Admission is included with the entrance ticket to the museum. Free for members. 

The talk will be held in Norwegian  

In collaboration with Astrup Fearnley Museet, Feroz Mehmood Shah presents a lecture series on art and the place of art within our consciousness, in dialogue with philosophy and literature. The series takes individual works from the collection as its point of departure—on this occasion,  Klara Lidén (f. 1979) and her work Verdebelvedere and Verdebelvedere Exit from 2024.  

In Lidén’s videos, we see a figure attempting to squeeze its body through square openings in a kind of fence or wall. With a fundamental interest in architecture and urban space, the artist uses her own body to challenge the boundaries of how we move through public space.

“An unconscious knowledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education; this is what matters, says the whispering voice. And the wretched physical existence strikes a spark in the supreme interest that is scarcely less repressed; it kindles a ‘What is that?’ and ‘Where is it going?’” 
– Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno connects the child’s simple and intuitive existential wonder with the horrors of the Second World War. Among other things, he describes how basic material concerns are displaced in a rationalized modern world, and how even the smallest elements of our reality are entangled with larger systems of cruelty and oppression. In this world, the child’s sense of wonder persists: “What is it?” In his lecture, Shah will explore how Lidén’s work contains this sense of wonder, but also a fundamental love of the world — amor mundi.

Feroz Mehmood Shah is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, specializing in ethics, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy.