On a cold morning in Oslo in mid-November, the kind where every hour of the day becomes a gift and cools the air for any thought that hopes to stay outside, the opening of “Contrary Decorations” at the National Museum of Norway marked a big change. Mounted in one of the most prominent institutions in the Nordic countries, the exhibition explores the commonplace in the Islamic world, a subject that is often considered too sensitive and politically charged in museum settings.
“It started with the year of Queer Culture in 2022,” the director of the National Museum, Ingrid Røynesdal, told the Observer. “We asked ourselves the question, what should we do? What can we do to increase or embrace a new and broader understanding of gender and sexuality?”
That question led the center to bring in one of its directors, Noor Bhangu, whose doctoral research on Islamic identity inspired the program. “His work was very important and clear,” Røynesdal recalls. “We are very inspired by his approach, which is very much in line with the whole umbrella of the museum’s programs.”
Røynesdal does not ignore this concern when dealing with the nuances of multiculturalism and queer identity. “We need to enter those topics with respect and responsibility,” he said. “It’s not an obvious show.”
It’s not obvious, no, but it’s important to start these kinds of conversations. In a country where the asylum acceptance rate remains relatively high, many second-generation youth navigate two parallel sets of expectations: the social freedom Norway welcomes and the traditional and religious values that their family of origin straddles. “As a museum, we need to keep up with an increasingly diverse society,” Røynesdal admits.
While the pussyfooting around Islam can also address problematic aspects, “Contrary Ornaments” still carries the kind of good showmanship that might not happen in many cultural references. In it, the re-reading of strange expressions in ancient artifacts or their expression in contemporary works takes place within a continuous Scandinavian interpretive framework that allows seeing the difference between Islamic theology and living culture while assuming that it is safe to do so. In that, the exhibition shows how institutions around the world are trying to adapt, sometimes at a standstill, to a society whose values are changing in real time.
New interpretation techniques at the National Museum of Norway
Showcasing contemporary concerns comes easily to newly opened museums, perhaps in places that did not have a long institutional art tradition, such as the Louvre in Abu Dhabi or the National Gallery in Singapore. Europe has unique constraints. Rather than going from scratch to modern thinking, European museums today are faced with the need to renew their collections, and to ensure that their temporary exhibitions (often pulling pieces from collections) are in line with current discourse.
Think of the National Gallery in Rome, which long ago abandoned chronological order in favor of chronological order, or the MUCEM in Marseille, the latter of which built its temporary exhibitions on the remains of what used to be racist colonial institutions.
Keeping up with changing culture is a struggle and means we need to think critically about what we should shine a light on and what we are happy to remove from the darkest corner of the museum’s storage space.
The National Museum of Norway, taking advantage of its advanced renovation within a new waterfront building in 2022 that allowed the integration of four major institutions focused on art, craft, design and architecture, has been taking a deep look at what has long been absent from the narrative of art history. The current collection includes about 400,000 items. “It’s a big responsibility,” commented the director. “The important thing now is to use that scope to open up new meanings, to present those things within different frameworks, to open up the potential for new understanding.”
The museum’s main collection follows a standard chronological narrative but slightly alters the perspective of different eras—for example, foregrounding women’s social worlds rather than subsuming them into domestic categories. Orientalist works come with panels that encourage viewers to investigate the context in which they were created, rather than taking them at face value. The eternal collection itself no longer feels immovable. “We change the permanent collection every Monday to show new themes,” explains Røynesdal. The work continues beyond the gallery displays and into the mediating process, which aims to build bridges with different audiences, even those who may not be familiar with the museum space.
MUNCH: the contemporary essence of a timeless artist
On the water front in Oslo’s Tøyen area, rising to 57.4 meters above the shore, the slanted gray MUNCH museum is unmissable. It is in this very old building that Edvard Munch’s legacy is read as an ongoing exhibition, rather than a closed legacy. Walking in, it’s easy to see how Munch’s artistic focus, emotional turmoil and presence and physical vulnerability resonates deeply with contemporary concerns about identity and mental health.
The museum emphasizes this by organizing the Munch collection by theme, from nudes to love and loneliness. These and other universal themes allow us to see that, for example, in his approach to the naked body, the artist has equalized between men and women, and that human emotions when tracing a straight line in modern works, say, Bacon or Marlene Dumas.
The capital letters of the name of the museum and the banner on the facade make it clear that the artist has been turned into a symbol. However, thanks to capitalist tools, the museum is able to remain attractive and connect the heritage to the present. In their 2025 program, we saw this at work in exhibitions like “Lifeblood,” which linked Munch’s work to changing medical histories and attitudes about illness and physical vulnerability. There, his concerns were re-read as part of a wider social and historical change in Norway.
Many times the museum management shows that they are not referring to Munch directly but echoing his themes in a modern way. An example is the current MUNCH Triennale, titled Probably False and focusing on tangible facts. Taking place on different floors, the exhibition explores the global gift of technology through the work of around 20 contemporary artists from various countries. Their works include many narratives from the Global South, as well as diasporic narratives, from the Indonesian artist Natasha Tontley, who explores historical and fictional accounts of “manufactured fear” and the afterlife, to Sara Sadik’s Y2K video based in Marseille showing youth from the Deines-Sadik neighborhood in Deines-Sadik’s social norms.
Internationality and the Astrup Fearnley Museum
The Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Tjuvholmen is part of a new cultural quarter developed in the framework of Oslo’s “Fjord City” project. Hosting one of the richest and most diverse private collections of modern art in Scandinavia, the museum is in another magnificent building, this time designed by Renzo Piano with a wooden boathouse-meets-Norwegian feel.
The interior of the center, characterized by sharp corners and rooms that stand out in an unexpected way, forces the organization of the collection and the temporary exhibition to think of creative solutions. The works are presented indirectly while passing through the glass,
Its founder, Hans Rasmus Astrup, collected works boldly, often against prevailing market preferences. “When the owner of a private museum passes away, you can go two ways. You can keep the collection as it is, present it as a collector’s museum, or go the way of Whitney or Louisiana, where the private initiative takes on the role of a public institution,” the director of the museum, Solveig Øvstebø, tells the Observer. “When we think about our museum’s DNA, we see that ours is driven by art.”
When Øvstebø was chosen as the museum’s director, returning to Norway after years at the Renaissance in Chicago, he saw an opportunity to diversify what was already an important collection. “There were important pillars in the collection, but it was necessary to expand and include more voices,” he said. Besides finding new works to fill the gaps in the collection, he chose rotating exhibitions, small in size but very thoughtful: “While it is good to see what is missing from the collection, in terms of identity and global diversity, it is important not to forget something else: the diversity of art.”
He treats these rotating exhibitions as small conversations between the pieces. “Right now, for example, we have a conversation between the works of Nicole Eisenman and Michal Lopresti that show in different ways isolated figures, the experience of today, one might say, but the possibilities of communication are raised. On the other wall, you have Nan Goldin, who adds to all these different ways of coming to a person and the mind of being a person.”
Some of these conversations are intentionally uncomfortable and are meant to mislead the viewer. Like when Odd Nerdrum, a Norwegian artist who openly rejects modern art, is shown in the same room as Jeff Koons’ shiny and ultra-pop gold clay Michael Jackson and his little monkey. Ultimately, Øvstebø believes in analysis as a dynamic process rather than a thesis to be proven. “It is very dangerous to make manifestos,” he concluded. “The collection is natural, as we humans are.”
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