Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This paper focuses on portals of Norwegian Stave Churches that in their original medieval setting functioned as transgressive markers of the dividing line between the secular and the spiritual, the material and the immaterial world. Heavily decorated with elaborate carvings, and transferred to and displayed in museums since the nineteenth century, these portals offer a challenge to the modern viewer as to how their ambiguous identity and agency as individual (“art”) object and threshold between different worlds can be experienced. This challenge is met in an experimental exhibition in Spring 2018 in the Oslo Museum for Cultural History, which will explore threshold experiences through various new modes of portal installations. These modes include the display of physical portals (wooden originals and plaster-cast copies), digital scanned projections, and 3-D prints (plastic and wooden) of portals on various scales. They will be placed against different backgrounds as to enable a variety of physical, visual, and imaginary transgressional threshold experiences. This way, people are offered new ways of connecting with and reflecting on their own heritage. The paper introduces the results of the exhibition and the underlying research ideas, and includes an audience response evaluation.