Arendal, August 2023. In Southern Norway, in the center of the country’s bible belt, we begin our journey of Claiming Space, a project comprising a year of performances in public spaces around Norway that focus on queer sensibilities and their expression in public. It was arranged by Fotogalleriet in Oslo and initially began with an exhibition in the context of the Queer Culture Year in 2022, marking the mere 50th years since the decriminalization of homosexuality in Norway. Queer Culture Year made it possible to seek funding specifically for this intent through the Norwegian Culture Fund. However, as one of the Claiming Space’s curators, Bassel Hatoum, critically mentioned, today, there shouldn’t be an occasion for creating art events with queer themes or artists. This should be an integrated part of any ‘culture year’. Therefore, they decided to initiate a new queer-oriented project immediately afterwards. Taking the queer art practices out of the exhibition space and into public spaces was a way of not just insisting on the rights of queer art to be represented, but also to challenge patriarchal norms of shared social space.
Back to Arendal, The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ by Mohammed Mohammed begins. In the middle of a concrete schoolyard, overlooking the Norwegian fjord and a sea of white wooden houses so characteristic of the Norwegian south, an interim bed has been installed. Here, six performers, presumably in their late twenties, share a vulnerable and seemingly secure space in an otherwise unwelcome public environment. The scenography reminds me of architectural historian Beatriz Colomina’s exploration of the bed as a microcosm of the ‘horizontal architecture’ of our lives post-Covid. Comprising new technologies, the unrestrained nature of work, and the sharing economy, we seldom need to leave our beds. A queer take on this development is that we also bring our friends to our beds, they are not saved for a significant other. The performers carry bags with a liquid that they can suck up from an attached tube. They start sucking up the liquid and releasing it onto the other performers’ faces and bodies. The act is done with an ambivalent mix of care and aggression. As time goes on, the bed becomes more disorganized, the bodies in it too. The horizontal architecture of the bed has a certain agency in the middle of a public space characterized by vertical silhouettes and hierarchical logics. This space of safeness is transposed to the acts of the performers who, as time goes on, become more emerged in their liquid practice. It is as though the audience is just a biproduct, they could leave, and the performance would still have power. The individual persons in the bed are not important anymore, they are almost dissolved, part of an entangled practice of togetherness that claims a tiny space of the public for pure vulnerability. When the bags of liquid are empty, they start using their own spit as material for the ongoing relationality of the performance. Spit is such an ambivalent thing, both degrading and clean, erotic and abject. Spit is also a marker of dna, and by spitting on each other and the bed, the performers are marking their territory; a tiny bit of Arendal and its conservative public sphere. For a moment in time, Mohammed Mohammed and his crew owns this public space entirely.
The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ was part of the yearly ‘Arendalsuka’, the largest political gathering in Norway. In that way, the performance was an important representation of queer artistic practice in a large political and public context. But it was also a healing experience in its own right. The artwork asked the question: how to move from working artistically with your traumas as a marginalized person (be it through racialization, gender, or sexuality) and presenting them to a hegemonic audience – to unfolding a representation of a caring, vulnerable, ambivalent, and resistant queer life that is already in the process of healing?
Madihe Gharibi’s performances in Bergen and Trondheim during the Fall and Winter of 2023/’24 were more subtly queer and more evidently working through trauma. With her mysterious title At the door with no knocker, I didn’t know what to expect when I took the funicular up to the mountaintop of Fløyen, one of Bergen’s seven mountains. I did know that Madihe is from Iran and moved to Norway where she obtained her master’s at the art academy of Bergen in 2021. Therefore, a tension between geographies and places of belonging seemed to be an evident theme in her practice. A group of around 20 people met on the mountaintop of Fløyen, and Madihe led us to a clearing in the nearby forest. This was a very serene place for a public performance, and in a sense, it was not that public – only a handful of families passed us on their evening walk. I felt like this was a clear departure from the framework, but getting into the performance, it became clearer why this kind of space was needed.
In the clearing we sit down in a circle and Madihe starts a fire. Meanwhile, we hear sounds of people in the streets through two small speakers. It sounds lke a mass of people, maybe a demonstration. It is definitely far away from the peaceful surroundings where we sit. At one point, Madihe raises her voice. She asks us all to write down an experience of a time where we felt helpless. After having written this down, we are asked to each read some of our text. The reading goes on from person to person around the fire. The circle ends with Madihe who starts her story. She reads aloud about how, when she was living in Iran, she wanted to go see her favorite football team play. However, since only men were allowed into the stadium, she had to dress up as a man. But when it was her turn to enter, the guards searched her and found out she was a woman. She was put in jail, and in a moment of madness she put fire to herself. At this point, I begin to suspect whether the story is about Madihe at all. Especially when she dies in the end. We find out that the story is about Sahar Khodayari who died of self-immolation after what happened to her at the stadion and the subsequent imprisonment. Madihe was sharing a story of a victim of the misogynist and repressive system in Iran.
Madihe’s work is mostly related to being an ethnic or cultural minority. In that sense, the serene and privileged natural surroundings of Fløyen is a fitting environment to show this discrepancy between the sound work and the peaceful forest. While we burn our papers and Madihe puts out the fire with water, filling the whole circle with white cmoke, I think about the tricky translation that is going on between the events in Iran and the Norwegian surroundings we have claimed for this event. There are some almost un-translatable dynamics going on between the site of the performance and the aural content from Iran. This dynamic does not offer any solution, more so it reflects the helplessness that Madihe asked us to write about.
The friction between the forest of Bergen and Madihe’s sound work and story from Iran was a haunting experience, even though it wasn’t necessarily public. However, Gharibi claimed a space in the forest to create a ritualistic space of grief, helplessness, pain, and anger – certainly public feelings that are not immediately accessible in Norwegian culture. In this way, the performance was a visibilization of marginalized people who carry foreign roots and memories and who need to constantly find ways of translating these geographies and make up a way of living in-between places of belonging. The fire was an element that connected the burning grief of Kodhayari’s violent death in Iran with the helplessness of our burned written stories.
Fast forward to the beginning of September 2024 where Bodø biennial takes place. Being the 15th largest city of Norway, the city is a remote point on the map and is situated just above the arctic circle. This time, Mohammed Mohammed has teamed up with sápmi artist Kátjá Rávdná for the performnace You have started singing again/ Don leat álgán lávlut fas in a public swimming pool. Beforehand, we are told that this is the first time the two artists work together, so the final result is also a ’collision’ between artists, a negotiation and a sort of moving into each other’s practices, methods, and sensibilities. This distance is expressed from the beginning of the performance, where the two artists enter the dimly lit area of the swimming pool from opposite sites while a minimal electronic sound work begins. Dressed in what looks like black latex, but might just be nylon, and with silvery or metallic pearls as crackling jewellery, the two artists slowly approach the pool. One of them is making loud noises with a wet fabric that is slapped onto the floor in a way that gives me aggressive erotic vibes. Approaching each other very slowly, they enter the water. While they are keeping themselves afloat, they both carry a megaphone through which they try to make sounds under the water. You can see that they try with all their might to get sound out of the megaphone, but only the most fragile of sounds reach the audience from the water. This is a very strong image – the relentless effort to reach the other, be heard by them, the wish to express something meaningful, the sheer physical exertion that is put into this work – and all that the audience hears is mumbling. Finally the two performers do reach each other, and they interact in a caring exploration of their black silhouettes. They twist and turn in the water to make their jewellery crackle and with the help of the soundtrack, a ritualistic mood fills the room. It is clear that these are two very different artists, but through emphasizing this aspect, they turn it into a core theme of the performance: an exploration of difference.
Back south, in Oslo late October 2024. The final iteration of Claiming Space takes place on a gloomy afternoon in Tøyern’s ’Snippen-park’. The artist Zirenia awaits the crowd on a small hill where she has laid out a sort of live ’Everything I have’-poster. Essential food items and food for thought in the form of books by authors such as Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Ernesto Che Guevara. This scenography acts as the backdrop for a longer speech by Zirenia that contains elements of a personal essay and a performative lecture. Titled Transits of Belonging, Zirenia creates a touching world around the bonds formed between locals where she grew up in Mexico. “These people have nothing and still they are able to share”, I remember hearing (my paraphrase), which as a description is such a stark contrast to how the Norwegian society is constructed, where the welfare state, inspite of its many qualities, leave it more difficult to form bonds of trust and solidarity between strangers. In her performed text, Zirenia weaves together the (un)belonging of crossing cultural and geographical borders with resisting fixed bodily, sexual, and gendered identities. Instead of these categorizations, she puts forward solidarity as a category that transcends the borders that are still very real in her writing. After a while, she folds the installation of books, vegetables, and flowers into a big bundle which she drags, with a lot of effort, out of the park. As if to illustrate her points on solidarity, after a while where the audience has been standing still, gazing, Zirenia says “are you not gonna help me carry this?”. And so the rest of the crowd help her, carrying her material and immaterial belongings toward Anarres Bokkafé where the performance ends with hot chocolate.
I was struck by the power and sincerity of Zirenia’s performance. But also, by a sense that it had elements of a student’s work. Citations of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘the rhizome’ and Glissant’s text about opacity figured in her text. These concepts have been used excessively in art discourse for the last forty years, and even though they are still operative, I was left with a sense of going back to school. There was the same sense in some of the other performances, and I think that from the curatorial point of view, it has been a priority to let marginalized voices in the Norwegian performance arts field be seen and heard over and above considerations about artistic experience. This makes sense as the goal of the project is to claim space for queer expression in public, but it is still important to note, and it points to a larger dilemma around the quality of art production versus having marginalized voices be heard. Both cannot always be obtained at once, so you must start with giving these artists space and then they will hopefully get the attention and means that they need to develop their practice further. Also in that sense, Claiming Space was meaningful, and we could use a third reiteration of the project since this fight is far from over.
CLAIMING SPACE
Arendal, Bergen, Bodø, Trondheim, and Oslo, August 2023 – October 2024
Artists: Kátjá Rávdná, Madihe Gharibi, Mohammed Mohammed, Zirenia
Curating: Bassel Hatoum and Miki Gebrelul
Communication and mediation: Lisa A. Bernhoft-Sjødin
Production: Fotogalleriet
With funding from LOK (Local Community Ordinance) / KORO (Art in Public Space)
Thanks to Fotogalleriet for travel support.
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