II: MUSEUM
(attention: mimesis!)
Lady Dada Kalam presented a three days performance of a museum exhibit on an area of about 10 square meters with objects from the year 1500 BCE to objects from 2017. With a dozen contemporary artists and in collaboration with a private collection of antique Persian and Hellenistic art works.
Like a museum, Lady Dada Kalam showed her works in a sublime, elegant, and distanced hanging. Indexical markers of the museum were show cases with sealed glass covers, museum’s tags with details about the works placed on the museum’s walls, and guided tours by “museum’s staff” (done by Lady Dada Kalam artists and writers Friederike Ruff and Julia Gyemant).
Lady Dada Kalam superimposed her WHITE CUBE and MUSEUM’s performance in that in both mimetic spaces every object was “available” to the visitor.
Lady Dada Kalam returns 100 % to the artists and their artistic research.
Inside the museum’s exhibit, objects from 1500 BCE were treated with the same reverence as contemporary works, high art with the same museal respect as so-called street art or handcrafts. There were no markers of national or ethnic representation. Inventory numbers on museum’s tags led visitors to the Lady Dada Kalam digital atlas for more information on each work.
Collectors who purchased works from the “museum” were entitled to sign Lady Dada Kalam’s Inventory which we call the Book of Life.
Soon in the future, Lady Dada Kalam will stage those signatures from the book of life in a series of exhibitions dedicated to the collectors and their collections.
Feel free to review images from inside Lady Dada Kalam’s museum.
With thanks to Manu Bruckstein and Hanna Lehun for their stills and photos.