museumfuernaturkun.de
Groupexhibition, Release Januar 2020
Unfolding screenshot
2020 (Screenshot)
The location of the Natural History Museum showcases, in various ways, forms of survival and adaptation in the animal, plant, and human worlds, often determining life and death. Institutions such as museums, galleries, and actors in the art world are also forced to confront the current crisis and its impacts: they are expanding their offerings into the virtual experience space. The resulting short-term overabundance of digital artifacts seems to overshadow the already fragile enjoyment of art even more. It is becoming increasingly clear how these institutions and their producers, namely the artists, seem to be subjected to the exploitation strategies of fewer online companies. With this project, we ask ourselves how a „digital institutional critique“ can be formulated.
The phrase „Survival of the Fittest“ (Herbert Spencer) symbolically represents the current struggle for attention and the resulting reflective approach to art. At the same time, the process of digitization releases countless resources that serve as inspiration for one’s own artistic practice, and into which we want to digitally intervene using the specific example of the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. Beyond the artistic appropriation of its digital resources, this project also reflects on the museum‘s narrative of natural history: a top-down narrative using dead subjects.