The elephant in the room

"If you need me, I'm (still) in the basement", group exhibition, Museum of fine arts Leipzig, 11.05 - 03.10.2022

My work "The Elephant in the Room" was a contribution to our group exhibition "If you need me, I'm (still) in the Basement" in the Museum of Fine Arts, Leipzig. The exhibition was based on the world exhibition "Saxon- Thuringian industrial and commercial exhibition – STIGA" in 1897, which took place in the trade fair city of Leipzig. While the focus was on industry and trade (by the way, they also had a colonial show), especially and most notably, a hall for contemporary arts.

The museum’s conception of the exhibition was to provide visibility for underrepresented groups, especially women*. As we in our group did a general but shortly after more detailed research in the museum’s archives, we found some shocking results in regard to the participation rate of underrepresented groups in the last two decades of the museum’s exhibition history.

This was basically my starting point to think about the saying "the elephant in the room". While the museum cares for its own reputation and wishes to update its image through the contemporary discourses which have emerged out of the resistance and needs of every underrepresented minority, especially women*, the museum as an institution tries systematically to remove the existing elephant and just skip its own history through producing this specific exhibition about underrepresented groups, which is at the same time contradictory to its own diversity rate in the very recent years' exhibiting history. I wanted to express the fact that exactly the contrary is the case and the elephant is still in the room and one should not ignore it. Therefore, I wanted to materialize the elephant in an actual sense so that viewers perceive and acknowledge it in the first place, and in the next step, open up a questioning mechanism and its relation to the exhibition in a museal, indeed power relational context. Therefore, I made an animation of a small elephant, which produces a connotation through its head movements, a negation of the exhibition. The elephant is sometimes coming to light and appearing to show its existence, but then again, vanishing and fading out.

Link to the website of MdbK:
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https://mdbk.de/en/exhibitions/unterschaetzt-kuenstlerinnen-in-leipzig-um-1900/