The Exhibition (2018)
The Exhibition (2018)
The Exhibition is a museum in virtual reality where a museum show is continuously built up and broken down while the visitor is walking around in it. The route that the visitor chooses dictates the course and content of the exhibition. Since the birth of the museum in the 19th century dioramas are being used to show the visitor a slice of reality. These slices of pseudo reality confront the visitor with a point in time and place – frozen in a confined box, while the subjectiveness depends on era and perpective. In The Exhibition the visitor dictates the course of the show itself by choosing a route and looking in certain directions. This makes the exhibition different for every viewer, being constructed and deconstructed accordingly. During his stay at the Wiels residency the artist has been studying and collecting information at different ethnographic museums, to investigate how these tableaux vivants are a reflection on the zeitgeist in which they were constructed. He used the collected numerous 3D scans of objects he found there to create exhibited objects that have become actors in a narrative that tells us more about our changing perception than it does about the content of the dioramas.