A heated row has broken out in Norway over a government decision to scrap a controversial artwork planned to commemorate the victims of Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 massacre and build something “low-key” instead.

The Norwegian minister of communal affairs and modernisation, Jan Tore Sanner, said last week the Memory Wound memorial, designed by Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg, would not go ahead after protests from some locals.

But Dahlberg and leading cultural commentators have denounced the decision, saying it amounts to a denial of the role of art and culture in helping people process traumatic events and that such decisions are “too important to leave to politicians”.

“A work of art can contribute to keeping the conversation about traumatic events alive in a very specific way,” Dahlberg said in a statement to the Guardian. “Visual art plays a special role in relation to these type of events, that can seem difficult to grasp and put into words.”

The artist said the government’s decision to cancel its contracts with both him and Public Art Norway – which ran the international competition to select the design – “clearly signals that they do not believe art has a role to play here at all. This is quite remarkable.”

Artist Jonas Dahlberg. Photograph: Magnus Hallgren/TT News Agency/Press Association Images

Dahlberg’s £2.5m design would have sliced a three-and-a-half-metre-wide “symbolic wound” through the Sørbråten peninsula, a strip of land facing Utøya island where 69 of Breivik’s 77 victims, mostly teenagers, died on 22 July 2011.

The stone from that site was then to have been used to create a second memorial consisting of some 2,000 engraved tiles in the government district in Oslo, where the far-right extremist detonated a car bomb that killed eight people the same day.



But about 20 locals, including some who helped save lives during the massacre, sued the state to overturn the project, describing it as a “rape of nature” that would damage the landscape and their community.

They argued that the “hideous monument” was too invasive and they would find it difficult to live with such a dramatic visual reminder of the bloodshed on Utøya. Some geologists had also expressed doubts about the feasibility of the project.

(L-R) Labour party leader, Jonas Gahrs Store, EU foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, Labour party member Anniken Huitfeldt, and the party’s youth organisation leader, Mani Hussain, on a visit to Utøya earlier this month. Photograph: Lise Aserud/EPA

A process will now begin to select a new monument at Utøykaia, where passengers catch the ferry to Utøya, along with “a respectful and low-key memorial at the new government complex,” the conservative Sanner said last week.

Dahlberg said most comparable installations around the world had taken longer to complete and had been “similarly marked by difficult conversations”. It was the government’s responsibility to “lead this conversation mindfully”, he said.



Jørn Christian Mortensen, the rector of the Oslo National Academy of the Arts who chaired the selection jury, said the government’s decision was “sad, because this very beautiful work of art will not now be built”.

But the fact that Sanner had taken the whole memorial project out of the hands of Public Art Norway and given it instead to the state department for public works was “remarkable” and perhaps more worrying, he said.

“It’s quite a radical shift, politically,” Mortensen said. “Some people do see this as a hostile blow against culture. Maybe the government was just clumsy. But we need to have this cultural-political debate now, for sure.”

Mortensen conceded that people living near the memorial could have been involved at an earlier stage, but said every such project had detractors. “What do you do? You work it out. You don’t just terminate the whole thing,” he said.

Other cultural commentators have backed Dahlberg. The art and architecture critic Lars Elton said this week the government’s wish for a “low-key” memorial ran counter to the very idea of commemorating the victims of Breivik’s horrific attacks.

Aftenposten newspaper, which devoted five pages to the controversy, said in an editorial that the government seemed to have “different ideas about what creates a good space for reflection”.

Culture has a purpose, the paper said, and “there is no escaping art’s ability to create space for reflection ... The task of designing the national memorial sites for 22 July is too important to leave to politicians and bureaucrats.”

Breivik, who recently changed his name to Fjotolf Hansen, is serving a 21-year prison sentence that can be extended indefinitely.