2-channel video, HD, variable loop on 19th century plaster casts of Kladeos, Kephissos, Belvedere Torso, Seer and the Three Goddesses from the Bernhard August von Lindenau Collection

Artist Statement | The work folds for the Lindenau Museum (Altenburg, Germany) may be understood as a rapprochement with the history of the museum’s collection of plaster casts. I was particularly interested in the ancient, fragmented bodies – how through the loss of limbs they became almost abstract, fragmentary sculptures and yet still disclosed a nearly uncanny vitality. Also noteworthy is that the collection entails sculptures, Greek in origin, that have been replicated time and time again. Hewn from marble and partially painted in color, the originals were repeatedly copied in marble or plaster in different places across centuries, despoiled of color and slurred in detail.

Despite these multiple re-shapings that attend the loss of the original’s memory, new meanings and frictions arise with each copy in each respective present. They are the precondition for over 2400 years of the ongoing revitalization of the legacy of antiquity. The fold, a continually recurring visual and conceptual motif in my works, is for me the pictorial metaphor for these layers and distortions of meaning. In the projection the fold becomes connected to the fragmentary sculptures, swirls around them, makes them flow with bygone colors, protects or clothes them, gives them peace and lets them come alive for a moment, in order then to be stored as a further layer in the sediment of oblivion.

Monographic Catalog
Robert Seidel: FOLDS
Publisher: Lindenau Museum Altenburg
ISBN 978-3-86104-070-0