Peggy Buth. Desire in Representation

Exhibition

Raum 1: O, My Kalulu! (Teil 1, Discovery)
Raum 2
Found footage (monument)
Fireworks on the day of their arrival, after the welcoming speech
Listeners & typewriters (Olympia)
Raum 3: Peggy Buth, Ohne Titel (Archiv)
Raum 4: O, My Kalulu!, 2009, (Teil 2, Brothers)
Raum 5: 70 Fotografien (Desire in Representation)
Desire in Representation, Fotoserie, 2004-2009
Desire in Representation, Fotoserie, 2004-2009
Desire in Representation, Fotoserie, 2004-2009
Desire in Representation, Fotoserie, 2004-2009
Raum 5: Register (Desire in Representation)
Ohne Titel (Please Convey To the King)
Raum 6: Ohne Titel (Labor)
Raum 7: O, My Kalulu! (Teil 3, Hunt)
Raum 8
Ohne Titel (fever, cabinet), Filmstill
A lion shot at midnight
Ohne Titel (portrait, portrait, portrait)
Raum 8: O, My Kalulu! (Teil 4, Loss)
Raum 9: Soundinstallation (Sounds O, My Kalulu!)
Raum 10: Dioramen
Raum 10: O, My Kalulu! (Teil 5, Savior)
Raum 11: Ohne Titel (library)
Raum 11: Wandtapete (Landschaft)

Desire in Representation, series of 70 photographs, 2004–2009
In her photo series on the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Buth hones in not only on the museum’s zoological and anthropological exhibits but also on its staging elements (fixtures, wall design, lighting), its information and security displays, as well as on transitional situations like the putting up and taking down of exhibitions, on temporal contexts or public and non-public areas within the museum. Treated are the museum’s artistic staging, classification principles, and distancing tactics. Here Buth focuses less on the grandiose accumulation of big game trophies and more on the gaps and fragmentations in the museal presentation, the nonuniform design of which dates from various epochs. Reconstruction measures, in turn, indicate what the future may hold for the museum, which is to be extensively renovated starting in 2010.

Significant aspects are often to be found off-center in Buth’s photographs, at the margin or even positioned partially beyond the periphery, like in an adumbrated diagram causing one to barely realize that it is aiming to show how the phase of colonialism in the Congo was short, relatively speaking—an “aside” that refers to a central conflict faced by the Brussels museum, where a copious, self-critical exploration of Belgium’s colonial history still remains absent. Instead, attempts are made to play down this history.

Museums are spaces of exposition under the prohibition of touching. In this way they ban and regulate death, the repressed, and history. They are a pivotal instrument of hegemonic discourse and of the codification of the “other,” the subjugation of which they showcase with a high level of theatrical effort. Yet in Buth’s photographs the visible traces of change attest that the prohibition of touching has been rescinded. The motif of exhibiting is likewise severed by the fact that we not only frequently find ourselves gazing at empty vitrines, walls, or curtains but that the exhibits, if visible, are only seldom centrally positioned. Through dual motions—by pointing out the museum’s authority in governing control and order while at the same time invalidating the same—Buth generates space for that which the museum seeks to conceal.

Index, wall chart, 2008–2009
In her index, which is viewable in the exhibition as a large wall chart, Buth works with further photographs taken in the Tervuren Museum, which, as opposed to the photo series, also show visitors: for example, visitors taking in the exhibition Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era (2005), in which the museum for the first time addressed—though in a very restrained manner—the colonization of the Congo. Other images show instances where the museum has been publicly appropriated being that its majestic façade and park are favored settings for wedding photographs.

In addition to Buth’s photos and film stills, the index contains numerous historical documents on Belgian and German colonial history, on the Congo’s (successful) struggle for independence and postcolonial contexts, on Henry Morgan Stanley, as well as on his longtime African servant Kalulu and Stanley’s Arabian expedition assistant Selim. Landscape and hunting motifs, ethnological exhibits, or pictures of natives reference the European interpretation of the “other” as “noble” or as a “wild savage.” Maps and images of travel routes and factories bring into play the territorial and economic exploitation of Africa. Photographs by Fred Holland Day from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attest to the interweaving of homoerotic aesthetics with motifs of the exotic. With intimations regarding the author Colette along with the openly lesbian American Natalie Clifford Barney, who founded an academy for women in nineteen-twenties Paris, feminist contexts, cross-gender practices, and questions of female or lesbian representation are introduced.

The images in the index stem from a very diverse range of sources. For instance, there is a photograph by the contemporary artist Guy Tillim showing a dismantled sculpture of Stanley, which has been placed in a boat that in turn is being urinated on by a black youth. The arrangement of texts, images, and credits in this index only appears to reflect a classical system of archival, a system which is, however, breached by the de- and recontextualization of the material and by its nonlinear structuring. The visitor is again and again confronted with the material collected here, in respectively altered form, throughout the exhibition.


O, My Kalulu!, five-part video production, 2009
Far away from the European homeland not only the foreign in nature and culture could be discovered but sometimes even one’s own sexual “otherness”: a desire that could potentially ended up being projected onto the “other.” In this vein, Henry Morton Stanley, in his novella which stylizes the life of his two subordinates, tells of the intimate, latently homoerotic friendship between the Arabian slave Selim and the African prince Kalulu.
As in the second volume of the publication Desire in Representation, the video work O, My Kalulu! likewise delves into the intertanglement between colonialism, manhood myths, and homoerotic yearnings, between the repressed and its reemergence in the form of the sublime and the uncanny.
Divided into five episodes—Discovery, Brothers, Hunting, Loss, Salvation—all of which involve dialogues between Kalulu and Selim, the video work extends across five rooms. The image compositions adopt motifs of “gay aesthetics,” such as photographs by Fred Holland Day or James Bidgood’s cult film Pink Narcissus. The theatrical character of the compositions remains clearly perceptible. The visual and audio planes have been separated. In this work Buth thus not only disrupts the coherent narrative style of cinema but also deconstructs its illusionism.

Transference
Two rooms in the exhibition are devoted to the “discoverer” Henry Morton Stanley, that is, to representations, to the repression and transference capacity of research. In one of these rooms visitors can listen to excerpts from Stanley’s diaries, in which the fine line between the experienced and the desired, between empirical knowledge and fiction becomes apparent. Moreover, here a series of collected objects and “trophies” of the adventurer can be viewed—yet these objects of self-expression are represented through works by the artist. By smuggling her own work into the representation of someone else, which has here become an object of study for the artist, Buth is very explicitly referencing the transference capacity of research, thus situating herself at the inside of the unavoidable dilemma respecting the projection of oneself onto the “other.” In this way, Buth imbues everything she is presenting here (and throughout the entire exhibition) with her own desires, with that which she’d wish to see. In contrast to the distancing techniques employed by the museum, Buth succeeds in achieving a distance that makes the exhibited assailable.

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