The Gods Present to Us the Artefact, in collaboration with Unnar Örn, 2012

sound piece and photographs

A large photograph of a woman in a sound booth prepares us for the story we are about to hear. The narrator is a contemporary folklorist lecturing on one of the supposed founders of the National Museum of Denmark. Here storytelling becomes a meta-fictive vehicle. The narrator recounts the queer life of Jón Ólafsson, a nineteenth-century Copenhagen resident and antiquarian of Icelandic origin. Ólafsson considers the objects that he gathers throughout Scandinavia to be sacred treasure. He looks to antiquity and the history of the Vikings and Norse gods as belonging to a pan-regional culture. Yet Ólafsson diverges from the views of his mentor Ari Thorláksson, a Danish loyalist who was also born in Iceland, which was at that time under Danish colonial rule. Through these figures, the work conveys the complex personal investments in the nascent nationalist period of the early nineteenth century, and how they are a subtext to the presentation of objects in museums of culture now. In the telling of a possible biographical history of the period, the work exposes the inscription of nationalist history in the founding of the museum and the degree to which it frames the experience of the museum for the contemporary viewer. The story-within-a-story, which strays into the territory of a murder mystery, involving stolen artefacts and occult rituals, asks how archaeologists then and now might write history, how they might be self-reflexive or critical, and how viewers might do the same.

Script written by Redfern Jon Barrett and conceived by Unnar Örn and Olivia Plender. Originally exhibited in ‘Shaped by Time’, at the National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen, curated by Milena Høgsberg and Julie Sass.