Exhibition

Surfacing Solids

In this exhibition, a museum artefact serves as a aggregator of artworks and research concerning cultural memories derived from archaeology, architecture, materials, science, and myths. The museum artefact, a lead amulet from the Middle Ages, is disseminated in a speculative narrative that links the town of Moss to Oslo`s Old Town and the heart of Europe by means of freestanding sculptures, installations, and a film. The exhibition shows how Petrine Vinje goes to the origin of something, to the core, or root, aiming to be touched, to touch, to stirr something. In several works, she takes sources from Old Norse poetry, the material text culture from the historical era when we transitioned from oral to literal systems of communication. By allowing these textual sources to surface through hi-tech materials, digital technology and ancient craft techniques, Vinje attempts to achieve a flattening of time, in which she unites the unknown in the past, present and future and brings it together in the rooms housing the exhibition. Through research into pre-modern museum artefacts from the Middle Ages in the Nordic region, alongside contemporary screen-based culture and technology, Vinje examines how we use semiotic material in our encounters with the unknown and the immaterial. She looks for the potential of sensory perceptions and experiences of meaning that exist at this interface. The exhibition Surfacing Solids displays the results of Petrine Vinje’s ongoing artistic research project as a doctoral fellow in the Art & Craft Department at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. In her PhD project, she explores how cultural memories and sculptural works are created within the relationships between people, technology and society.

Petrine Vinje collaborates with Archeologisches Zentrum, Berlin, and the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage Research: Follobaneutgravningen, the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Paul Scherrer Institut (Villigen, Switzerland). The exhibition is funded from the Audio and Visual Fund - Arts Council Norway, the Norwegian Visual Arts Fund and Atelier Nord.

Petrine Vinje studied fine art at the Institute for Colour at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). She has a project-based practice and her spatial installations and sculptures are often the result of interdisciplinary collaborations. In her studio, Vinje works with sculpture, camera-based media and text. She explores concepts concerning language, temporality and spatiality in material and immaterial systems.
Vinje has participated in a number of international and national group exhibitions, and has had solo exhibitions at venues including Fotogalleriet (2018), the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo (2014) and SOFT (2011). In 2018, she published Anatomisk teater (Uten Tittel Forlag), a book based on an art project of the same name, for which she created and curated an artistic programme in a replica of the first Nordic anatomical theatre, which dates from the 17th century (Oslo Sculpture Biennale 2013, Vigeland Park).