Skip to content

Resistance within the Museum Fauna, a performance at Lunds Konsthall

Detail of C.W. Eckersberg’s Mendel Levin Nathanson’s Elder Daughters, Bella and Hanna, 1820



Welcome to Lunds Konsthall on the 20th of August for a performance on the resistance within the museum fauna* of Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. The performance is part of my doctoral project Reframing the Non-Human Animal in Art Production and as such will focus on how we interpret and experience the portrayed non-humans hanging on museum walls.



Curator Paula Ludusan Gribe writes:
Resistance within the Museum Fauna is a combined lecture and performance, written and performed by the artist EvaMarie Lindahl. She invites the audience for a guided tour of a virtual world with stops at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen and Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. During the journey, participants are confronted with a considerable number of animals depicted on paintings that hang on the walls of these art institutions and belong to its collections.

Lindahl’s performance sheds light on the dreams and imagined experiences behind portraits of non-human individuals, of animals. Basing herself on a relatively unexplored region of art history, she uses a less anthropocentric and more empathic method is used to imagine what this relationship between the portraitist and the portrayed – the depicting human being and the depicted animal – might mean. Participants are offered a new in-depth experience of the paintings and the choice of motif.

What is it like to be part of art history and its production system of oppression and violence? What happens if we refuse a symbolical reading of beings that were once alive and instead recognise their agency, the need for control over actions and their consequences, that are so clearly reflected in the fauna of the museum?

EvaMarie Lindahl (b. 1976) lives in Malmö. Her research-based practice unites critical animal studies, visual art and activism. Lindahl makes large-scale pencil drawings and text-based performance works, challenging the anthropocentric and patriarchal default positions of art history by correcting, rewriting and inventing new stories. Her method could be called art historical activism. In her ongoing work, Lindahl questions the human/animal dichotomy and discusses the human habit of oppressing other animals by using them as resources and material for art production.


Resistance within the Museum Fauna
Thursday, 20 August 2020
2pm and 6pm. Duration: 30 min.
Lunds Konsthall


https://lundskonsthall.se/en/current/evamarie-lindahl/



*According to the Cambridge Dictionary the word FAUNA means: “all the animals of a particular area or period of time”. At art museums non-human animals from all over the world and from different time periods can share rooms with each other. Therefore the Fauna that I adress is not one defined by time or a specific forest but a museum building.

Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.