The scene recalls King Kong, but also Gulliver’s Travels: a huge hairy monster lies sleeping on the ground. Around 500 small anthropomorphic parasites set about their host in search of various “raw materials”. Blood is pumped out, teeth and mucus, skin and hair are transported away. Thanks to its obsessive detail, the fantastic picture has a drastically macabre quality. Looked at close up, the beast’s body turns into a kind of landscape whose wealth is plundered by open-cast mining. With this installation, the artists Matthias Böhler (born 1981) and Christian Orendt (born 1980) have created a striking metaphor for humankind’s overexploitation of nature.
A species that subjects everything to the economy and to profit will not to be prevented from behaving this way by the fact that its host will one day either wake up or die. Böhler and Orendt work on a narrative universe that holds up a mirror to our Last Days with great wit and humour.
A cooperation of Neuen Museums with Elke Antonia Schloter und Volker Koch