Chaza Charafeddine, Divine Comedy Series: Untitled V, 2010. © Chaza Charafeddine

One cold Oslo morning in mid-November, the kind where each hour of daylight is a gift and the air chills any optimistic thought of lingering outside, the opening of “Deviant Ornaments” at the National Museum of Norway marked a significant shift. Installed in one of the most prominent institutions in the Nordic countries, the exhibition explores queer experiences in the Islamic world, a topic often considered too delicate and politically charged for museum spaces.

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“It started with the Queer Culture Year in 2022,” the National Museum’s director, Ingrid Røynesdal, tells Observer. “We asked ourselves the question, what should we do? What can we do to really amplify or embrace a new and broader understanding of gender and sexuality?”

That question led the institution to bring in co-curator Noor Bhangu, whose doctoral research on queer identities in Islamic contexts inspired the show. “Her project was so vital and so clear,” Røynesdal recalls. “We were super inspired by her approach, which fits very much together with the whole umbrella of the museum programming.”

Røynesdal doesn’t sidestep these concerns when dealing with the nuances of multiculturalism and queer identity. “We need to go into those topics with respect and responsibility,” she says. “It’s not the obvious exhibition.”

Not obvious, no, but important to start these kinds of conversations. In a country where the asylum acceptance rate remains relatively high, many second-generation youth navigate two parallel sets of expectations: the social liberalism of their adoptive Norway and the more traditional and religious values carried across borders by their families of origin. “As a museum, we need to be relevant to an increasingly diverse society,” Røynesdal acknowledges.

While pussyfooting around Islam and not tackling the problematic aspects head-on, “Deviant Ornaments” still carries the good type of tension of a show that could almost certainly not happen in most of the places whose cultures are referenced. In it, the rereading of queer expressions in ancient artifacts or its expression in contemporary works happens within a progressive Scandinavian interpretive framework that permits seeing the difference between religious dogma and Islamic lived culture while assuming safety in doing so. In that, the exhibition is illustrating how institutions globally are trying to adapt, sometimes haltingly, to a society whose values are shifting in real time.

New interpretative strategies at the National Museum of Norway

© Observer