REFERENCE Marit Benthe Norheim ”Life-boats”

 

Marit Benthe Norheim has asked me to provide a reference for ”Life-boats”.

 

I must stress that I do not work with art or sculpture in my professional life and I have an extremely sporadic knowledge of Danish and international art criticism. However, in my opinion, the ”Life-boats” project contains both an internal reflection and performative character. The work builds upon interaction and moves both in time and space - which creates an interplay of a far broader artistic context than the relatively narrow professional arts context, from which the work originates.

 

The interactive and performative characteristics of Marit Benthe Norheim’s works are nothing new. ”Campingwomen” (2009) and ”The Rat Maiden” (2006), but also many of Marit Benthe Norheim’s earlier works, contain these characteristics. ”Campingwomen” is a travelling exhibition, caravans with female figures made out of cement, whilst ”The Rat Maiden” - inspired by a well known figure in Henrik Ibsen’s play ”Little Eyolf”, has movement worked into a slide within the belly of the sculpture. In both sculptures, children have been involved in the creation of the work.

 

Women and children are frequent guests in the works of Marit Benthe Norheim. First and foremost as a motif, but also often as an interactive element in the creation of the work. The theme of fertility is striking in the works of Marit Benthe Norheim.

 

Europe finds itself, in these times (as always) in an era of change. Globalisation leads both to the lifting of borders and to an even more marked drawing of the borders of the nation states. Europe wants both to retain its cultural heritage as well as explore the endless possibilities of the world.

In the Lion Feuchtwanger story ”Odysseus und die Schweine oder Das Unbehagen an der Kultur”, Odysseus tells the story of an episode with the sorceress Kirke, where his men are bewitched and transformed into pigs. In Homer’s epic, they are changed back into human beings, but in Feuchtwanger’s version, Odysseus relates this was not true. In reality, Odysseus’ men did not want to be human beings and take part in the wars of the world, they preferred to remain pigs.

 

”Life-boats” makes the journey real. The work is also a comment on the journey of Odysseus, the epic journey, mankind’s linear movement. By realising and bringing to life the work in interaction, participation and performance, and by stretching the entire female figure over the whole boat, so that the boat becomes a container that touches on the theme of fertility, the journey is no longer only epic, but also epic-cyclical, and a centre for the crossing of a series of peripheral streams of meaning.

 

”Wege, nicht werke”, Heidegger wrote regarding his collected works.

 

Marit Benthe Norheim’s ”Life-boats” is both a fascinating and intelligent journey, an open work, which does not unfold its meaning through an institution, but through a direct meeting with the audience.

 

The work is an appeal or an invitation to the child, the audience, the viewer, the art museum, the city, the nation, to step in and become a part of it. An elementary, banal, trivial and archaic quality, which we may possibly have lost already in our efforts to encompass the entire world.

 

Helsingør, 19. february 2010

Jens Frimann Hansen, Director of Helsingør Theatre