UR TID – Cluster 8 – Evolutionsmuseet
Cluster 8 has activated artifacts from the museum’s paleontological and zoological collections to awaken questions about collecting, evolution and the perception of time. Process in deep-time. The earth’s sediments embrace. We collect, exploit, and weather. How is the past stored? In active investigations of fiction, reality, art, and science, Cluster 8 opens a conversation on how we approach and interact with natural history collections. The Swedish title UR TID is a play on words using the multiple meanings of the prefix ur, which evokes both an ancient indeterminate past, but also a time that is out of joint. Both point to the natural museum’s purpose; it shows artifacts beyond the human horizon of experience, and as a site, it tries to preserve objects in an atemporal state against the ravages of time.
The collaboration originates from the palynologist and botanist Gustaf Sandberg’s (1908-1983) scattered archive from Torneträsk and Abisko, preserved today by Evolutionsmuseet, and by coincidence also in Cluster 8’s possession. At Evolutionsmuseet, parts of the archive have been compiled in a ritual attempt to reassemble and expose it anew. The exhibition emerges from the Sandberg collection, transforming the museum into a place where art and science are symbiotic.
Cluster 8 is an interdisciplinary art collective of curatorial practice, art history, quantum physics, and artistic creation. Using experimentation as a form, Cluster 8 explores the borders where art and research meet: technology and nature, digital process and analogue work. The collective consists of artists Sara Ekholm Erikson (MFA ’22) and Lior Nønne Malue Hansen (MFA’24); Axel Gagge (BFA ’23), artist and PhD in quantum physics; Isabelle Ribe, curator and Otto Ruin, art historian and writer.