rest your eyes in Sweden’s national museum pic: nationalmuseum.se
Sweden’s national museum, in Stockholm, closed in mid March due to Covid. Earlier, they had closed certain installations and certain events, but remained open for individual visitors for as long as they could. Then it all came to an end.
But now there’s an end to the end. Although some rooms will be closed, and there will be a slew of signs saying what you can do, can’t do, or can do under certain conditions (if you absolutely must sneeze, for example, for heaven’s sake pull a Dracula and go nose to elbow!), you will be free to wander around and take your mind off things with the help of art.
pic: tidningen vi
Art – or Nobel festivity dresses. The regularly scheduled installation of Sara Danius’ Nobel dresses (and they were really fabulous creations) as well as an installation on Gustavsberg porcelain will also be open.
Zorn, detail (pic: barnebys)
Sadly, the “Zorn – a Swedish superstar” exhibit won’t open but has been put off until February of next year.
the Handke nomination still causing an uproar pic: Armend Nimani/AFP/Getty
Besides Lucia and her flickering crown on the 13th, the other bright point in the otherwise compact darkness of December is the Nobel festivities. We will certainly miss the late permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, a bright point in a bright point, and the way she would sweep down the stairs in a fabulous dress (putting everyone else to shame in more ways than one).
Sara Danius at the Nobel festivities pic: DN.se
Despite frantic measures to put the Nobel Prize for Literature back on its feet, it was again lambasted this year for its choice for the 2019 prize. Already two members of the external committee that helps the Academy choose a prize winner have stepped down this last week, and now, a long-term member of the Academy, Peter Englund, has said he will not participate in the award ceremony in protest of the 2019 choice, Peter Handke.
The critique of Peter Handke is in regard to his not very critical stance towards the Serbian regime during the war in former Yugoslavia. He is accused, among other things, of relativising mass murder, and of denying the genocide of 8000 muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in 1995 (SvD.se/Handke). Peter Englund saw the war first hand as a reporter for Expressen and Dagens Nyheter: “To celebrate Peter Handke’s Nobel prize would be extreme hypocrisy from my side” he wrote in a mail to DN.
Others are not so categorical. “He is basically anti-fascist; there is a lot of evidence for this” said Thomas Steinfeld , a professor of theory and literary criticism. “When he avoids the use of the word genocide for anti-fascist reasons, it’s interpreted as though he’s denying it.” Steinfeld goes on to say that this is the biggest misunderstanding of Handke’s work (SvD.se/Handke). (There are reams of articles about Handke’s nomination in all sorts of languages, if interested).
Meanwhile, 2018’s prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk, will – yes – be visiting school children at a Rinkeby school during her week in Stockholm after all. The tradition has been that this particular school studies the literature of the prize winner (why it isn’t Peter Handke, see above), and then the prize winner visits the school. Earlier, Tokarczuk was not going to visit the school at all, but someone reminded her that these are children, this is what is done, and that she needed to get with the program. It was just a misunderstanding, said her translator.
