Exhibition:
Meet the Vikings, Copenhagen, 2018–2021.

Organisation:
National Museum Copenhagen.

During the redesign of the Viking Age department of the Danish National Museum, the objects on display were supplemented by Jim Lyngvild‘s larger-than-life photographs of actors wearing interpretations of Viking-age finds. This woman is depicting the 10th-century Danish Queen Tove wearing jewellery from the Hiddensee Hoard. This mise-en-scène of modern-day actors as people from the Viking Age serves to eliminate historical distance – the fictional past becomes a screen onto which the present can be projected. This large-format fiction exhibited within a museum space was widely criticised.