The installation I’ve photographed at Mumok (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien) in Vienna is striking in its eerie stillness. Seven life-sized mannequins sit in a row, draped in long, heavy, velvet-like robes that pool at their feet. Their faces are elongated and pallid, carved into almost expressionless masks with closed eyes and slightly raised chins, as if caught in a trance somewhere between prayer, exhaustion, and resignation. Each figure’s hands, skeletal and pale, rest carefully on their laps, fingers elongated in a way that feels both fragile and unsettling.
Behind them, a reflective artwork amplifies the strangeness of the scene, catching fragments of the museum’s ceiling lights and bouncing them back like ghostly echoes. The effect makes the figures seem doubly unreal—already suspended between sculpture and corpse, they’re further abstracted by the mirrored backdrop, as if their presence is multiplied and made spectral. The uniformity of their poses only deepens the uncanny aura, evoking themes of conformity, mortality, or perhaps the silent solidarity of collective memory.
There’s a tension here that lingers after you walk away. Are they an audience, forever waiting for a performance that never begins? Or are they themselves the performance, a meditation on stillness and sameness in a world obsessed with movement and difference? Something about the blank serenity of their faces makes them look wise, but also defeated. Like monks who have renounced words, they sit in rows, holding secrets they will never tell.
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