Vanessa Baird, the winner of this year’s Norwegian Lorck Schive prize, is creating new murals for the ministry of health in Oslo, two years after her paintings were removed from the government building over complaints they reminded employees of the 2011 terror attack carried out by Anders Behring Breivik. Despite being created before the attack, the paintings were taken down and installed in the headquarters of the Arts Council Norway.
The new murals, due to be displayed on three walls inside the ministry of health, resonate with Baird’s Lorck Shive prize-winning work—a room full of wall drawings that depict, among other things, refugees drowning in the Mediterranean. The government commission will include “more drowning and cell phones”, Baird says in an interview with Le Paradox, adding it will be “very poetic and scary”.
Meanwhile, I don’t want to be anywhere, but here I am (2015) is on show at the Trondheim Kunstmuseum until 28 February 2016 together with the works of the other Lorck Shive finalists: Ane Hjort Guttu, Jana Winderen and Snorre Ytterstad. It is a particularly political line up this year. Guttu has made a film about Norwegian politicians’ recent attempt to outlaw begging and Ytterstad’s installation, Wires and Strings, comments on Europe’s refugee crisis.
Baird’s work incorporates a range of imagery from cots and cribs to naked people and swirling oceans. One small, lifeless body appears to have been washed up on shore, a poignant reminder of the drowned Syrian toddler whose body was found on a Turkish beach in September.
Norway has come under fire in recent weeks for launching a controversial anti-refugee advertising campaign in print and social media. The Norwegian directorate of immigration has sent messages on Twitter warning Afghans planning to cross the border from Russia that they risked forced repatriation. But Baird says all citizens, artists included, have an obligation to help fellow humans in need.
“People who are fleeing war zones and hopeless conditions should be welcomed,” she says. “It’s grotesque how people have to pay cruise fares to risk their lives across the Mediterranean in crammed plastic boats. It’s heart-rending to see these people wandering around in Europe, looking for somewh ere to be accepted. The rhetoric in Norway is more and more about us/them, which is depressing. But I’m not a politician; I have no recipe for how to deal with today’s situation.”
