Fin Serck-Hansen, Bjørn Hatterud and Caroline Ugelstad Elnæs write:
Queer Icons is not a representative or exhaustive work of history. It attempts to produce a nuanced story about lives that restitute a generational portrait when these lives are brought side by side.In the decades both before and after the decriminalization of homosexuality in Norway in 1972, various forms of queer culture developed underground: in nightclubs, in art spaces, educational institutions, or through voluntary work and closed gatherings. Queer histories, therefore, depend on being retold orally to survive.
Artistic Director of Fotogalleriet Antonio Cataldo writes:
During the last five decades, Fotogalleriet worked to shape a space for representation, where people could create their image under their premises: images that could represent different ways of life outside given norms and institutions. Queer Icons, a multilayered project by Fin Serck Hanssen, Bjørn Hatterud, and Caroline Ugelstad Elnæs, is on many levels a work in progress as we have a long way to go into a more equitable society which not only endorses non-normalized positions but makes them become their primary model, icons. As these issues sit at the intersection of social sciences, technologies of power and information, and the aesthetic field of what’s yet to be normalized and accepted, Fotogalleriet, in its continuous work as a kunsthalle with its public remit and accountability, is inherently the primary site of presentation of such concerns and propositions.
