In the Moment: Notes from a Weekend of Performance in Oslo

Saturday morning in Oslo, I circle the National Museum looking for SAGG Napoli’s new work. The slate-clad façade reads like a fortress—clean planes of Oppdal stone, almost defensive in its quiet. Around the corner, there’s another fortress of sorts: a matte-black cube ringed by metal bars and guarded by security. Spray-painted across its high walls are lines that sound like a collective instruction: May we learn to control our rage. May we learn to organise our anger. So that it moves us to build. Rather than force us to destroy. Screens loop a scrolling text. One sentence catches me and doesn’t let go: “I would rather be an angry girl than a frightened one.”

I go in. Inside the cube the space compresses. In the center: hulking stones, protective glasses, shoe covers, a hammer. Alone, I negotiate the weight of the handle, then strike. Each hit detonates against the rock—percussive thuds that meet a lilting Italian folk soundtrack. Dust clouds rise. I stop, flushed and a little stunned at how quickly the body remembers impact.

Napoli’s premise is blunt and generous: an environment to identify where anger lives in the body and to release it through short, intensive exercises. The metaphor is legible (smashing to build) and rooted in what she calls “South Aesthetics,” a framework grounded in Neapolitan identity, mental health, and unapologetic expressiveness. She mentions she took up archery after a breakdown, adding: “Life can be brutal, but this is a practice of patience, of emotions. I’ve been doing it for five years now. It feels like a new chance. Becoming a sport person became my medicine. I became more concentrated, like throwing arrows at a target nonstop for five hours, to manage my anger.” Since 2020, archery’s physical focus—aiming, breathing, release—has become a through-line in her installations and performances.

Is what happens in this cube a performance? It certainly behaves like one. There’s a score (instructions), a set (the cube), props (hammer, stones), and an audience of one. But more importantly, there’s an aftermath. A felt residue in the wrists and lungs, a recalibration of tempo. Rage is often framed as spectacle; Napoli reframes it as technique. The work’s strength is that it doesn’t aestheticize violence; it trains capacity. You leave not with a cathartic purge, but with a quieter awareness of thresholds: when breath shortens, when heat rises. It’s less a show than a rehearsal for living.

That evening I step into Storsalen for Meredith Monk with members of her Vocal Ensemble, Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin. The hall hums with that particular attention people bring to an artist whose work has shaped entire fields. Monk begins with Songs from the Hill (mid-1970s), her voice carrying a landscape of air, grit, and clarity. The room softens. She smiles, and the smile works its way through the audience like light.

Monk is often described as a pioneer of extended vocal technique, but that phrase can sound technical for something essentially human. What she does is remind us that the voice is an instrument and a language; that it can hold weather, memory, and play without being tethered to text. “I always felt the need to create,” she says. “Now I’m 82. I devoted my life to be an artist at 22. People enjoy putting everyone into boxes, but I believe it’s one thing. My whole being is ‘in the moment,’ like the title of this program. Making art today is resistance. The world is very dark, but I still have hope. I keep trying.”

Simple Sorrow (2020), shaped during lockdown, moves like a vigil, private dread becoming communal breath. Monk frames that period as a time of “thinking alone, walking alone, dying alone,” yet the piece turns outward with a clear refusal: “Don’t give up.” In her rendering, consolation is not sentiment; it’s structure. The harmonies lean into each other, build footing, then open.

She closes with “Happy Woman” from Cellular Songs (2018), a work that listened to cooperation at the smallest scale and found models for social life in cellular behavior. The repeated line “Oh, I’m a happy woman” arrives not as a declaration but as a practice, a rhythm for staying. “The beautiful thing with live art,” she confesses, “is that you’re allowing yourself to be vulnerable. Being real and authentic. There’s nothing wrong in being sincere.” In a culture allergic to earnestness, Monk’s sincerity feels like a kind of rigor. The evening telescopes six decades of invention into a single proposition: voice as connective tissue, singing as a way to keep company with others and with time.

On Sunday I return for Uskkádat Ustaria, a guided walk by Elina Waage Mikalsen and Jassem el Hindi that threads through the museum’s collections. At the entrance we are handed headphones; their voices will hold the route. This is a commission tailored to the National Museum’s architecture and holdings, and it asks a simple, difficult question: what autonomy is possible within this colonial space?

Waage Mikalsen, a Sámi-Norwegian artist and musician, often assembles field recordings, voice, electronics, and home-built instruments into spaces between reality and fable. She reflects there isn’t even a Sámi word for “performance”—“Performance is art is life is art is life”—which is less a slogan than a worldview. El Hindi, a French Palestinian Lebanese artist and performer, speaks of “haunting and hospitality,” of being “generous hosts” within institutions that claim to belong to the public and thus to artists. “I like when the work, once done, sparkles something,” he says. The aim is not illustration but activation.

We drift past visitors who are visiting another museum entirely. In our ears: chimes, water, close-miked breath, a voice repeating “I’m here, I’m here, I’m here… always present, even when you can’t see me.” The artists stage small, precise actions that sync and dislocate with what we see. A bucket of berries appears, and with it a story about gathering and reciprocity. Eating inside the museum, usually prohibited, becomes a gentle trespass and a reminder that culture and sustenance have always been entwined. We each receive a berry. It’s a tiny act, but it re-calibrates the body against the rules of the room.

In front of Hannah Ryggen’s tapestries we pause, eyes pulled to Horror (1936). Ryggen wove her politics into the loom; the weft is a timeline of global tension. Here the duo weave their own counter-text about hospitality and geopolitics, a conversation that moves from the earth to the moon, from today’s conflict zones to the quiet of a northern gallery, without severing the thread. A single word echoes through the headphones: “absence… absence… absence.” It names what collections often don’t: who isn’t pictured, who isn’t cited, whose stories were trimmed to fit a wall label.

At one point Waage Mikalsen cries out, “Where is my language?” Then she slips into Sámi, song and speech braided, while gesturing toward the didactic panels, their anonymous authority intact after decades. The question is not only accuracy; it’s ownership and address. Who wrote these words, and for whom? Both artists remove their shoes for a short movement sequence—respect offered not to an abstract institution but to the lives and materials gathered under its roof. The walk doesn’t produce outrage; it cultivates attentiveness. The choreography is made of looks, steps, and the small courage of asking better questions out loud.

Across the weekend, “In the Moment” frames performance not as a genre but as a set of relations between body and site, voice and listener, institution and public, anger and action. What links these three very different propositions is a shared insistence on training: how to notice, how to aim, how to host.

Napoli’s cube shows that rage can be practiced into form. It is not about spectacle but capacity: learning to move energy so it doesn’t rot inside. Monk’s concert reminds us that sincerity can be highly disciplined and that the voice is a place where hope can be rehearsed daily. Waage Mikalsen and el Hindi lead us through the seams of a museum, teaching us to hear what labels cannot carry and to make room for what returns: the languages, appetites, and ghosts that collections often overwrite.

A program like this also repositions the museum. Instead of staging performance as a special event sealed off from the rest, it lets the works spill into the square, the hall, the galleries—so that the institution is experienced as a living host rather than a glazed container. The title could sound generic, but over two days it felt exact. To be in the moment is not to chase novelty. It is to be specific with your attention: this hammer, this breath, this harmony, this berry, this label, this absence.

Before I leave, I think about how each artist shifted my sense of time. Napoli compressed it to the instant of the strike; Monk stretched it into a lattice of tones where grief and consolation could rest together; Waage Mikalsen and el Hindi layered it, so the present held other presents, other tongues. Performance, in their hands, is not an answer. It’s a method. It teaches you how to arrive and how to stay.

And maybe that’s the quiet argument of the weekend: that presence is learnable. You can train your aim. You can tune your voice. You can walk a building differently and, with others, make it a little more hospitable. Being in the moment is work—sometimes sweaty, sometimes tender—but it gives something back. And you carry it past the doors.



In the Moment, a two-day performance program at the National Museum in Oslo (25–26 October 2025), was developed by a committee comprising Stina Høgkvist, Geir Haraldseth, and Klaus Biesenbach.



Feature image: Meredith Monk. Courtesy of Nasjonalmuseet/Frode Larsen