DE SMUKKESTE ERHVERVELSER

2021

Brass, graphite and pigment on paper, plaster, unburnt clay

 
Scrolls of paper, plaster replicas of flint axes and clay imprints are spread across slim brass structures in Skulptursalen at Funen Art Academy. The room that once housed Odense City Museum’s sculpture collection now contains an assemblage of objects that defy usual expectations for muse¬um artefacts. They are not originals, but copies and traces, and they do not adhere to the limits of the structures in which they are presented. Similarly, the exhibition cases are nothing more than rudimentary boxes which neither protect nor display the objects they hold.

 
Funen Art Academy is today located in the former premises of Odense City Museum. The museum’s very first collections consisted largely of ancient artefacts, and several of the individuals who founded the museum in 1860 were passionate about Denmark’s prehistory. These archaeological collec¬tions were also the last to be moved out of the building in 1989, before it was converted into an art museum and later, an art academy.
In the 1990s, the Museum embarked on an enormous project: the digitalisation of the countless objects listed in its acquisition records from 1860 to 1972. These thousands of objects are now available to the public online, in a series of albums on Flickr. Acquisitions from protocol 2, which spans the years during which the museum was built, form the basis for the installation in Skulptursalen.

 
The contours of clay pots, stone axes, arrowheads and jewellery are the
starting point for the installation’s numerous paper objects and frottages.
The original objects are not visible in the exhibition, still stored in the museum’s depot or exhibited at Møntergården, but traces of them have returned to the building as temporary, and not particularly durable flat documents, three-dimensional only because the papers are rolled up.

 
Skulptursalen
Det Fynske Kunstakademi, Odense
25.11 – 23.01.2022

Exhibition folder