SITUATIONS

Art intervention at the archaeological excavation site C5 in Arendal, Norway

SITUATIONS is a collaboration between artist Nina Torp, E18-prosjektet Tvedestrand–Arendal and the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. The project is supported by the Museum of Cultural History, Arts Council Norway, the Norwegian Visual Artists Remuneration Fund and Norsk Fotografisk Fond.

Since 2015 Nina Torp has accompanied the work of a group of archaeologists at the Museum of Cultural History. In her project SITUASJONER she looks into the archaeologists' scientific methods and processes which are being used to excavate traces from the Mesolithic and Neolithic Era in the south of Norway. Her art project is research into the mechanisms of how cultural history evolves.

By interpreting the archaeologists' scientific records (digital and analog drawings) and her own photographs of the excavations, Nina Torp has further developed the documentation into three-dimensional sculptures of the excavations in various material such as cardboard, raw clay, papier-mâché and polystyrene. By materializing what is being dug out and scaling this mass she clarifies archaeology as a tradition which has strong relation to modernist art and architecture. For the exhibition outside at the archaeological location in Arendal she displays the sculptures reminiscent of architecture scale models on display tables. Instead of focusing on the artifacts found at the site, she shows materializations of the archaeological method in the Museums' display cases.