Doors: 18:30
Event start: 19:00
Seated event
The conversation is held in Norwegian
How do we perceive bodies that deviate from the norm? Based on Jan Grue’s essay in the publication Edvard Munch. Lifeblood, Where the Body Begins and the World Ends, this conversation explores what it means to live in and encounter bodies that extend beyond flesh and blood. The wheelchair is an example of such an artificial extension of the body, as is the kind of walking cane Munch owned several of, which are now part of the museum’s collection. What kinds of experiences do they entail, and what kind of gaze do they invite?
About the conversation series Who Cares?
Death in the Sickroom, The Sick Child, Melancholy: Edvard Munch had a visual language for life’s fragile and vulnerable aspects. Many of his works address themes that are personal to all and private to some, such as illness, death and difference. In public discourse, we tend to approach these topics with caution, out of consideration for those affected. But can caution become excessive, and can such overzealous care erode compassion and obscure nuance?
In connection with the exhibition Edvard Munch. Lifeblood, MUNCH invites you to the conversation series Who Cares? Over several discussions in the autumn of 2025, authors, doctors and art historians will reflect on how art influences our conceptions of body and gender, health and illness, life and death.
Jan Grue is a fiction writer and professor at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography at the University of Oslo. He has published three novels, five short story collections and two memoirs, and his books are translated into ten languages. Grue has received several awards, including Fritt Ord’s award and Kritikerprisen – the latter for I Live a Life Like Yours. A Memoir (2018, English 2021), which was also nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize. In 2021, he received the P.O. Enquist Prize for Hvis jeg faller. En fortelling om usynlig arbeid (If I fall. A story about invisible work). His most recent book is the novel Det kinesiske rommet (The Chinese Room, 2024).
Heidi Bale Amundsen is an editor at MUNCH Publishing, where she works with fiction, non-fiction and image-based books on art. Amundsen is trained in aesthetics and art history and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Oslo with her dissertation Perceiving Structural Unity in Photobooks (2019). She has extensive experience as a critic specialising in contemporary art and photography and served as chair of the Norwegian Critics’ Association from 2019 to 2022.
©Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, Munchmuseet
