Opening speech at the arrival of Life-boat in Copenhagen
by Else Marie Bukdahl, Dr. Phil.

The Danish/Norwegian sculptor Marit Benthe Norheim is an internationally recognized artist whose art is built on many forms of collaboration with technology and natural science, while at the same time possessing a special visionary power and establishing new and unexpected relations with the surrounding world and with the individual human being, nature, and society as a whole. In forming these relationships, she is also inspired by literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. Her art is generally situated in an interdisciplinary field.
She has exhibited widely, especially in Denmark, Norway, and England, and her works are represented in numerous museums, such as the National Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, and the Vendsyssel Art Museum. For many years she has made a strong impact in Danish and international art life because she has created a long series of often very extensive and original projects, which have given public spaces in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, England, Iceland, and Greenland a new identity. In many cases, she has given harbors, schools, hospitals, hospices, churches, and industrial sites a new and visible profile.
Concrete is her preferred material, and she has acquired a deep insight into its many possibilities of use. It is a material that in itself is anonymous, but which she has transformed in such a way that it appears as an artistic material, marked by a unique sensitivity.

Marit Benthe Norheim has always been concerned with how she can intensify the dialogue and relationship between her art and the public. She discovered that by creating movable sculptures she could open up new forms of communication. Her first attempt at creating mobile sculptural works was The Rolling Angels, which the public could move themselves, thereby establishing a fine mental as well as physical contact with them.
With the creation of The Camping Women (2008), she developed this strategy further. She transformed five worn-out caravans into moving female figures of great strength. Their skirts covered the caravan itself, while the upper body emerged from the roof. They have already travelled both in Denmark and abroad, establishing new kinds of contact in places where visual art has normally not been present. In this way, she succeeded in extending sculpture’s communicative reach.
But she has also combined music with her art. This has taken place through a long and fruitful collaboration with the well-known composer Geir Johnson. By creating movable sculptures and installing music within them, she has introduced a time dimension into sculpture that it does not normally possess.
This year she has surprised us once again, by creating nothing less than three 12-meter-long Life-boats, which already stand in the harbor here at Papirøen, awaiting your visit. The work has taken about seven years.
The three boats are made of concrete and shaped as female figures, both powerful and deeply sensual and expressive. The large female figures form the very shape of the boats and represent the three central stages in a woman’s life.

The first boat is called My ship is loaded with Longing – the young woman setting out into life, yearning for love.
The second is called My ship is loaded with Life – here the woman is pregnant and in mid-life.
The third has been given the name My ship is loaded with Memories – it carries 19 figureheads, portraits of women over 70 who have worked across several countries. At the same time, they express universal existential conditions and aspirations. They are marked by a fine interplay between the local, the national, and the global. However different they may be, they share one goal: a vigorous striving for unity, peace, and humanity. Several of them have, through their lives, painfully experienced how difficult this striving has often been to realize, and indeed how it has at times been trampled underfoot.

In this project too, the Norwegian composer Geir Johnson has created music. He has composed soundscapes for the interior of each boat, in order to underscore the women’s individual character and general symbolic function.
Time and again, we experience that both poets and visual artists can change our perception of everyday life, give us new courage, and reveal aspects of our world that we had not noticed. This is the experience we gain when we meet and sail with Marit Benthe Norheim’s Life-boats. At the same time, they open doors to the world of imagination and pierce through the veil of conventionality that so often surrounds our daily lives.
Precisely because Marit Benthe Norheim has combined sculpture and music in a movable – sailing – work of art, they can reach those who encounter them or come on board in a particularly intense way. They appeal to all our senses, and many of us have already felt how they almost take residence in our consciousness, continuing to leave their mark on our daily lives.
In the actual experience of Life-boats, something happens: our fixed opinions and attitudes are often exceeded, and a new experience is opened – that life is richer than any single theory can capture.

Life-boats also link the local with the international or global. This is an endeavor especially important today, when one-eyed nationalist movements threaten to narrow our vision. If the local and the national do not have a global perspective, they will become self-sufficient. We therefore hope that Life-boats will have the opportunity to sail on the German and French rivers, and preferably also on the Chinese canal, thereby weaving bonds between our different cultures. These journeys will be organized in such a way that artistic and cultural events will be arranged in every port where the boats anchor: theater, music, small art exhibitions, and other activities that create opportunities for new cultural encounters and new forms of understanding, both of the similarities and of the differences between our countries.
And in this context, My ship is loaded with Memories is especially important. For the 19 female figures symbolize – as mentioned – a cross-cultural perspective, and they call to be sent out into Europe and beyond, in order to foster fruitful cultural encounters.

We all hope that the dream of sailing out into the wide world will come true, but we are at the same time immensely happy that Life-boats has come to Copenhagen Contemporary at Papirøen. Each of the three boats carries in its own way a message of hope for greater understanding of cultural differences and for a new, more peaceful world, where love has the final word.

Else Marie Bukdahl