Already during his first year at art school Viskum made comparisons between foods and animals in jars. As part of his studies it was important to investigate different forms of presentation.
In his second year at art school he emptied the contents of olive jars and filled them with rat babies in formaldehyde. These he placed in 20 shops in Norway (four jars in shops in Bergen, Trondheim, Kristiansand, Stavanger and Oslo). The jars made headlines in all the Norwegian newspapers and on TV news because a store employee claimed to have unpacked the jars from a sealed box sent from Spain. The factory consequently closed down and all deliveries to Scandinavia were halted.
The jars are now in five museum collections.
