Archive of Lost Tails (2025) is an ongoing art project that investigates how the painful tradition of tail docking horses can be traced through art history. The project stems from the video work The Boulevard of Men and began with a detail found in Rosa Bonheur’s painting The Horse Fair (1852), where two of the horses are depicted with strangely tied tails. This observation led to a wider inquiry into the tail docking of horses and how this violent practice has been spread across lands during war and maintained through what appear to be aesthetic conventions.
The archive currently consists of around seventy graphite and charcoal drawings of horses with docked or tied tails, based on various paintings, sketches, and etchings. Among the drawings of docked horses there are also a number of drawings of texts that discuss the history and practice of tail docking, as well as a group of drawings of rosebushes pointing to early arguments that the horse tail should be pruned like a rosebush . The drawings, that span from 50×70 cm to large scale, are presented alongside shredded linnen canvas shaped into long ‘tails’. The linen strips are cut to resemble the movement and form of a horse’s free tail.
The Archive of Lost Tails was first realised as a large scale installation at Skissernas Museum for the exhibition The Museum Fauna – Lost Tails and Unheard Stories of Resistance together with artworks from the collection of Lund University depicting docked horses. For this exhibition there were also docking irons on display as well as an earlier video work about Rosa Bonheur’s painting The Horse Fair titled The Boulevard of Men.
Photograph by Emma Krantz
Photographer Emma Krantz
PHOTOS FROM THE STUDIO AND RESEARCH PROCESS
