Kari Steihaug: Arkiv - De ufullendte

Incompleteness & imperfection

For more than 10 years, the artist Kari Steihaug has collected unfinished knitted garments. She has received them from acquaintances and strangers, from friends and family and through exhibitions and lectures. Steihaug has also collected the stories embedded in these unfinished garments, the often touching and funny explanations of why something that once was supposed to become something beautiful and useful, never reached the goal.Archive: The Unfinished Ones is a documentary project about the poetry in imperfection and about directing attention to something failed and lost. These knitted projects didn’t gain the role in someone’s everyday life that they were intended for, they became carriers of time and thoughts, sorrows and joys, hope and dreams. The book about this archive of handicraft and stories is now launched by the publisher Magikon in Oslo, Norway. The book contains, in addition to the archive itself and a foreword by Steihaug, essays by art historian Jorunn Veiteberg and philosopher Dag T. Andersen