In a darkened room at the Kunsthall museum in Bergen, visitors can stretch out on a beanbag below a speaker and eavesdrop on a nine-year-old girl talking to her mother at bedtime. “Is Dad evil, Mum?” the girl’s disembodied voice asks. Bedsheets rustle with impatience as the mother fails to conclusively answer her question. “Is Dad possessed by the devil?” A police siren is heard passing on the street outside. “Am I also possessed by the devil since I’m his daughter?”
The girl in the recording, reenacted from memory, is artist Lene Berg, and Dad is the film director Arnljot Berg, an influential figure in 1970s Norway. The reason why little Lene thought her father may have been possessed by Satan is evident from the series of Norwegian and French newspaper headlines that have been embroidered into curtains that hang around the space. In 1975, Arnljot was arrested in Paris for the murder of his second wife, Evelyne Zammit. He took his life a few years after his release from prison, when Lene was a teenager.
