That, for some years now, the Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosity, has been attracting the attention of artists, curators and art historians, may have something to do with its non-hierarchical, encyclopedic approach to the world. Exhibiting side-by-side objects from geology, natural history, archaeology or contemporary art, the Wunderkammer, equating the natural and the man-made, opens up analogical readings unrestrained by modern science categories.
Pursuing her journey through zones of indetermination, between animality and humanity, fact and fiction, mythology and science, Louise Manifold’s latest body of works, Unnatural Esoteric, draws form and inspiration from the wunderkammer’s representation of the world’s multiplicity. During a residency at the Francke foundation in Halle, Germany2, she photographed the exhibits in the oldest remaining intact Wunderkammer museums. Through the use of lighting and framing the series of photographs conveys the strangeness of forms in glass jars, rather reminiscent of the creatures inhabiting Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings of Hell, than specimens from natural history.
Using video, photography and installation, Manifold looks for a visual form of storytelling. In the video A forty-nine year old woman (2008), using the medical description of a case of Clinical Lycanthropy3, as her narrative, she composes a series of almost still tableaux around the patient state of alienation while alluding through discreet visual elements to the mythological dimension of the condition – such as a round shaped mirror, whose surface has become the trembling waters of a pond, reflecting a moon crescent between dark branches.
In Unnatural Esoteric, through the use of different medias, Manifold attempts to release facts and objects from their informative or scientific state, so that they may recover their dimension as tales and stories that continue their wandering in our imagination.
Using video, photography and installation, Manifold looks for a visual form of storytelling. In the video A forty-nine year old woman (2008), using the medical description of a case of Clinical Lycanthropy3, as her narrative, she composes a series of almost still tableaux around the patient state of alienation while alluding through discreet visual elements to the mythological dimension of the condition – such as a round shaped mirror, whose surface has become the trembling waters of a pond, reflecting a moon crescent between dark branches.
In Unnatural Esoteric, through the use of different medias, Manifold attempts to release facts and objects from their informative or scientific state, so that they may recover their dimension as tales and stories that continue their wandering in our imagination.
