Highlights from Masahat 2023

In its third edition, Masahat festival 2023 was a great success!

The festival took place during 21-24 September in Oslo in nine venues, in collaboration with 17 partners hosting 38 guests from more than 12 countries, with a record number of tickets sold and audiences reached.

“This was not a festival. It was a community”, said one of the attendees of Masahat festival. We were proud to see Masahat festival continue to function as a unique platform showcasing the vibrant tapestry of cultural and artistic expressions from the Arab world and its diaspora in Norway and beyond, while forging spaces for artistic inspiration, empathetic encounters and thought-provoking discussions.

Like every year, Masahat festival chose a theme that functioned as a guiding framework for the festival’s programming. Masahat festival 2023 took “Re-member” as its theme. 

2023 marked 20 years since the invasion of Iraq and 30 years since the Oslo Accords, two events that have had a detrimental impact on the Middle East as evidenced in the current reality of the region, and one of the historical reasons that has made immigrants from Arabic-speaking countries the largest diasporic community in Norway. 

Norway has a long tradition of engaging in the Middle East through politics, diplomacy, aid and, more recently, international culture. The public opinion about the region is widely shaped by Norwegian scholars and other “Middle East-experts”, while Arab-Norwegian scholars, artists, cultural workers and other professionals are hardly visible in the debate. 

Bringing together artists, scholars, journalists, historians and cultural workers from Norway, the Arab world and the diaspora, Masahat festival 2023 attempted to reflect on these two historical anniversaries, the right to history, competing narratives, national and unofficial archives and the politics of memory.

What roles do memory and archives play in artistic processes and national narratives? This theme ran throughout the festival programme, which included concerts, film screenings, panel discussions, culinary experiences, satirical performances and more that took place around different venues and in partnership with institutions such as Nasjonalmuseet, Deichman Bjørvika, PRIO (Peace Research Institute Oslo), VEGA Scene, Melahuset, and Blå among others.