Schaukasten

Video // 6:17 min. // Stereo mix // Color // 2022

"Schaukasten" is a video work that deals with the Museum of Natural History as a place for exhibiting nature. The showcase in the Natural History Museum displays a natural world, by determining it. A brutal exhibiting that only works through the appropriation of living beings and the dissection of them. These taxidermic preparations are to show living beings as detailed and lifelike as possible, although they are actually dead. The animals function as objects of deception in this public site of power demonstration. This ideology of conservation is on the one hand a loving gesture of preservation and appreciation of a thing, but at the same time it is a powerful exercise of violence over the animal bodies on display.
The video works with the hierarchy of the gaze that is created in the museum and attempts to unbalance it. The spatial element of the glass, denies the view into the box and distorts it.
The ordered world of the taxidermic preparations with their details is withdrawn by the camera, the window pane, which actually functions as a separating element, is used as a tool to visually connect museum and diorama space, accompanied by a sound recording from inside a showcase.

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