Oslo’s July 22 memorial landscape is gaining a new and unusually physical presence. Public Art Norway has completed Matias Faldbakken’s “Upholding,” a large-scale work that will be unveiled in Oslo’s Government Quarter ahead of the 15-year commemoration of the 2011 attacks.
The memorial is anything but discreet. Rising 40 feet high and stretching 50 feet wide, it takes the form of a steel rig carrying a mosaic image of a small wader bird reflected in the waters around Utøya. The image is built from 300,000 stones, while the reverse side leaves the structure exposed, with its framework painted red, blue, and green.
Faldbakken, the Norwegian artist who represented his country at the Venice Biennale in 2005, has said the work should feel “large and insistent, brutal even,” with a weight that mirrors the burden of the tragedy. He has also described the mosaic as a way of thinking about lives that are “small, exposed, and irreplaceable.”
The memorial was selected in 2025 after a three-year process involving curators, artists, politicians, and representatives of those affected by the attacks. That deliberation followed the controversy surrounding Jonas Dahlberg’s “Memory Wound,” a proposal to cut an 11-foot gap into Utøya that was ultimately abandoned after local objections.
Fabrication for “Upholding” was also collective. Roughly 2,000 people contributed over three weeks, and the final 7,000 stones were added in a temporary workshop in Johan Nygaardsvolds Square. The last stone was placed by the chair of the National Support Group after July 22, whose daughter was killed on Utøya.
The work joins an existing memorial at the mainland ferry quay across from Utøya, opened in 2022 and composed of 77 bronze columns, each bearing the name of a victim. Together, the two sites trace the geography of the attacks, which killed 77 people in Oslo and on Utøya, and the long effort to give form to national mourning.
As Trude Schjelderup of Public Art Norway put it, the memorial’s force lies in making visible the fragile conditions under which democratic life is sustained. In that sense, “Upholding” is not only a monument to loss, but also a reminder of the labor required to preserve democratic pluralism.
