Special Dossier: DEATH - Reference Exhibition: - SIX FEET UNDER

Autopsy of our Relation to the Dead at Museum of Fine Arts Berne

Six Feet Under is an exhibition made up of works from the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Berne and from other public and private collections as well as works specially created for the show, ranging from the 16th century to today, and originating from different continents and civilizations – Europe, America, Mexico, China, India, Thailand, Ghana.

Violence and death are omnipresent in the media, yet our society avoids direct contact with dead people. The corpse has been definitively removed from our field of vision and replaced by a new system of rituals and symbols intended to help us deal with the finiteness of human existence.

The skull, for example, has been transformed from a sub cultural emblem to a chic mainstream fashion accessory. Other countries and civilizations often have more direct contact with the dead, which is mostly compensated by a greater degree of reutilization.

Repression, catharsis, de-symbolization, metaphor, and the invention of substitute rituals, neutralization, black humor and other such instruments have always been, and continue to be used, in ever new forms so as to redress our natural awkwardness in the face of the idea of death and the body of the dead person.

Death is a universal theme in art. Two extremes are evident in contemporary art: either art re-conquers the ritual, which was surrendered by religion to highly professional service providers or to the media, and restages or extends it using its own means; or else certain artists bring the undesirable corpse back into our field of vision in order to show us, in an often very direct way, that (physical) existence (also) continues after death.