Background

January 27- March 30, 2008
PREUS MUSEUM, Horten, Norway

Danger Museum (Øyvind Renberg & Miho Shimizu), Ida Ekblad, Geir Tore Holm, Samir M’kadmi, Verena Winkelmann
Curator: Jonas Ekeberg and Susanne Ø. Sæther

Opening: January 27 (Sunday), 14:00

PREUS MUSEUM
Kulturparken Karljohansvern
Kommandørkaptein Klincks vei 7
Pb. 254, NO-3192 Horten, Norway
http://www.preusmuseum.no

Danger Museum is an artists’ collective consisting of Øyvind Renberg and Miho Shimizu. Through geographic mobility, use of the Internet, discursive initiatives, publications and establishment of social situations, Danger Museum operates as a mobile museum in which institutional rules, borders and frameworks are displayed and investigated. Danger Museum often refers to the margins of the history of western art and culture, often presenting their work in close cooperation with artist driven exhibition spaces and local communities. The collective’s work can thus be placed within the relational aesthetics strand of contemporary art, where the spectator is invited to take part in the making of the work. In the exhibition Background Danger Museum presents a selection of their own works along with objects from the Preus Museum’s collection. Instead of activating objects from the collection that are part of the canonical history of photography, Danger Museum have chosen to bring forward that which rarely or never is shown: the objects that reside in the ideological fringes of the collection. This material includes a set of narrative laterna magica-slides dated ca. 1850, old chairs and tables, a destroyed piano and a backdrop with a romantic landscape motif from a photography studio. Of their own material they present, among other items, a series of stereoscopic drawings, a self-produced panoramic print and a textile camera. Together these elements constitute an interior-like installation of equipment and outdated vision technologies, reactivated by Danger Museum. By bringing out objects that rarely feature as the photographer’s main motif, Danger Museum reverses the relationship between foreground and background in the history of photography. The installation becomes a sort of alternative examination of different optical regimes, in line with Michel Foucault’s use of the concept of archaeology; an archaeology that focuses on ruptures rather than continuities. The project highlights how categorizing and evaluation are a part of the museum’s practice, and thus how the museum contributes to the production of cultural difference.

From the catalogue essay Photography’s Otherness by curator Susanne Ø.