Recommendation of Life-boats, from Jens Frimann Hansen,
director of and Helsingør Teater

Recommendation of Life-boats
by Jens Frimann Hansen, Director of Helsingør Teater

Marit Benthe Norheim has asked me to give a statement about her work Life-boats.
I should emphasize that I am neither an art historian nor a sculptor, and that my knowledge of Danish and international art criticism is only fragmentary. Nevertheless, the work Life-boats possesses, in my view, both an inherent reflection and a performative character. The work is based on interaction and movement through time and space, placing it within a far broader artistic context than the relatively narrow frame from which it originally emerges.

The interactive and performative qualities of Marit Benthe Norheim’s art are by no means new. Both Campingwomen (2009) and The Rat Virgin (2006), as well as several of her earlier works, share these traits. Campingwomen is a travelling exhibition — caravans containing concrete female figures — while The Rat Virgin, inspired by a character in Henrik Ibsen’s play Little Eyolf, incorporates motion through a slide built into the sculpture’s body. In both works, children have participated in the creative process.

Women and children are frequent presences in Marit Benthe Norheim’s art — first and foremost as motifs, but often also as active participants in the creation of the work itself. The theme of fertility is a recurring and distinctive element throughout her artistic practice.

Europe finds itself (as always) in an age of transformation. Globalisation dissolves borders — yet, paradoxically, it also reinforces the outlines of the nation-state. Europe seeks to preserve its cultural heritage while simultaneously exploring the world’s infinite possibilities.

In Lion Feuchtwanger’s tale Odysseus and the Swine, or The Uneasiness with Culture, Odysseus recounts the episode with the sorceress Circe, where his men are bewitched and turned into swine. In Homer’s epic, they are later transformed back into humans; but in Feuchtwanger’s version, Odysseus admits that this was not true — his men did not wish to become human again and take part in the wars of the world; they preferred to remain as swine.

Life-boats reinterprets the journey. The work comments on the Odyssey — on the epic voyage, the man’s linear movement through the world. By grounding and animating the work through interaction, participation, and performance, and by extending the feminine figurehead into the entire vessel — transforming the boat into a container, a womb that echoes the theme of fertility — the journey becomes not only epic but epic-cyclical: a centre for crossing multiple peripheral streams of meaning.

“Wege, nicht Werke” (“Paths, not Works”), wrote Heidegger of his collected writings.
Marit Benthe Norheim’s Life-boats is both a fascinating and an intelligent journey — an open work that unfolds not through an institution but in direct encounter with its audience. It is an appeal, or an invitation, to the child, the viewer, the spectator, the museum, the city, the nation — to step inside and take part.
An elementary, simple, and archaic quality — one we may already have lost in our desire to encompass the entire world.

Jens Frimann Hansen
Theatre Director, Helsingør Teater