Welcome to “Sara and freedom”

Across the street from Perspektivet Museum, WOW (Walls of Women Tromsø) is completing a street art project inspired by Cora Sandel, and on 15 June, the museum opens its large exhibition on Cora Sandel/Sara Fabricius (1880–1974).

From 1901 to 1905, Sara Fabricius lived with her parents and brothers in a flat in Storgata 95. It is the floor the family lived on that now provides the framework for the exhibition ‘Sara and Freedom’.

Sara Fabricius lived at a time of transition between tradition and modernity. Early on, she experienced that the rules and restrictions on a young woman’s life were too strict. In letters and fictional literature, she writes about freedom and the lack of it, also between men and women; about the freedom of childhood, and the freedom to develop herself as an artist.

The young Sara Fabricius dreamed of becoming a painter, and several of her paintings are still lifes. Also as an author, Cora Sandel created scenes that can draw a connection to created scenes, and in the exhibition ‘Sara and Freedom’, we imagine that Sara has staged her life through still lifes composed with her own possessions. The installations have been developed through collaboration between Perspektivet Museum and Lawrence Malstaf and are based on an idea from Astri Fremmerlid.

Through letters to her friend Elisabeth Sinding-Larsen, written when Sara lived at Storgata 95, we experience Tromsø through her gaze. All the cultural-historical objects in ‘Sara and Freedom’ are part of a gift to Perspektivet Museum from Sandel/Fabricius’s heirs. The exhibition is introduced with a biographical cartoon strip by Anneli Furmark.

For sake of infection control, the opening party must wait until the autumn. Until then, the exhibition will ‘dance in’ through a collaborative project with the dancer Liv Hanne Haugen and the filmmaker Rachel Andersen Gomez. For even though Cora Sandel/Sara Fabricius left to posterity pictorial art and literature, she specifically said: ‘From the beginning I wanted to dance’.


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