Our new exhibition celebrates the research project Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia. The project studies changing relations between humans and aquatic mammals in maritime regions of North- and Southeast Asia, focusing on popular ritual practices and beliefs.
About the exhibition
This research-based exhibition isn't quite like anything you've seen before. By combining different elements like photographs, objects and embroidery art pieces, we hope to give you a different way of looking at and engaging in research. In addition to embroideries, drawings and photographs, you can see genuine whale bone and a dolphin skull borrowed from the Natural History Museum, as well as a beautiful sculpture by artist Trond Kasper Mikkelsen.
Embroidery
Sakura Koretsune is in Oslo as a guest researcher in the Whales of Power project. She is a visual artist who collects stories of human-whale relations, and uses these as inspiration for embroidered images on textiles, as well as texts in journals and poems. For the past six years, Koretsune has visited various places that have relationships with whales and dolphins. For this exhibition she has created embroidered pieces inspired by stories she's collected and old photographs. The result is both beautiful and meaningful:
"Stories are woven out of words, and pieces of textile are woven out of yarns. “Text” and “textile” share the same origin in the Latin word “texere,” which means, “to weave.” If we were to connect scattered words, stories, and lands where whale stories were handed down, lost images of whales may be rewoven, as if retying loosened yarns."
Sakura Koretsune
About the research project
The Whales of Power project is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 803211 (ERC Starting Grant 2018). Project investigator is associate professor of the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, Aike Peter Rots.
The relationship between humans and whales, ritual traditions and environmental issues in different Asian and indigenous societies are at the centre of the project. Whales and other aquatic mammals have long carried importance in these societies, not just as sources of nutrition, but as subjects of cultural and spiritual significance. Some places, people have hunted whales for a long time, eaten their meat and used their bones and balls for tools and works of art. In other places, the people refused to whale and used only the scraps that would wash onto the beach - they regarded the beached whales as god-given gifts.
"Myths, rituals and festival traditions are still important across many places in Asia, but their meanings shift. What happens with a whaling ritual when it becomes public 'cultural heritage' and is subject to a new audience? What happens to sea gods and goddesses when the fish disappears from the ocean, ocean pollution and erosion worsens, and natural catastrophes intensify?"
Aike Peter Rots, project investigator
The exhibition will remain until the middle of August 2023.
Make sure not to miss the installation in the revolving door entering the Georg Sverdrup Building. This is part of the exhibition.