The season begins on 10 March with An echo buried deep deep down but calling still, a major new exhibition by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. In parallel with the exhibition a separate performance program will be presented.

2023 marks the 30^th anniversary of Astrup Fearnley Museet. To celebrate this significant milestone, the museum will present an extensive Anniversary Exhibition featuring works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection opening on 22 June. Alongside recent acquisitions from the past three years, the exhibition will include both iconic and lesser-known works, showcasing the collection’s breadth and scope across the museum’s two buildings. 

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Basel Abbas / Ruanne Abou-Rahme
An echo buried deep deep down but calling still
10 March – 28 May 2023

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: An echo buried deep deep down but calling still brings together key works jointly produced by the artists since they began collaborating in ​​​​2007 and is the first museum exhibition to survey their practice. It provides an opportunity to understand the breadth of their work—how it has developed over the last decade and a half across a range of mediums, including video, sound, installation and performance—while highlighting their contributions to the poetics of resistance, and the political as well as creative possibilities of the fragmentary. Central to their practice is an ongoing concern of how communities not only endure the consequences of oppressive political systems, including state sanctioned violence and colonialism, but also create potential within this context.

In May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2013-), an ongoing project that will be presented at the Astrup Fearnley Museet as part of this exhibition, Abbas and Abou-Rahme gathered pre-existing video materials found online depicting communities in Palestine, Iraq, Syria and Yemen that reclaim a sense of dignity through song and dance—of being ‘momentarily and communally together’ as articulated by the artists (Soboleva, 2022). It brings together digital traces of these performing bodies with new performances created by the artists with dancer Rima Baransi and electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk. 

Basel Abbas (born 1983, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (born 1983, USA) live and work between Ramallah, Palestine and New York.

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After Tomorrow – Thirty Years of Astrup Fearnley Museet 
21 June – 1 October 2023 

2023 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Astrup Fearnley Museet. To celebrate this significant milestone, the museum will present an extensive exhibition featuring works from the Astrup Fearnley Collection.

The selected works represent various time periods and highlight a number of key directions that have come to define the identity of the collection and the museum more broadly. The exhibition also provides an opportunity to grapple with what it means to develop and manage a collection and to consider what role the Astrup Fearnley Collection can play within a changing public sphere. 

The Astrup Fearnley Collection is one of Europe’s largest collections of international contemporary art. Beginning in the 1960s, Hans Rasmus Astrup assembled a collection that emphasized artists themselves, rather than historical periods or stylistic trends, a focus that established him as one of the world’s most active, daring, and influential collectors. The collection holds multiple works from several significant artists, both Norwegian and international, documenting the development and complexity of their practices. With the passing of Astrup in 2021, the Astrup Fearnley Collection was donated to a non-profit foundation that has as its sole purpose to further develop this collection and to present it to a broad public. 

The celebration of the museum’s anniversary is thus also a tribute to the museum’s founder, Hans Rasmus Astrup, who, with this generous gift, made his collection available to us all. 

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