PETRA LANGE-BERNDT (HAMBURG): THE INFECTED MUSEUM. CONSTELLATIONS OF INSECT AND HUMAN IN CONTEMPORARY ART
A museum, like any exhibition, is an ensemble of transversal concatenations of space, materials, things, images, institutional structures, audiences, discourses, and narratives. Numerous artists and curators have critically examined these contexts, their archives and power structures.
Especially after decolonisation and the popularisation of the ecology movement, these protagonists increasingly ask how displays can be activated and set into motion. To discuss this question, I will focus on strategies that deal with social insects such as bees, wasps, ants, and other organisms such as moths or mosquitoes. What happens when the white cube is transformed into a hexagonal honeycomb? Or turns into a paradise for larvae and maggots? Do these buzzing, crawling, and swarming non-humans contribute to re-perspectivising the exhibition system? What institutional critique can be discerned? And what about the uninvited guests in crevices and niches that do not fit into human taxonomies and orders of things? Will there be a paradisiacal interspecies community, are there inclusions and exclusions – or where else do these insect communities point?
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Marienstr. 13 C, Hörsaal A