As of 2024, forty years have passed since Halvdan Hafsten gave his collection of 208 works by eight male artists to Stavanger Art Museum. In this way he inserted himself into a centuries-long tradition of art collectors who have donated their collections to the public via a museum institution. Norwegian art museums manage several collections of this sort, examples being Rasmus Meyer’s collection at Kode in Bergen and Christian Langgård’s collection at the National Museum in Oslo. In addition to Hafsten’s collection, Stavanger Art Museum also has Jan Groth’s and Steingrim Laursen’s collection and Trond Mohn’s collection. In recent years we have seen how new private collections have become accessible to museum visitors through cases such as the Fredriksen family’s collection in the National Museum and Nicolai Tangen’s collection in the new museum Kunstsilo in Kristiansand.

By inviting the artist Andreas Siqueland to create an exhibition both about and with Halfdan Hafsten’s collection, we as a museum wanted to challenge our own ways of making this collection accessible to the public.[1] By letting an artist select and exhibit works from Hafsten’s collection in dialogue with his own works, it became clear which conventions are usually activated in museum collection presentations. The museum’s architecture and the many choices regarding textual and visual arrangements for how the artworks are presented contribute in large measure to form visitors’ experiences of the artworks. In a text in this publication, the museum director and curator Hanne Beate Ueland examines how Siqueland’s site-specific artworks challenge the spatial experience of the exhibition simultaneously as they suggest new dialogues between viewers and the collection’s artworks, and, not least, between the artworks in Hafsten’s collection.

An underlying theme in the exhibition The Forbidden Forest is the relationship between a private collection and a public museum. What happens to an artwork after it ends up in a museum? Inspired by Siqueland’s institution-critical approach, we have invited the American curator and writer Laura Raicovich to share her thoughts about the relationship between private art collections and public museums. Raicovich has worked for several American art museums, one example being that she was the director of Queens Museum in New York. In 2021 she published the book Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (Verso Books), in which she provides insight into controversies relating to financing and questions of values that have played out in museums in recent years.

At a time when the museums are asked to find solutions to an increasingly difficult financial problem that involves public funding not keeping pace with rising costs, it is important to reflect over the interests that motivate gifts of art and how museums, in a good way, can manage these gifts for the benefit of society. How can art collections amassed by private individuals be assimilated into art institutions? A collection built by a single person in a given time period is not objective art history but is marked by the person’s gender, financial status and personal preferences. How can the museums work with the collections in ways that enable visitors to understand where the works come from and the values on which they are based? And how can the museums build their collections in ways that compliment or fill out the private collections?

We hope this publication can contribute to raising a discussion about the management of private collections in our public art museums. How can museums manoeuvre in a landscape where the rising prices of art lead to an over-heated art market that far exceeds our own purchasing budgets, and, at the same time, uphold our significance and relevance in the field of art? How is it possible to unite the ambitions of being accessible museums for an increasingly differentiated public and at the same time ensure meaningful and ethically responsible contractual agreements with rich art collectors?

The exhibition The Forbidden Forest – Andreas Siqueland and the Halvdan Hafsten Collection invites visitors to enter an enveloping artistic experience where the encounters between the collection and Siqueland’s artworks open new interpretive possibilities. By breaking with conventions, the exhibition invites the public to have new experiences of the artworks. At the same time, it exposes the many possibilities that we as a museum have in facilitating engagement with the Halvdan Hafsten Collection.