Laura Ahlqvist (Århus): "The social role of Nordic Bronze Age visual art. Perspectives from ornamented personal objects".

The social role of visual art in the Late Nordic Bronze Age: Perspectives from ornamented personal objects
Laura Ahlqvist
The visual art of the Late Nordic Bronze Age is tantalizingly compelling in how different it is. The imagery seems to invite us into a world where bodies can merge and transform and where something can be two things at once, challenging the traditional archaeological toolkit of categorization and ordering. Throughout the research history of Scandinavian archaeology, the pictorial record has been argued to reflect a cosmology involving sun worship, animal helpers, fertility, and ritual specialists. But in this talk, I ask what more the visual art does. What does its use reveal about the social reality that people wearing the art navigated in? What ideals are mediated in these bronze artefacts? And how did the art and its properties entangle with human lives in the Late Nordic Bronze Age? My choice of material is portable art on bronze artefacts with a particular focus on personal objects used and carried directly on the body. This establishes a link between the visual art and its social context that enables the study of gender differentiation in the use of cosmological imagery and allows me to consider the effects of art as a set of relations surpassing mere representation. My talk discusses how ontological and bodily ideologies emerge through famous Late Nordic Bronze Age objects such as the well-known razors, examples of oversized bodily ornamentation, and a group of overtly female figurines. I suggest that in addition to representing cosmology, the visual art can be seen as a medium that makes the cosmology present.  

Join via Zoom