© Lena Breitmoser
© Lena Breitmoser
© Lena Breitmoser
© Lena Breitmoser
© Lena Breitmoser
The Violent Container focuses on the cultural phenomenon of the cage, and caging as a practice to contain, categorise, restrict, and appropriate objects or bodies – as well as a tool to collect, treasure, preserve, and protect them. The project comprises an exhibition and a publication that examine the various properties and functions of the cage’s shifting forms, exploring how cages not only enable the administration of living or dead bodies and objects, but also govern the ways in which we perceive them.
By considering their different qualities and uses over time, it becomes clear that the cage is a tool that always carries a certain degree of inherent violence.
An enclosure, a prison cell, a menagerie, a vitrine, a collection, an exhibition, a cricket cage, a label. The publication gathers fragments of relevant texts, material examples and terms around the subject of the cage and caging as a cultural practice. While offering an analysis of different properties, mechanisms and protagonists surrounding the cage, it is a subjective collection, which is self-consciously incomplete. Like the textual translation of a patchwork blanket, it connects bits and pieces of pre-existing and newly commissioned materials and is the result of a polyphonic authorship.
During the course of the diploma exhibition, the handbook was used as a body of reference on how to navigate the space and interpret its exhibits by linking them to specific pages or chapters within the collection. Printed matter and space, the research and artistic interpretations, were closely intertwined.
The exhibition raised questions of accessibility, of hierarchies within the mediated encounter around a cage, of the limiting and violent act of categorising and being fitted into a pre-installed container, and of the purposefulness of a cage once it is stripped of its contents – of its failings and deficiencies. The display featured a voyeuristic window, photographic glitches, a reading station, a specimen table and a mechanical spectator.