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Coproduction of Agnes Hegedüs and the ZKM | Institute
for Visual Media;
iCINEMA Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, University of New
South Wales
Their Things Spoken by Agnes
Hegedüs refers to the gulf between the conservation and valuation
of officially recognized cultural representations and the information
content of bearers of personal significance originating in apparently
unimportant, unknown biographies. The artist distributed among visitors
to the ZKM a leaflet asking, »Why not put your favorite object
in a museum?« This question stimulated the museum visitors
to reflect upon rituals of appreciating and keeping, and to relate
the museum exhibits to the relics to which they attribute private
significance.
Using a Polaroid camera to document contributors
and objects, and a tape recorder for their stories and comments,
she imposed no restrictions on the choice of personal favorites.
Her concern was to warehouse the portraits of people
and objects in the most neutral possible way, so that every image
and statement is equally valid. The DVD-ROM storage medium allows
the body of contributions to be archived exactly as they were documented.
The stories stand for themselves and, like an atlas of everyday
life, show a random collection of people whose relationship to the
world is revealed through the objects they identify with.
- Ursula Frohne -
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