“Fundet af en ny Jellingsten” stages an excavation of a replica of a famous danish monument “Harald Bluetooth’s Jellingstone”, at a construction site next to the exhibition space Udstillingsstedet Spanien 19 in the south harbour area of Aarhus. The Jellingstone is a huge stone with runes and carved imagery, from around 960 ad., located in the small town of Jelling, known amongst other things as the “baptism certificate of Denmark”. In this version the reliefs on the stone are painted in the same color scheme as that of a 1:1 replica of the Jellingstone from 1933, that was located in the courtyard of The National Museum of Denmark. That replica was painted in a color scheme selected by the poet, activist and autodidact art historian Rudolf Broby Johansen, as his suggestion of how the original stone may have looked like originally (there are no visible remains of colors on the stone in Jelling).

The installation relates to a longer history of copies of the Jellingstone. This was further elaborated inside the exhibition rooms of Udstillingsstedet Spanien 19, where I had installed various materias conveying fragments and stories of a series of Jellingstone copies located around the world.

Fundet af en ny Jellingsten was made with assistance from, and with thanks to: Felix Exner Lenzing, Jeppe Ibsen, and Benjamin Krog Møller.

Photos by Mikkel Kaldal