Indian artists' collective comes within inches of designing Norway's national memorial for terror attack victims

Earlier this week, Indian art missed by a whisker what would have been a major international achievement to follow last month's record-breaking auction of an M F Husain painting in New York.

On April 8, eleven people gathered in Oslo, the capital of Norway, with an important task at hand. It was a jury whose job was to decide who will design a new permanent national memorial for the victims of Norway's worst-ever terror attacks on July 22, 2011 that claimed 77 lives and injured more than 100 people. In contention for the memorial's final design was an artists' collective from India.

The jury, headed by prominent Norwegian politician and former Oslo mayor Marianne Borgen, had to pick a winner from three finalists. Two of the finalists were from Norway itself. The other was called the Raqs Media Collective, based in Delhi.

A competition for the memorial was announced nearly two years ago, opening it to participants from across the world. The 2011 terror attacks, unprecedented in Norway's history, was carried out by a right-wing extremist, who targeted mainly young people. The terror attack was the subject of a globally acclaimed movie, July 22 directed by British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, seven years ago.

When the jury decision was announced in Oslo this week after a three-year-long process, the Raqs Media Collective lost its bid to design the national memorial to a proposal by Norwegian visual artist and novelist Matias Faldbakken.

Nevertheless, its journey, from an artists' collective with a studio in a congested lane in Delhi's trendy design district of Shahpur Jat to within inches of mounting a national memorial in faraway Norway, was worthy of a winner.

Design for diversity

The Raqs Media Collective had become a finalist out of 220 entries from around the world, which were later whittled down to ten in the first round and three in the second. It was the only contender from outside of Norway that had reached the final round.

Founded by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta more than three decades ago, the Raqs Media Collective, a previous participant at the Venice Biennale in Italy and the Kochi-Muziris Biennale back home in Kerala, had submitted its preliminary proposal nearly two years ago when an open call was issued by the Public Art Norway or KORO, a national body entrusted with curating, producing and activating art in public places.

On July 22, 2011 an explosion in the Government Quarter in central Oslo killed eight people and a subsequent shooting on a summer camp of the Norwegian Labour Party's youth wing in Utøya, an island outside Oslo, killed 69, mostly young people. In 2022, KORO was given the job of commissioning a new national memorial for the victims of terror.

The new memorial, termed a national remembrance and learning centre dedicated to the legacy of the 2011 terror attacks, is scheduled to come up at the sprawling town square close to the site of the explosion in central Oslo in a project based on the design of the winning proposal.

The open call for the memorial design was first announced in September 2023, which drew 220 applications from artists, architects and groups. In January 2024, the jury selected ten proposals, including the Raqs Media Collective, from the 220 submissions. The three finalists were announced in September last year. In January this year, the three finalists made their presentations before the jury in Oslo.

Among those on the longlist who didn't advance to the final round were celebrated American visual artist Suzanne Lacy, a pioneer in public art who partnered with South African architect Sumayya Vally, and Norwegian multidisciplinary artist Merete Røstad, who collaborated with Lebanese architect Jad El Khoury. Collaborating Norwegian artists Henning Sunde, Hanne Tyrmi and Rainer Stange formed the third finalist.

Memory of violence

"It is a tragedy that happened in Norway, but it is a global tragedy," explains Bagchi of the Raqs Media Collective. "We wanted to reflect the idea of an open multicultural society, of a memorial that speaks the language of diversity," he adds. Among the victims of the terror attacks were immigrants, from places as far as Iraq, Iran, Somalia and India.

"The 2011 terror attacks in Oslo and Utøya were not specific to Norway. It is part of a rising curve of extreme right-wing violence," echoes Sengupta. “The inability to give a global response to it is leading to more violence.”

Drawn from diverse cultures around the world, the Raqs Media Collective design, modestly titled 22nd July National Memorial, had functional and aesthetic elements inspired by the jaali (window) of Delhi that breathes openness, the Jantar Mantar clock constellation, a verse of Palestinian poet Taha Muhammed Ali, the Norwegian national bird (the white-throated dipper), fossilised stone from Utøya island, and even the Simurgh bird from Persian mythology.

The collective, which met with survivors of the 2011 terror attacks during their many research trips to Norway, proposed a "time-oasis" for its design of the memorial "where we assemble, converse, mourn, reflect and wonder, with 12 bird-clocks poised between rest and ascent with 11 time-telling wingspans, making porous forums with no centre and periphery".

"It is an interesting debate we were part of, about what constitutes memory of violence, and what kind of ways you can think about violence," explains Bagchi. "You can't say violence didn't happen, but you can transform it into a different paradigm," he adds. “No Indian artist has ever travelled the journey in an open-ended competition like that of the Norway memorial before.”

The Raqs Media Collective, which curated the 2008 Manifesta 7 - the European Biennale of Contemporary Art in Italy, the 2016 Shanghai Biennale and the Yokohama Triennale (2020), is not a stranger to global public art competitions. It was a finalist at an international competition for new works on the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square in 2014. Four years ago, the collective's three-part installation, All, Humans (the first words of Article 1 of Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights"), won a competition for the new Faculty of Linguistics, Cultures and Arts building at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

The winning proposal for the Norway national memorial will now transform into a construction project costing about 4.5 million dollars (about 39 crore rupees). The new memorial spanning an area bigger than a football field is expected to be ready in one-and-half years.

"The proposal has taken an emotional toll on us, but it has made us wiser," says Bagchi about the collective's two-year-long work for the Norway memorial that dealt with how to create space, the logic of space and the relationship between art and architecture, all extension of the work the collective has been doing at its Shahpur Jat studio over three decades. "It will have important consequences in the way we will work."