Witnessing War: A Conversation in the BOMBA Exhibition with Khalid Albaih and Tetiana Khodakivska

November 26 2024

Welcome to a conversation with Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih and Ukrainian filmmaker Tetiana Khodakivska in Dag Erik Elgin’s exhibition BOMBA at the Skylight Halls of Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo on Thursday, December 12, 2024, from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM.

How can art be a witness to war? How can traumatic testimonies be drawn up? Is seeing images from afar also a form of witnessing?

These questions will be reflected through the work of Sudanese political cartoonist Khalid Albaih and the Ukrainian filmmaker Tetiana Khodakivska.

Khalid Albaih recently completed the installation Shahid, Arabic for witness, which addresses how social media and live streaming of the atrocities in Gaza have turned viewers into witnesses. Tetiana Khodakivska‘s mixed-media documentary The Blue Sweater with a Yellow Hole uses hand-drawn animations as testimony of Ukrainian children’s time in the Russian “re-education camps”.

The conversation will take place in the room where Pablo Picasso’s Guernica was shown in 1938, which is the focus of Dag Erik Elgin’s current exhibition BOMBA. Although Picasso painted the work in exile in France, Guernica depicts scenes of the devastating bombing by Nazi planes of the Basque town of the same name just weeks before.

Photo: Jan Khür/Abrakadabra

The event is part of a program that is organized in partnership with Fritt Ord and Kunstnernes Hus. Kunstnernes Hus create the framework for current conversations about the intersections of art, society and freedom.

Practical information at Kunstnernes Hus

News

The freelance study is completed in 2025

October 15 2025

The share of freelancers in the media has been increasing for years in many countries, but until recently, there has been little research-based knowledge about the scope of freelance work and the working conditions of journalists, photographers, and critics without permanent employment in the media.

The Genocide in Gaza and Big Tech

October 14 2025

Sunday, 19 October 2025 at 3.30 PM at Cinemateket, Oslo
Fritt Ord, Masahat and Oslo Dokumentarkino invite you to a lecture and conversation with Nadim Nashif about Big Tech’s complisity in the genocide in Gaza.

New Oxford fellow – How Journalists Interview “Monsters and Victims”

October 14 2025

VG journalist Håkon F. Høydal has been awarded Fritt Ord’s journalism fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford in the spring of 2026.
His project explores what journalists can learn from new trauma research when interviewing both “monsters and victims” in crime and abuse cases.

What's happening in Georgia?

September 22 2025

Monday 29 September 2025 at 6.30–8 pm at Vega Scene, Oslo

“While art is often relegated to the bottom of financial priorities, it paradoxically becomes the first target of dictators.”

Fritt Ord invites you to a presentation of a hyper-relevant, upcoming documentary film “Untitled” from Georgia and a conversation with two film directors about the political developments in the country in collaboration with Oslo Dokumentarkino, Stray Dogs Norway, Viken Filmsenter and the Norwegian Film Federation. Journalist Ingerid Salvesen is the moderator. For the safety of the filmmakers, we will not mention their names in advance.