Still image from the Virtual Reality experience.
WIELS Project Room - 20.06 - 07.07.2019
Opening: 19.06.2019, 18:00-21:00
Open Tuesday - Sunday, 14:00-18:00
Free entrance
Jasper de Beijer, resident at WIELS in 2018, shows a new body of work in the Project Room.
The Exhibition is a museum in virtual reality where a museum show is continuously built up and broken down while the visitor is walking around in it. The route that the visitor chooses dictates the course and content of the exhibition. The virtual building is a machine, an automata. The dioramas in the museum are modules that can be replaced or adjusted, depending on time and context. Since the birth of the museum in the 19th century dioramas are being used to show the visitor a 'slice' of reality. These slices of pseudo reality confront the visitor with a moment in time and place, frozen in a confined box. Ever since its birth as an institute, the historical and ethnographic museum has suggested that these slices are a palpable representation of reality, but the perception of this reality differs per context and era. The visitor of the Exhibition has an influence on these slices, by choosing diffent routes and looking with the VR set at different subjects. This means that the Exhibition will be a different experience for each visitor, adjusting its content on the visitors' behaviour. This creates a unique dynamic between visitor and exhibited subject. During his stay at the 6 month residency Jasper de Beijer has been studying and collecting information at different ethnographic museums, to investigate how these tableaux vivants are a reflection on the zeitgeist in which they were constructed. He collected numerous 3D scans of objects he found in exhibitions and storage, using them to create exhibited objects that have become actors in a narrative that tells us more about our changing perception than it does about the peoples subjected in the museums.
Special thanks to WIELS and the Mondriaan Foundation.