Publication:
Art Monthly, Exhibition Reviews, May, 2009

Headline:
Mythologies, Haunch of Venison

Selected editorial:

By Rikke Hansen

Taking its cue from the gallery building's former history as home to the Museum of Mankind, this group show borrows the format of a Wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities. this predecessor to the modern museum has proven a somewhat favoured method of display in projects that aim to challenge the way things are ordered, from exhibitions centring on institutional critique, to the artistic flirtation with ethnography in the 1990s, to the current interest in cultural categorisations of the natural world.

As an exhibition, 'Mythologies' goes a long way to make connections between artists from disparate parts of the world; yet, the way in which something might 'look' exotic, or be framed as such, is not necessarily free of hangovers from colonialist discourse. Still, as a method within the show, this self-othering differs from an anthropological drive in the sense that it aims to both investigate and retain the mystery of the self and world. As such, it recalls the multiple meanings of the 'wonder' of the Wunderkammer, with the term 'to wonder' meaning both 'to speculate' and 'to marvel', to question and to be in awe. The works of Heather & Ivan Morison, both their slide-animation and sound installation Dark Star, 2007, and their two large kite sculptures, Kind, Wise and Loving, 2008, and The Opposite of All Those Things, 2008, exemplify this tension elegantly. In all three works we encounter elements that appear as if they were autonomous life-forms: manmade constructions which regardless of their artificiality seem as if they have entered the world by their own force, and have simply been observed or picked from nature and placed in the gallery.