Summer Night by the Beach

The artist duo Astrup & Bordorff has visited 1930s Oslo in a performative adaptation of a popular open-air bath with an accompanying cabaret stage by the fjord. Created as a theatrical backdrop in a film studio, Astrup & Bordorff have staged a series of stylised tableaux, which connect the popular with the more marginalised across past, present and future. From an opera performance on a cruise ship to a romantic encounter between two roller skiers in Oslo’s Ekebergskogen forest, the film includes drag artists, professional actors and amateurs performing side by side under a tropical, ominous, orange sky, which is otherwise foreign to Norway – and which is reminiscent of Fassbinder’s queer cinema monument ‘Querelle’. The place actually existed until 1946, when it burned down, and is today the subject of intense gentrification. The work was commissioned by the Munch Museum and is named after one of Munch’s paintings.