British Museum 2017-01-23T20:45:20+00:00

Project Description

British Museum

2004-2016,
Iron, photograph, 90x60x2 cm

These images were photographed in exhibition hall 70, among those exhibiting ancient Greek and Roman cultures, during a visit to the British Museum in London in May 2004. The hall was open, accessible, and routinely lit, while the artifacts displayed were bubble-wrapped. The captions proclaimed portraits of emperors and their wives, court nobles and goddesses, when in fact the viewer encountered packages of plastic hurriedly wrapped with masking tape, cutting the classical figures along arbitrary lines. Looking into the packages elicits a peeping feeling and a macabre experience of distortion like that portrayed by Francis Bacon, or feelings of blockage, isolation, and suffocation. Enlarging the photographs enhances this absurdity, reminiscent of canonical expressions in Roman sculpture that enlarged rulers’ sculpted heads somewhat larger than life, while also emphasizing the absurdity of the shining plastic bubble-wrap and the torn masking tape together with the routine and worn mechanisms of museum display (such as lighting and pedestals).