Image: Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, London
Feroz Mehmood Shah will give a lecture on 24 September from 17:00 to 18:00, addressing how the political can be understood in contemporary art. Presented by Astrup Fearnley Museet, the event is the third instalment of a lecture series about the place of art in philosophy and literature, with each session taking its starting point in individual works from the collection.
For this instalment, Shah will discuss Britta Marakatt-Labba’s 2022 work ‘Gränsløst’. The embroidery gathers its motif around a horizontal central line, using shades of blue, black and red to suggest a winter landscape; a small figure on a reindeer sledge appears in the white foreground. Shah will examine how Marakatt-Labba’s quiet stitches bring together reflections on nature and culture, different forms of life, and the effects of human existence on Earth.
Marakatt-Labba was born into a reindeer-herding family in Sápmi, a region extending across national borders in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. The museum describes her works as containing political reflections on ecology, climate and feminism, as well as Sámi identity, history and the present.
In Benjamin’s formulation, an angel facing the past sees one single catastrophe where people see a sequence of events. Shah is a philosophy lecturer at the University of Oslo, specializing in ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy. The lecture will be held in Norwegian and is included with museum admission.
