Peggy Buth

The two works “Forest in late autumn after Caspar David Friedrich” and “Untitled (found footage monument)” are part of Buths multimedia work cycle “Desire in Representation”, whose starting point was the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (near Brussels), which opened in 1907. It combines a photographic documentation of the museum representation of Central Africa and its Colonization with a narrative, which consists of quotations from travel reports, archive pictures and historical documents from the Belgian and German colonial era. The theme is the Desire of the colonizers, as seen in their self-portrayals and their projections onto the idea of the “other”. The two works in the exhibition form a contrasting pair - while Buth’s photography of a monument questions forms of production of meaning and historicity, the landscape created from tar initiates a process of decomposition.