Opening of antiquity in a new light. - 5 October at. 15

Since Brian Mikkelsen in 2006 tried to start a conversation and debate about the quality of art and culture in 2006 with the Danish Cultural Canon, there was particularly a work from the list of selected visual art, which aroused astonishment.

The sculptor Sophie Kalkau had identified Solvognen produced 1,400 years before our era as one of the 12 " most important and significant " works of art , which would act as a guide , role model and parameters of quality of art. Also today

Most would probably discuss about Sun Chariot at all could be seen as a work of art ? In art museums , we deal almost exclusively with art produced after 1790 , this is where you talk about the emergence of a Danish art , and shortly after the emergence of the discipline of art history at the university.

Frescoes , not to speak of articles from Danish antiquity , which  are with a few exceptions, not an area for art museums, but for the cultural history museums . And now that even P.S. Kroyer had been given a place on the list it was mysterious that a cultic object was produced as a work of art.

Nevertheless , I think it was appropriate for what is art at all ? An aesthetic form that evokes pleasure, a sensual interpretation of the world and life, or perhaps both. The desire to transform objects from other than a pure function, and create visual expressions, where big questions we never come to terms with , beginning and ends, life and death, love and hate, goes through almost all cultures at all times.

Today an exhibition project opens  just where in ancient times are seen in a new light and the objects that are not normally considered as art are interpreted and updated across the millennium by contemporary artist.

Dialogue and interpretation happens at many levels and work with art in different ways, conceptually and formally. This has produced many fine works.

Signe Kähler and Mai Kjer work stylistic and aesthetic and let the beautiful decoration on an axe or ornament from a rock carving grow onto a piece of ceramic or artist's "canvas" and are thus creating a connection across time and place based on the decors. Tetsuko Matsuzuka works with the texture of the material across time. Per Kjærsgaard creats abstract patterns and lines which are closely associates to runes, but leaves the textual content similarity disappear in the same way as the passage of time blurs our immediate understanding of the objects and their contemporaries.

Efforts are also art as existential sensuous form and symbol.

As Aage Arbjerg and in Kent Zahle that lets his characters take part in a mystical ceremony in which just the sun, darkness , life and death is the central theme . While Pia Græsbøll Ottesen is based on the natural oak ship and in various materials, explores the ships as form, metaphor and symbol, on life, on the journey.

This is great for afterthought

I read in the newspaper Politiken last weekend that in Sweden they have begun to involve archaeologists in the debate on labeling of nuclear waste to future generations. What can be read and understood for 3,000 years ? Why not artists ? This project shows in each case that the ancient visual alphabet and vocabulary is valid and can be used as a model, source and impetus for new artworks. And Sophie Kalkau with her choice points to a perhaps underexposed source of knowledge and aesthetic understanding of art and arts today.

The dialogue is not just happening in interdisciplinary collaboration as here, I'm sure the participating artists can tell you more about it, otherwise you are welcome upstairs, there's an artist who greatly let the mythology and the distant past integrate into a new age art, namely Sven Dalsgaard .

Otherwise, it is with great pleasure that I can declare the exhibition open

Lise Jeppesen, museum director

Randers Museum of Art