NINA STRAND ON MATIAS FALDBAKKEN

En opprettholdelse / Upholdong (2026), Matias Faldbakken. Photo by Niklas Hart / KORO.

Afterimage by Nina Strand:

And then, there it is. Fifteen years after the terrorist attacks in Oslo and on Utøya: Upholding, the national memorial for July 22. A towering steel structure as a protest against forgetting.

Those who live in Oslo will likely remember the large steel rig built to preserve Pablo Picasso's The Fishermen from the demolished Y-block. This inspired the artist, who filled this new structure with a mosaic work whose motif is from the island of Utøya. We see a wading bird, a common redshank typical of the area around the island, and some reeds and twigs reflected in the water. The back, painted in the same red as Utøya's speakers' platform, is meant to function as an open wound.

The rig itself refers to what happened in the government quarter, and the motif to what happened on Utøya; the work thus becomes a bridge between the two horrific events. In the description of the work, the artist states that the rig that protected Picasso's work ‘appeared as an essential object from the transitional phase between the old and new government quarter, and further, a Norway before and after the attack.’

The placement is also significant: when standing in front of the mosaic, one looks towards Utøya, with only a couple of degrees' deviation. According to the artist, the mosaic functions in this way both as a window and as a screen, echoing Vilém Flusser: ‘The image is a screen which hides what it means.’

Co-creating the work with survivors and the bereaved underscored its inclusive dimension. Many were invited to place the mosaic together with the artist, among them teenagers who were not yet born when the terrorist acts took place. As one of them put it, we are the future, and it is important that we know what we want to do with it.