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, Britta Marakatt-Labbas (f. 1951) work Gränslöst from 2022.  

Marakatt-Labba was born into a reindeer-herding family in Sápmi, a region that stretches across the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Her works explore political reflections on ecology, climate, feminism, and Sámi identity, history, and contemporary life. In the embroidery Gränslöst, the motif is concentrated around a horizontal central line in shades of blue, black, and red, suggesting a winter landscape. In the white foreground, a small figure can be seen riding in a reindeer-drawn sled.

Walter Benjamin takes Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as his point of departure to describe a historical perspective different from our own—the gaze of an angel upon creation: “This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we see a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe (…)”. What does this mean—to not simply see history as a succession of events with differing values, but to take in the totality of historical suffering?

In the lecture, Shah will explore how Marakatt-Labba’s quiet stitches bring together reflections on nature and culture, different forms of life, and the impact of human existence on the earth. Can these small signs trace an image of human history, and allow us to glimpse what the angel sees?

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

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