A visit to the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, is anything but peaceful, what with the exhibit on slum living around the world and the profiles of award recipients who fought inhumanity. A stroll through can be disturbing and disheartening, but also inspiring.
The Nobel Prizes were established in 1895 in the will of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite. Only the Peace Prize is selected by a Norwegian committee—it’s awarded in Oslo each year on the 10th of December, across the street at city hall—while the other five prizes are selected and announced in Stockholm, Sweden. The Peace Center, in a busy tourist area on the waterfront, is housed in a 19th-century train station that was given a modern makeover by London architect David Adjaye. Temporary exhibits tackle global issues, while the permanent ones focus on the Laureates and Nobel himself. The cutting-edge digital displays and trendy gift shop are hip enough to attract all ages.
For the show “The Places We Live,” up through February, Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen spotlights 16 homes in slums around the world: Nairobi, Kenya; Mumbai, India; Caracas, Venezuela; and Jakarta, Indonesia. Video and still displays cover the walls in separate rooms, while translated interviews are broadcast over speakers. Some inhabitants are hopeless and live amid violence, while others run small enterprises and look toward the future.
The heart of the Center is the “digital garden,” which brings Laureates to life. In a glass room, lights sit atop three-foot-tall stems that feature displays. As you approach, each prize-winner’s photo and information appear, eliciting reactions that swing from anger to sympathy, sorrow to empathy—and ultimately, to peace.
