Niamh Fahy, Overflow, tintype, 2022.

Editors - Ole Lützow-HolmJessica Hemmings

On 22 July 2011, at 3:25 pm, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the entrance of the Høyblokka building in the government quarter of Oslo, killing eight people. Following the explosion, he drove to the island of Utøya and, dressed in a Norwegian police uniform, used firearms to kill sixty-nine individuals attending a Workers Youth League summer camp. In Threads of Defiance (2019), the biography of artist Hannah Ryggen, art historian Marit Paasche notes that the force of the explosion outside the Høyblokka building moved the lobby’s security barrier, which weighed more than a ton, twenty metres. Inside the building was Ryggen’s tapestry Vi lever på en stjerne (We are Living on a Star) (1958), whose flexible structure and light weight meant it faired a little better than the barrier. “For several days after the explosion, We Are Living on a Star lay on the floor in a pool of dirty water, mixed with concrete rubble and shards of glass.”[1] The tapestry was subsequently collected by KORO (Public Art Norway) and moved to the Conservation Services of the Museum Centre in Hordaland for restoration.

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