Tone Hansen

Marit Paasche

We are living on a star takes its title from a tapestry by Hannah Ryggen that hung in the government building known as 'the High-rise' until July 22, 2011. The explosion that took place that day left the tapestry with a gash in the lower portion. The artists and writers participating in We Are Living on a Star contend with a range of issues relating to history, contemporaneity, normality, and expression. The result is an open and inquiring look at our own time.

We are Living on a Star

Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970) was a Swedish-Norwegian modern artist who began her career as a painter before switching to creating political art in the form of monumental tapestries. Combining the decorative and the political, Ryggen was ahead of her time with her turn to "political weaving." She was also a feminist with strong communist sympathies involved in the international workers' movement. Her dramatic, beautiful tapestries were shown at both the Paris and Brussels World's Fairs, but she was largely forgotten by the international art world in the decades after her death. In recent years, however, as interest in both fiber arts and pioneering women artists has grown, Ryggen's work has returned to the public eye, with major international exhibitions and fresh attention from curators, collectors, and critics. A widely recognized authority on Ryggen, Marit Paasche brings this important Scandinavian artist to the foreground in this biography, the first published on Ryggen in English. Paasche looks at Ryggen within the social, political, and cultural contexts of her time and explores how these issues informed her work, from her anti-fascist tapestry that depicted a spear piercing Mussolini's head to one protesting the war in Vietnam. Published to correspond with a major retrospective in Frankfurt, of which Paasche is one of the curators, Hannah Ryggen is a foundational book that will provide a crucial introduction of this artist to a broader audience.

Threads of Defiance

Hannah Ryggen

Judy Radul

"Since the early twentieth century, contemporary art and art theory have creatively challenged the status of representation. [...] To an increasing extent the law is present on screen, and the photographs, video documents, audio recordings used as evidence are not entirely distinct from their correlates in contemporary art, cinema and mass media."--Back cover.

Marit Paasche

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