The archive of pictures is unmanageable to a monstrous degree. The accumulation of photographic material, as part of Eline Mugaas’ both immediate and thoughtful practice, is the starting point for a sideway glance at history. The refreshing effect is generated by unexpected couplings that preclude neither humour nor original insights. Mugaas’ intimate knowledge of her medium and her understanding of how the world is constituted through pictures permeates her projects. They often revolve around her own extensive archive material which she has collected over many years. Photography as activity often arises in the wake of this archive.

The circulation of the picture as something readymade, severed from its original context, is in full swing in Mugaas’ work for Angle, Prehistoric Tits. Here we see a series of small pictures distri­buted across the pages as abstract microcompositions with curved lines. But soon something much more physical starts to take form – tits as far as the eye can see. Mugaas has cut them out from old textbooks that depict prehistoric humans. Fictional human figures from prehistoric times are first and foremost depicted as ape-like men, here the women stand out, with strutting breasts. Ideas about fertility and primeval instincts characterize the scientific presentation, while the illustrations invariably seem formed by ideals of the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Mugaas has zoomed in on the tits, and has thus abandoned any hope of providing pedagogical archaeo­logical context and a probable scenography of humanity’s past. Prehistory has its descrip­tion from inadequate written sources. Mugaas too lets the picture speak for itself, textless, appearing as an archaeological object in quotation marks. The cut-outs are reckless and seemingly thrown into an open context, like windows in a myopic peepshow.