American film director became the curator of an unusual exhibition at the Vienna Museum of Art History.
One of the most famous museums of the world is not afraid to let outsiders into the holy of holies - their vaults. From time to time, he invites celebrities from different spheres to choose objects from the museum’s permanent collection to his own taste and make an exhibition of them.. As an amateur curator, the American artist Ed Rusha has already lit up - his project was called “The ancients stole all our ideas! »And British ceramist and writer Edmund de Waal.
Recently, American director Wes Anderson and his wife, writer and clothing designer Juman Maloof joined the list.. On November 6, the museum opened an exhibition invented by them: “The Mummy of a Shrew in a Coffin and Other Treasures”.
On the eve of the opening, one of the curators of the museum, Jasper Sharp, said: "This exhibition will not be like any of those that we have done before. We made Wesu and Juman a unique, but somewhat overwhelming, offer: explore all the items in our collection - Egyptian mummies, Greek and Roman antiquities, pictures of old masters, kunstkamera, imperial treasury, crown jewels, ethnographic objects, sledges and carriages, costumes. "Apparently, the author’s imagination of the“ Train to Darjeeling ”and the“ Hotel Grand Budapest ”” most impressed by the ethnographic part of the meeting and all sorts of curiosities accumulated by the generations of the Habsburgs. Under the exhibition, one of the halls of the Kunstkamera was released - a section from which, in fact, the museum's collection began.. In the collection of the imperial dynasty, ingenious musical machines coexist with shark teeth, which in the Middle Ages were mistaken for petrified dragon tongues. Approximately the same freakish chaos reigns in the exposition of Anderson and Maloof. They divided the hall they had divided into eight small boxes with niches and shop windows.. Objects of all times and peoples are exhibited side by side, without labels, just like in the old kunstkamera, - as if in a peak of the exhibition of Peter Bruegel, full of detailed explanations, that runs one floor above.. Carved wooden statues of medieval saints side by side with carved African sculptures - as they say, find ten differences. At the same time, there is no logic in the choice of themes for different parts of the exposition.. In one, all objects are exclusively green: malachite caskets, dresses of emerald shade, and so on.. Another floor to ceiling hung with children's portraits. The third is devoted to animals: it was there that a place was found for the Egyptian mummy of the shrew (IV century BC), who gave the name to the project. Sometimes it seems that the curators were collecting not only an exhibition, but also props for the future film: portraits of the “hairy man” and his children by an unknown master, a contemporary of Velasquez, are easy to imagine in the interiors, for example, of the Tenenbaum family.
The exposition design itself is replete with unequivocal references to the visual language of Anderson’s paintings.. His passion for symmetry and bright color is recognizable at first sight.. Each room has its own color scheme, and niches with exhibits line up in complex shapes like kaleidoscope patterns.. The curators did not deliberately left the key to their labyrinth: while working on the exhibition, they did not give an interview in principle and did not even appear at the press conference on the opening day. Only one way out - to rely on intuition and solve the riddles of a Hollywood magician, giving full imagination.
Source: theartnewspaper.