European House, corner of Knez Mihailova and Zmaj Jovina
Monday, 15 December 2025
Opening at 18:00

Marie Høeg with a moustache, 1895–1903.

Bolet Berg (Bolette Berg, 1872–1944) and Mari Heg (Marie Høeg, 1866–1949) were Norwegian photographers and lovers. They worked in commercial photography, producing portraits and landscapes in their own studio, and later owned a printing press where they published art books and periodicals. They were also part of the first wave of the struggle for gender equality in Norway at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century (M. Høeg founded the Norwegian branch of the National Association for Women’s Suffrage).

However, they are best known for a collection of roughly sixty negatives discovered among their belongings in the 1980s. These are their “secret,” private photographs, taken between 1895 and 1903, in which they experimented with the representation of gender identities. The images show the authors, their relatives, and their friends wearing both men’s and women’s clothing.

At the time they were made, such photographs could not find a place within the conservative social, cultural, and political frameworks of the day. Today, in an era marked by the rise of the global right and renewed insistence on gender–sex equivalence, they continue—more than a century after their creation—to function as a symptom of irreconcilability and a source of inspiration for all those who resist (gender) stereotypes, prejudice, anthropological reductionism, and political repression.

Exhibition curator: Dušica Popović

Karl Heg, M. Høeg’s brother, dressed in women’s clothing, 1895–1903.

Support: Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway, European House, The Preus Museum