Are We Living on a Star? panel with artists participating in Passing Motherhood April 5th 2025

Are We Living on a Star? Memories of giving birth and taking life on planet Earth A panel discussion with artists participating in the group exhibition Passing Motherhood at Trondheim kunstmuseum: Sheba Chhachhi, Basma al-Sharif, Maritea Dæhlin, Marin Shamov and Thora Dolven Balke. Moderated by curators Yaniya Mikhalina and Marianne Zamecznik In 1958, textile artist Hannah Ryggen wove a tapestry We Are Living on a Star, commissioned for a governmental building in Oslo. It depicts a couple in love standing on planet Earth, surrounded by other planets and stars floating in space. On July 22, 2011, when the building was bombed by a Norwegian neo-Nazi, the tapestry was damaged. Once a post-war peace stance, the art piece was subjected to a very same fascist relationship towards life Ryggen had been confronting with her practice. Are we living on a star? What kind of world it hosts? The discussion brings together five participants of the exhibition Passing Motherhood who in various ways practice art as form of remembrance of giving birth and taking life. Drawing from participants’ work, the panel concerns mother*hood on and from Earth, its terminable and interminable forms, affordability, parallel realities, collective labor, and spaces between mother*s shaped by geopolitical and corporal dimensions.