience during these two days of thinking, discussing, speculating and performing. The chronology has been partly dissolved. Some thoughts and works have cross-pollinated each other, some quotes are maybe half-remembered or hallucinated. Most questions remain unanswered, ready to perform as small problems in the machinery of museums and other art institutions.
Misunderstandings, restlessness and re-calibrations
The seminar starts off with a screening of the artwork The Guided Tour (2024), a film by the artist Maren Dagny Juell. In the film, the narrator is a sort of archaeologist in the future visiting a “museum” and trying to find out what kind of place it is and why humanity preserved the things we did. Dagny’s fictional museum is a museum of trash, sounds and energies, that has been preserved through ambiguous conservation, classification and display methods. “The soup preserves. It also erases memories,” the voice utters, pointing to the both edifying and violent history of museums. With this ambivalent statement, we’re invited to look at the museum with new eyes. How would our future selves look at the museum practices of today?
Misunderstandings and mistranslations as a way of looking at things anew, also serves the as the framework for curator Kjersti Solbakken’s talk, drawing on her work as the director of Bergen Kunsthall as well as being the curator of Lofoten International Art Festival in 2024. She tells an anecdote of a show she curated at the kunsthalle, where just as the show opened, there was a flooding of the bathrooms. The flooding was discovered by a visitor who came to the staff and well-willingly asked: “Is it a performance or is it a problem?”. Even though the experience was merely a cute misunderstanding, Solbakken uses the example to talk about how a performance can be a problem posed to the institution. “Maybe performance is what reveals what an institution is?”, she asks.
A similar contamination (although this one an actual performance) takes place in curator Hendrik Folkerts talk, when he mentions a performance by Wu Tsang and boychild that he curated at the Stedelijk Museum in 2014. Here the glitter from the performer’s face entered the ventilation at the museum, contaminating the sterile space of the museum in more than one way.
“We’re giving birth in the mausoleum”, another of Folkert’s collaborators, performance artist Cally Spooner once said to him, to talk about the contrast of making live performance at such a place. Folkerts goes on to ask, in the words of artist Ocean Every Hughes: “How can we build a structure to be alive inside?” Through Folkerts talk he reimagines (or reanimates) the museum, as a living place, “a restless museum”, that refuses to settle. He dreams of a museum that moves, dances, spits, fornicates.
Folkerts says that all institutions must ask themselves how to be good hosts. His question is echoed in the way Solbakken talks about the collaboration between Bergen Kunsthall and Landmark: a café during the day and a club and concert/performance venue for over 180 events a year, during the night. She says that she practices “giving away the keys”. Folkerts similarly touches upon collaborations between institutions as a tool for practicing better forms of hospitality, like his show with the artist Vaginal Davis at Moderna Museet, that was shown in collaboration with a handful of different institutions scattered across the city.
Through both presentations, you also get a sense, not only of changing methods on a structural level, but also the importance of curators being present as human beings, in a hands-on approach to exhibition making: Solbakken recounts the first time she entered Landmark and sensed the magical ambience of the place and the community that already existed there and Folkerts shows photos of himself having fun on a lift with Vaginal Davis during the install.
The human interaction and transmissions between humans is also the core of conservator Ana Ribeiro’s talk. In museums the term ‘restaging’ is often used when it comes to showing performance works, but Ribeiro proposes the terms ‘calibrating’ or ‘re-calibrating’ as another framework for thinking about how to show performances in the museums. Ribeiro suggests that museums look at the transmission mechanisms that already exist in performance works – for example from the choreographer to the performers – and think about how to best preserve that process. She further suggests that curators and conservators should work together from the beginning, so conservation can be involved already during the production of the artwork.
Re-calibration is a term that seems to go well in hand with Folkert’s idea of the restless museum in that the institution cannot take its practice for granted and must renegotiate how it does things every time it makes a new show. As Folkerts says “Radical hospitality needs maintenance. The infrastructure of the institution needs to constantly be reevaluated.” An important lesson and challenge, that few institutions have yet to take up.
Later that night at the museum’s performance concert with the iconic performance artist Meredith Monk, I think about how Monk, who’s trailblazing and genre-defying work now spans around 60 years, is an institution in herself: a living museum and carrier of so many years of art history. Yet she is very much alive, present and not in any way stale, having just released a new album Cellular Songs as the second part of an interdisciplinary trilogy, that started with On Behalf of Nature. During the concert she sings both old and new songs, she offers anecdotes, she’s fun and serious in turns, camp and sincere at the same time. At one point she plays Scared Song from 1987, a song that she wrote in a time when she felt very scared, and which has once again become present. In the song she keeps singing “I’m scared” with a trembling voice. As I watch and listen to this very simple but powerful gesture, tears run down my face, and I feel a sense of both sadness and relief.
After the show I leave the space struck by both joy and sadness and a feeling of a basic human connection and sincerity, that I don’t experience often in the art world. I look at the giant grey airport-like facade of Nasjonalmuseet and I imagine it trembling, like Monk.
Classification logics, workers and spirits
On a more practical level, curator from MoMa Alison Burstein discusses some of the problems that performances make up for museums. Taking the Fluxus collection at MoMa as the starting point, she identifies three problems of the museum, when it comes to archiving and showing performance and other immaterial cross-disciplinary works: Classification logics, protocols for collection care and models of display. Through Burstein’s talk the rigidity of the museum’s infrastructure becomes clear. How to make anything come alive in a world of vitrines, barriers and rules? And how to archive works that defies the classical mediums, that many museums still use to classify and organise their collections? What does it mean to show Yoko Ono’s work Painting to be stepped on in the form of a painting, that has already been stepped on and is now in the collection versus re-activating it anew in collaboration with the artist?
The same Fluxus movement that is a bit of a headache for the collection in MoMa, also gave birth to The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, that since the 80s have collected and shown ephemeral art in Denmark. Curator Lotte Løvholm from the museum talks us through their recent acquisition of the piece Grødegejster og Agerånder (Ghosts of Growth, Spirits of the Field) (2022) by artist Sidsel Bonde, that makes use of a 1000-year old Northern European plaiting technique using field crop. The museum is now responsible for learning and sharing the plaiting technique, resulting in a list of people capable of plaiting the works of Bonde. It is also a spiritual practice, that has historically been used to get a good harvest. When Bonde herself installs the works, she usually talks to the spirits. The museum wanted to honour this, but since some employees might not know how to talk to spirits or be comfortable doing it, they have gotten a magical verse made, that must be read aloud by the employee when they open the box containing the artworks. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde in this way hosts both spirits as well as spiritual and non-spiritual employees.
Conservator from Nasjonalmuseet, Jina Chang, also has a similar intimate approach to the humans that make up the museum. Chang calls for a de-growth in museum practices, that should start putting humans in the centre and pay attention to the workers, the invisible hands that care for the whole collection. The staff of the museum should ask themselves: “How do we feel as workers in the museum?” As someone in the panel discussion later remarks: “the museum’s staff is the museum’s first public”, therefore it only seems natural, that the museum should learn how to host its own workers first, before it can learn how to host artists and guests.
When it comes to preserving immaterial works, Chang tries to answer the both practical and philosophical question: “How do you preserve something that is immaterial?” with a counter-question: “What exactly are we continuing?” Since most digital archives and databases for museums are still made for objects, it becomes crucial to resist this very material-based way of preserving. Instead of listing a specific speaker for a performative work, the museum should instead ask questions like: “What type of sound do we want to create?”. The museum needs to identify the intention of the artist versus the expression that the artwork takes: the idea and the material mean, by which it has come to life.
Both Burstein, Løvholm and Chang identifies the rigidity of the museum framework and find each their different creative solutions to the problem of preserving and showing immaterial works. Unfortunately, in an artist talk the next day with the participating artists of In the Moment, curator and director of Neue Nationalgalerie, Klaus Biesenbach inadvertently ends up performing this very rigidity of the museum, as he asks all artists in the panel the same three questions, as if he was conducting a survey. To the question “When did you know that you were an artist?” Jassem el Hindi challenges the premise of the question and answers: “I don’t know if I am an artist,” showing the gap between the rigid classificatory logic of the museum and the practice of many contemporary cross-disciplinary or even anti-disciplinary makers.
In the same artist talk, artist Sagg Napoli tells us how she had to take a break from art in a long time and started shooting arrows instead as a therapeutic practice (as well as going to therapy), which feels very symptomatic for an art world, that is still unsustainable (and sometimes straight up uninhabitable). Drawing from her own experiences in therapy she has created a ‘rage room’ as her commissioned piece for In the Moment, corresponding with Meredith Monk, that emphasizes how we have to learn to inhabit difficult feelings such as sadness and anger to not let them overtake us. Monk says that now is not a time for irony and we must insist on being absolutely sincere and vulnerable. Even though Napoli’s rage room is fairly literal, its simplicity resonates with me as well as the accompanying text that wraps around the facade of the rage room, that is a poetic call for action:
MAY WE LEARN TO CONTROL OUR RAGE
MAY WE LEARN TO ORGANISE OUR ANGER
SO THAT IT MOVES US TO BUILD
RATHER THAN FORCE US TO DESTROY
Inclusion, exclusion and the political implications of performance
Anger is also an emotion that resonates through several of the speakers at the seminar. “When we make work, who do we decide to exclude?” asks choreographer and PhD-researcher Saša Asentić as a fundamental question institutions and artists have to ask themselves. Asentić has curated a series of disability-led and disability-centered works, such as Dis Festival. Through his work he looks at how to integrate different accessibility and translation practices directly in the work, such as sign language for performances, as well as translations into other languages that are spoken in the local context but not always taken into account. Asentić clearly showcases how their disability-centered pop-up institution integrates this logic into the very fabric of Dis Festival, that is structured around the concept of ‘crip time’, stretched over a long period with only a few events at a time.
Exclusion is also at the heart of artist and choreographer Helle Siljeholm’s talk titled, The Performance of a Museum During a Genocide. Siljeholm out the double standards of the museum, that has earlier shown their immense solidarity to Ukraine and even promised to help preserve Ukrainian art in danger of being lost, but now like many institutions remain silent in the face of the genocide in Gaza and instead claim their ‘neutrality’. Meanwhile the museum recently included the work Mourning Carpet (After the Ma’alot School Massacre) from 1974 by Israeli artist Noa Eshkol in their collection room 76. The work caused an uproar for two reasons: First that the work which depicted a historical murder on Israelis by Palestinians could be seen as a political support for Israel. Second that the wall text read that the artist was born in Israel, a state that didn’t exist before 1948, when Eshkol was 24 years old.
In her talk, Siljeholm traces Norway’s own self-image of being ‘good’, and how the rhetoric of goodness continues to shape Norway: “We bomb for peace, we extract oil for sustainability”. She also shows the performative (in its other sense: doing something inauthentically) diplomacy of the Oslo Accords. Right before Norwegian politicians arrived, the Israeli state arrested a lot of local Palestinian politicans and put them in a temporary prison in Negev, that the Norwegian delegation never visited. Siljeholm dubs this “The performance of disappearance” and with her talk she asks not only who is included in the collection, but also in the political decisions – and who is excluded?
Siljeholm draws a connection between democracy and its historical links to theatre, that performer and philosopher Mijke van der Drift further pursues in her talk. Through the lecture performance The Commodification of dissent written in collaboration with Nikhil Vettukattil she talks about how performance has always been a political position against the commodification of art but has now turned into a commodity in the institution, and how the institutional critique that performance has historically posed to the institution has now been co-opted by the institution itself.
Van der Drift pinpoints some of these paradoxes involving performance in a society where neoliberal management logics has structured how our bodies can move and perform inside the institutions, made us convinced that performance is created by individuals and in that sense disabled our sense of solidarity and community. Solidarity, community and true criticality towards the institution now mostly seems possible to find outside of the institutions, in social and collective works and drag performance collectives as well as other underground activist performance groups, she argues.
To really change the institution, we also need to change the spectatorship inside the institution. The audience needs to move from consumption to curiosity. As an audience you need to lose something, in order to get something. In the same vein, the institution also needs to sacrifice its own power, to make radical performance art happen inside its walls. Van Der Drift dreams of performances that collapse the institution. She encourages artists to ask institutions: “What are you integrating?” and “Are you ready o bring down your own power to make this happen?”
Maybe Solbakken’s “giving away the keys” is one part of this, but there is so much more work to be done. This is also evident in the commissioned performance walk Uskkádat Ustaria by Elina Waage Mikalsen og Jassem el Hindi exploring what autonomy can look like inside the colonial space of the museum. “The artworks on the wall seem to always have been here. No hands were involved. The museum popped up with the art already there,” the two artists recite from their script. “Who wrote the wall texts? No one knows,” they ask cheekily, acting as fellow archaeologists to Dagny Juell’s The Guided Tour. Mikalsen and El Hindi look for stories in the dust on the artworks. They look for what stories are included and excluded in the museum. And they look for their own stories: Mikalsen is of Sámi descent and El Hindi of Lebanese and Palestinian descent. “Where is my language?” Mikalsen asks, as the two look for kin in the collection. El Hindi recites from Lebanese artist and poet Etel Adnan’s beautiful book The Arab Apocalypse from 1989 and the two of them do a tender dance around the sculpture Vealahančuoldda / Diskrimineringens påle (The Pillar of discrimination) from 1987-1993 by Sámi artist Iver Jåks. At some point they serve lingonberries for the audience, that they have brought in a basket. Mikalsen and El Hindi tell us how food is not allowed in the collection, and that it was a long negotiation with the museum, because the berries could colour the floor. “No berries!” they yell tauntingly, before they each serve us a single sour berry.
Performance as contamination: A sour berry for the museum
After this weekend in Oslo, I can’t help thinking that museums and performances in many ways are opposites. Life versus death, unruliness versus rigidity. My mind keeps returning to this idea of performance as a problem for the museum. Both on a philosophical level, but also on a practical level. A flooded toilet (that wasn’t a performance but could have been), glitter in the air vents, possible berry stains on the floor. Performance clearly contaminates the museum, it spills over with emotions and staining materials, while many museums still try to contain it through the same logics they’ve always used.
Eating the sour lingonberries from Uskkádat Ustaria inside Nasjonalmuseet, makes me think of Aesop’s fable with the fox that unable to reach a bunch of grapes deems them “sour”. Performance is clearly still a problem for the museum, but it is maybe also an ideal that the museum can never seem to achieve: authenticity and aliveness, community and care. But if the museum can try to be vulnerable, if it can open its mouth and let itself be properly contaminated, maybe then it can be a place of life and not death. Maybe then we can be alive inside the museum. With In the Moment museums are offered a red berry with a sour taste. The question is: Do they dare to eat it, and take the consequences? It might end up staining their sterile floors…