The photographer Elin Berge has devoted years to documenting the lives of Thai women living with Swedish men in the province of Västerbotten in northeastern Sweden. Despite major varieties in living conditions and age, each woman faces the same challenge of coming to terms with a cross-cultural identity.
The title Drottninglandet (Queen Country) refers to the area in Sweden where these women live. It also reflects their expectations and dreams as citizens in a Scandinavian country where culture is less markedly influenced by gender divisions. Nearly all the women in the project originate from a poor region in northeastern Thailand where most women have to move to big cities, tourist destinations, or abroad to find work.
Going far north to live with a Scandinavian man is an enormous step into the unknown. Drottninglandet is “a narrative of longing and the dream of a better life” as Elin Berge puts it. “So my title is symbolic, representing all the things I imagine these women were dreaming of when they suddenly had the opportunity to move to Sweden.”
Between 27th December of 2008 and 18th of January 2009, the Israeli military carried out an attack on the Gaza Strip named Operation Cast Lead. The magnitude of the harm to the population, buildings and infrastructure was unprecedented.
In Gaza Portraits we meet Palestinian civilians who had their lives dramatically changed. Due to severe injuries and loss of limbs, many lost their ability to support their families or to complete their education.
Since 2000, the Magnum photographer Paolo Pellegrin has reported from both sides in the long-standing Israeli – Palestinian conflict. When he arrived a few months after the Israeli attack, he was struck by the devastation and the high number of dead and wounded. The first photographs were taken in 2009, returning to Gaza several times. He felt obliged to tell the stories to the population that was brutally affected by the Operation Cast Lead.
The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of Ole D. Mjøs, chairman of theboard of Perspektivet Museum from 2001–2011. The exhibition is produced by Magnum Photos in collaboration with PERSPEKTIVET MUSEUM, Tromsø. Supported by the Italian Cultural Institute in Oslo.
Over the course of a decade, South African photographer Matthew Willman has documented those who must live with HIV/AIDS on a daily basis, be they individuals or organizations.
In Africa, south of the Sahara, lives two-thirds of the world population with the diagnosis HIV/AIDS. In South Africa, five million people are directly affected by the pandemic.
Matthew Willman
The photographs reflect his sensitivity and understanding for the ethical challenges that this type of documentation entails. Willman has chosen his focus: He wants to communicate the burning commitment that South African individuals, local communities and organisations show in their encounters with the pandemic. He wants to show an Africa that is standing up and taking responsibility.
Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Annie Lennox have added their support for this exhibition, VUKUKANYE – RISING UP, by personally signing their respective portraits.
The exhibition is produced by Perspektivet Museum in collaboration with the photographer.
The municipalities of Lurøy and Træna lie along the coast in Nordland County. They include 2,400 islands, islets and rock reefs. Here in this breath-taking archipelago, the Church of Norway has built centres of worship. This is the world of Anders Rosland, the parish priest who makes God’s Word known to the inhabitants.
He’s always on the move: between houses clustered along the shore, on the way to a funeral, visiting parents who want to baptize a child, administering last rites, or on the way to a confirmation camp. Rosland acts as a human hub for those living in this challenging natural setting.
Priests and Christianity aren’t sexy themes in mass media, but to travel around with a priest opens doors in society – doors that were closed by taboos many years ago.
Eivind H. Natvig
Anders Rosland’s social involvement far exceeds his priestly vocation. As a man of the sea, he could teach us all an extra thing or two after mass – for instance how to sail or get about in an ocean kayak. Teaching the faith is important, but compassion, empathy and fellowship are even more important to him.
“Come, for all is now ready.” When a priest in the Church of Norway utters this phrase, it signals that the congregation can come forward to receive Communion. And they come. Rosland is a pastor to those who mourn and those who rejoice; he is there at the beginning and end of life and participates in all that befalls the community. It is this ‘drama of life’ that the photographer Eivind H. Natvig has witnessed. It provides motifs for a distinctive visual expression that exists somewhere between photojournalism and low-voiced poetry. Ordinary life, as it has been lived for generations, is Natvig’s focus. As he himself says: “The normal is more than enough for me”.
Eivind H. Natvig has won several grants and prizes for his work. He is a member of the photojournalist collective Moment Agency, and in 2014 joined the international photo agency INSTITUTE.
The native costume or traditional festive dress is a strong symbol of belonging to a geographical region or an ethnic group. Normally, it creates positive associations with familiar events, family ties, origin and traditions. Unfortunately, it is also such that the clear message of the costume about who you are and where you come from also provokes prejudices and agitation.
In the project My Costume – My Story, 30 women tell about their relationships to their costume and to Tromsø as place of residence. Individual stories and different lives. What they all have in common is that the costume evokes a feeling of pride and dignity.
The costume reflects the woman’s personal story. It is unique. It collects threads from the past, memories and longings, knowledge and experience. Independent of age and norms for use: “The costume says something about me. It doesn’t have to be old, only meaningful.”
In Tromsø, the local rock star Little Henrik entered the stage with cover songs by Elvis and provocative hip movements in 1958. Then the music got harder, the hair longer and the shoes more pointed. The Tromsø-band Pussycats entered the scene in the 1960s before hysterical fans and played themselves to the top of the national hit lists. The new music had seriously established itself in Tromsø.
The 1970s involved a strong mobilisation to strengthen the regional pride. At the legendary pub Prelaten, the folk music movement delivered a stream of relevant texts.
With the entry of punk music, the youth in Tromsø rekindled old battles, like the one for their own, autonomous house. The demand manifested itself through house occupations and demonstrations, and in 1984, Ungdommens Hus (Youth House) was opened. In 2000, when both student house Driv and youth house Tvibit offered new music stages and rehearsal rooms, Perspektivet Museum completed an extensive documentation of the city’s lively youth and music environments.
The exhibition includes a database of Tromsø bands with samples from the record collection and viewing of film clips from the city’s music scenes for rock and pop throughout the ages.
Land makes people into who they are. Of that I am sure. If they lose it, they forfeit their solvency and a little bit of their souls, which they will spend the rest of their lives trying to regain.
This extract is from Larry Towell’s book The World from my Front Porch (2008). Like many of his Magnum colleagues, on his field trips he too met and photographed people who had lost their home and their homeland. People who, for political or economic reasons, were obliged to leave their country, were forced into exile by war or natural disasters, and who possessed only the little they could carry. Some sought asylum in the West, others ended up in refugee camps or tried in vain to return to their own countries.
The exhibition Uprooted, eschews any form of historical, chronological or geographical order. The aim is to visualize the sheer number of international conflicts which have occurred since the Second World War, and the resultant masses of exiles and refugees. Similar in their fate, interchangeable in their columns, the refugees progress towards an uncertain future, uprooted, homeless, unwanted.
Exhibition produced by Magnum Photos and Perspektivet Museum
”The nature of photography is the pose”, asserts the French philosopher Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Something has posed before the camera lens and is captured for eternity. “Click” – a halt in the continuum of time. Something took place there and then, and reminds us of our mortality and the transitoriness of all things.
In this exhibition it is Tromsø which poses, with people and milieus as photographic fragments of the city’s immediate and distant past. Recognisable to some, alien to others. Here are shown images from Tromsø ranging from portraits of citizens in the mid-1800s to today’s busy crowded centre. Persuasive historical sources in possession of “the photograph’s authority”, as culture critic Susan Sontag formulated it in her collection of essays entitled On Photography.
Perhaps it is here the magic of the photograph lies: its ability to confirm a bygone reality by creating proximity and participation.
”Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgements by the generalized pathos of looking at time past.”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Photo collection online
The exhibition is a part of an ongoing project in the museum, to publish the the archives on the museums’s wesbite.
Sara Fabricius and her family moved from Christiania (today Oslo) to Tromsø in 1893. Shortly after the turn of the century, the family became tenants of businessman Johan Rye Holmboe in Storgata 95, where Perspektivet Museum is located today. Five years later, Sara left Tromsø to develop her painting skills in Paris.
Her breakthrough as an author under the pseudonym Cora Sandel came with the publication of her debut novel Alberta and Jacob in 1926, when she was 46 years old. Her childhood years in Tromsø left their clear marks on Sandel’s literary production, where the small-town life up north gave her material for the majority of what she has written. Her quiet messages also have a universal content and her books are therefore just as relevant today. She is included among Norway’s most important authors.
The exhibition focuses on her childhood in Tromsø, her life as an artist in Paris and her literary work.
After 70 years absence the Russian seamen returned to Tromsø. Rusting trawlers tied up in Tromsø harbour – some to load fish or take on supplies, others under arrest pending the settlement of unpaid bills. Some were victims of unprincipled trawler owners, abandoned without money or a return ticket home.
In the wake of the Russians’ arrival came dramatic newspaper headlines: “Russians Not Wanted”, “Pirate Ship Arrested”, “Stolen Goods Found on Russian Trawler”, “Incensed by the Russians”, and so on. The accounts gradually became more nuanced, but the image that remained was less than positive.
Curious to learn more, we approached them and enquired: Who are you and where are you from? How’s life on board? What do you think about Tromsø and Norwegians? This was the prelude to many interesting conversations on board the trawlers and at the museum in 2004/5, as well as visits to the homes of some of the seamen’s families in Murmansk.
Trade with Northern Russia has traditions that go back to the middle of the 18th century and the Pomor traders. The Russian seafarers arrived each summer from the White Sea area and supplied the region with necessities such as grain and building materials. They returned with fish as the most important trading commodity. The Pomors left their mark on Tromsø in various ways – through literature, photographs and, not least, the museum’s collection of artefacts.
Russian Seamen
This historical contact with the east can also be traced through the seamen who fled from the new Soviet state after the Russian Revolution in 1917 and settled in their traditional trading regions. One of them who sailed every year into Tromsø harbour was Ivan Ivanovitsj Burkow from Navolok near Archangel. Through Ivan’s dramatic story, which ends in Tromsø, we set today’s encounter with the Russian seamen in a historical perspective.
“The Russian Current” exhibition is about trade and international relations in the High North. A common denominator for the contact between North Norwegians and Russian seamen before and after the Soviet era must be that the two groups view each other with a certain amount of irony and distance and a good portion of scepticism. Then as now. This is at the very core of the exhibition, where we point out how perceptions of “the others” are created and maintained, not least by a critical media.
“The Russian Current” was opened september 2007. Perspektivet Museum would like to extend their gratitude to ABM-utvikling, Fritt Ord and UD for making this exhibition possible.
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