Year: 2025
Folding Screen

Technique: Digital sculpting, carpentry, UV printing, Augmented Reality
Material: Pine wood, ash wood, linseed oil stain, brass
Photos by: Carl Ander 

Supported by The Danish Arts Foundation. Acquired to Röhsska Museums permanent collection. 

The screen 5+sinnen (5+senses) consists of six panels featuring interpretations of objects from the Röhsska Museum’s collections. The first five relate to the human senses. In the final panel, Wang & Söderström playfully explore a sixth undiscovered sense. The duo draws on the 17th and 18th century fascination with nature and its systems. The motifs are brought to life through augmented reality (AR), where a digital layer is activated in real-time via a screen.

Technological innovation has gone hand in hand with human exploration of the world. Across cultures, the senses have played a central role in understanding and creating knowledge. In the 18th century, when global exchanges intensified, the body and the senses were seen as essential tools for experiencing and understanding the world around us. The panels on the screen present objects from the museum’s collections as carriers of 18th-century global sensory experiences: coffee, sugar, spices and tobacco, whose history is inter-twined with trade, colonialism and cultural encounters across continents. 5+sinnen also reflects on screens’ changing form and function throughout design history. Folding screens and fire screens protected against unwanted gazes and heat, and 18th-century public entertainment offered optical illusions on various projection surfaces. Today, digital screens connect the private and the public with a third sphere – the virtual.