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RITUALS OF RESISTANCE ( #1-#8)
2017
Archival pigment print on Fine Art Baryt
210 x 140 cm each 


[...] The foreign object is not a spectacular work, but simply an abstract geometric something without a proximate function. A thing among things. In this sense, the monkey in the black-and-white photographs of the series Rituals of Resistance can also take possession of sculptures and, sitting on geometrically colorful constructs, degrade works of art to pedestals on which he is enthroned as the actual subject. Taken in a temple complex, the sculptures become mere relics, staffage. And since they inevitably remain mute, it hardly matters what ideology of ideal form may once have been inscribed in them. In the image that presents itself to us, they have not only lost their color, but also the context that the modernist project needs in order to behave as hegemonically as it once did. But this is not a loss. The revised view brings to light a different beauty that lies in the difference of mutually dependent opposites; a different reading that does not exclude, but rather changes the backdrop and thus also the perspective.



Text: Vanessa Joan Müller, Vienna 2019


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