The National Museum of Norway in Oslo has announced the launch of a major new art performance programme, In the Moment, taking place from Saturday 25th to Sunday 26th October 2025. Featuring live performances alongside conversations and events, this dynamic initiative establishes a vital platform for performance art and the critical discourse surrounding its history and future.
In the Moment will celebrate the breadth and vitality of contemporary performance art, explore its evolution throughout the 20th century, and examine its evolving relationship with museums and institutions. Emphasising the fluid, interdisciplinary nature of performance, the programme will bring together a range of practices by established and emerging artists, showcasing the diversity
of the genre.
The programme was initiated in 2023/2024 by Stina Høgkvist, the then director of collections at the National Museum, together with Lise Stolt-Nielsen and Klaus Biesenbach. The 2025 programme is developed by a committee consisting of Stina Høgkvist (Director, Northern Norwegian Art Museum), Geir Haraldseth (Curator, the National Museum) and Klaus Biesenbach (Director, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin), a longstanding and renowned curator of performance programmes at institutions including MoMA and MoMA PS1, New York and MoCA LA.
In the Moment features live performances by three contemporary artists. These include the pioneering composer, performer and interdisciplinary artist Meredith Monk (b. 1942, New York), recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 2025 Venice Biennale Musica. Celebrated for works that seamlessly integrate voice, body and movement, Monk will appear in concert on Saturday 25th October in the museum’s main auditorium, performing with members of her renowned Vocal Ensemble, Katie Gessinger and Allison Sniffin.
Throughout the weekend, SAGG Napoli (b. 1991, Naples) will activate the museum’s outdoor square with an interactive performance exploring themes of rage and emotional embodiment – characteristic of her practice, which bridges the physical and psychological.
Meanwhile, SámiNorwegian interdisciplinary artist and musician Elina Waage Mikalsen (b. 1992, Romssa / Tromsø) will foreground questions of whose stories are represented in the museum, and who has the power to tell them – disrupting institutional narratives and centring alternative ways of knowing. Monk, Napoli and Mikalsen will also take part in a public conversation on Sunday 26th October, reflecting on their individual approaches and the changing role of performance in contemporary art.
In addition to the performances, a series of lectures, panel talks and conversations will explore the curation, production, research and conservation of performance art. Curated by Håkon Lillegraven (Curator of Education, National Museum of Norway), this programme will bring together leading voices from museums and cultural institutions worldwide, fostering new international and cross-institutional dialogues.
Contributors will include: Alison Burstein (Curator, MoMA, New York); Ana Ribeiro (Conservator, Tate); Hendrik Folkerts (Curator of International Contemporary Art and Head of Exhibitions, Moderna Museet, Stockholm); Helle Siljeholm (artist, choreographer, and PhD fellow in artistic research, Oslo); Jina Chang (Conservator, Nasjonalmuseet); Kjersti Solbakken (Director, Bergen Kunsthall); Lotte Løvholm (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde); Saša Asentic (choreographer, researcher, and cultural worker, Oslo/Novi Sad); and others.
‘The National Museum is deeply grateful to Lise Stolt-Nielsen and her family for their generous support, enabling a major international platform dedicated to performance art,’
says Ingrid Røynesdal, Director at the National Museum of Norway.
‘Through live new works and a rich discursive programme, In the Moment will explore the tension between performance as a fleeting, fluid art form and the museum’s role as a space of permanence and preservation. We look forward to presenting internationally acclaimed artists to Norwegian audiences and to fostering critical new discourse around the medium, both within the institution and beyond.’
In the Moment, Saturday 25th – Sunday 26th October 2025, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo, Norway
The programme has been generously supported by Lise Stolt-Nielsen and her family, reflecting their longstanding commitment to advancing performance art in both Norwegian and international contexts.
About the artists
Elina Waage Mikalsen (b.1992) is a Sámi-Norwegian interdisciplinary artist and musician from Romssa/Tromsø, Sápmi. She works with sound, text, textile, performance and installation. She often mixes field recordings, voice, electronics and home-built instruments to create sonic spaces that exist somewhere between reality and fantasy.
By collecting fragments of stories, materials and practices she works with what lies in between. The holes that the Norwegian colonization of Sápmi has created in the form of loss of language and cultural heritage have become a starting point for imagining what these holes might represent, what matter they constitute and how they continue to affect the people in our societies. Waage Mikalsen collaborates with other artists and practitioners and since 2023 she has organized Šuvva, a gathering in the form of a talk show-collage focused on sounds and listening from a Sámi and Indigenous perspective.
Waage Mikalsen has exhibited and performed nationally and internationally in places like Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, MUNCH, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Nuuk Art Museum, Cultural Centre Caisa, The National Museum in Norway, Lofoten International Arts Festival, Singapore Biennale, Toronto Biennial and Roskilde Festival (with Katarina Barruk). She has also been an artist in residence at the Borealis Festival for experimental music, focusing on Sámi sonic practices, ways of listening and experimenting.
Meredith Monk is a composer, singer, and creator of new opera, music-theater works, films and installations. Recognized as one of the most unique and influential artists of our time, she is a pioneer in what is now called “extended vocal technique” and “interdisciplinary performance”. Her groundbreaking exploration of the voice as an instrument, as an eloquent language in and of itself, expands the boundaries of musical composition, creating landscapes of sound that unearth feelings, energies, and memories for which there are no words. Over the last six decades Monk has received numerous awards and honors including a MacArthur Fellowship, Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters from the Republic of France, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and a National Medal of Arts. She has also been hailed as one of National Public Radio’s 50 Great Voices and “one of America’s coolest composers.” Celebrated internationally, her work has been presented at major venues throughout the world.
Monk has recorded with the ECM New Series label since 1981 and was recently honored with a 13-disc box set of her work, Meredith Monk: The Recordings, in celebration of her 80th birthday, which includes the 2008 GRAMMY® nominated impermanence. In addition to numerous vocal pieces, music-theater works and operas, she has created vital new repertoire for orchestra, chamber ensembles and solo instruments. Her music has also been featured in films by Terrence Malick, Jean-Luc Godard, David Byrne and the Coen Brothers. Selected scores of her work are available through Boosey & Hawkes. She is also the subject of two books of interviews: Conversations with Meredith Monk, by arts critic and Performing Arts Journal editor Bonnie Marranca, and Une voix mystique, by French author Jean-Louis Tallon.
From Fall 2023 to Spring 2024, Meredith Monk. Calling, her first European retrospective exhibition, was realized as a collaboration between Oude Kerk Amsterdam with Hartwig Art Foundation, and Haus der Kunst München. A catalogue of interviews, essays, previously unpublished archival material and documentation of the exhibitions was published in Fall 2024. Recently Monk celebrated her 60th Performance Season with a host of events centred in New York City with additional performances and workshops abroad. This fall she will receive the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in Music at the Venice Biennale.
About SAGG Napoli
About the National Museum
SAGG Napoli is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans performance, video, sculpture, photography, writing, and digital culture. Rooted in a deep engagement with her Neapolitan identity, her work interrogates class, gender, regionalism, and mental health through a highly personal and unapologetically expressive aesthetic she defines as “South Aesthetics.”
A graduate of Camberwell College of the Arts, London (BA Fine Art Photography, 2014), SAGG’s work draws on visual and performative codes from Southern Italy architecture, gesture, dialect, fashion, ritual to challenge dominant narratives of beauty, power, and cultural value. At once intimate and theatrical, her practice engages the body as both subject and medium, often exploring vulnerability, resilience, and discipline in relation to broader social and psychological structures.
Since 2020, SAGG has also been active as a competitive archer. Her physical training and mental discipline have become core elements in recent installations and performances, where the act of aiming physically, emotionally, and politically becomes a central metaphor. Her 2024 solo exhibition Sempre Contratta at Basement Roma exemplified this synthesis, staging the artist’s body and sport tools as sculptural forms and healing devices.
Recently, SAGG has shifted toward writing and orality as artistic mediums, extending her practice into new poetic and conceptual terrains. She continues to explore the contra dictions and power of Southern identity as a living, embodied archive.
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway, is the largest art museum in Northern Europe, housing an extensive collection of over 400,000 objects. These include paintings, sculptures, drawings, textiles, furniture, and architectural works, spanning from antiquity to the present day.
The museum’s new, state-of-the-art building, which opened in 2022, showcases a comprehensive presentation of approximately 6,500 works, providing a rich narrative of Norwegian art and culture within a global context. It offers visitors a diverse, cross-disciplinary and research-driven programme of temporary exhibitions and events, regularly featuring works by internationally renowned artists.
