Negative Space and Positive Form: Exhibiting Fragments in Modernity

Exhibiting archaeological material in a museum habitually involves some sort of storytelling. The remnants of the past are employed as constitutive markers in an attempting account of preceding societies and cultures. However, as the endeavour concerns foregone events, the natural temporal separation engenders an innate fictitious characteristic in the exhibition with varying degrees of transparency. Most often, the narrative utilised to recount antiquity is centred around chronology and typology. This is largely a result of modernity and the current inclination towards the tangible. In archaeology and exhibition practice, the favour lies towards the complete and the organised. The complete data set, the complete statue, the complete narrative – organised in a didactic manner that leaves little room for contemplation and evaluation. By producing plaster cast fragments of the well-known sculpture of Doryphoros and installing them in a temporary exhibition at The Royal Cast Collection in Copenhagen, I managed to combine the practices of art/archaeology and the contextual experiment and thus merged the reflexive nature of art with the practical quality of the experiment. The resulting installation was hence an attempt to advance both archaeological and museological practice and initiate various perceptions and interpretations of the past while simultaneously emphasising the implications of modernity in our field. Using the analogy of the mould, the aim was to allow objects to express various meanings when not solely reduced to their ‘positive form’ and their ‘negative space’ is embraced.