Els Dietvorst
(c)image: M HKA
The Skull series are sculptures that are made to be symbolical metaphors for every war. The first sculpture was a huge skull, made of wood and loam, built in Antwerp.
The next Skull was made on the roof of the M HKA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp and was a reaction on the War on terror.
“In 2009, on the roof of M HKA in Antwerp, she exhibited the gigantic work Skull, a figure in a cage, fashioned from mud and wood. This powerfully visual work is Dietvorst’s way of reacting to the numerous images of war that the media floods us with. This specific work alludes to Guantanamo; to solitary confinement in cages. Dietvorst made a life-sized model of one of them, inhabited by a gigantic skull. On the roof of the museum, the head appears to be imprisoned in a dovecote, which can be viewed from a nearby bench. After a while, two pigeons built their nest in the cage and hatched out their eggs there – thus a piece about murder facilitates the creation of new life at a totally different level…”(source; Eva Wittocx, ED2)
The third Skull was made in the biennal of Moscow. The form of the Skull was inspired by a skull of a neanderthal man that lived in Eurasia. In that time Neanderthalers and the new immigrants, the homo sapiens, lived peacefully together. This tooth is the symbol for immigration, respect and human transcendence.
