Would you try to express love in a quadratic equation? Not really. Then why would you try to define the mysterious beauty of the human face in terms of millimeters and degrees? This and similar questions were raving through my head while watching Péter Forgács’s media installation exhibition titled “Col Tempo” – The W. Project at the Ernst Museum. At first.
Aiming to catalogue and separate different human races in order to gain knowledge on the ‘hygienic race’, The W. Project, lead by Nazi anthropologist Dr. Wastl, followed a strict procedure. The standardized film shots were based on established anthropometric angles. Thus, all the sequences have the same structure: first, the subjects – deported victims, prisoners of war, Austrian locals and Wehrmacht guards alike – are shown from their right profile, slowly turning directly into the camera continuing to the left.
The minutes after you get over the dreadful simplicity of the Nazi research permeated with its lethal ideology, you might as well abandon the historic context of the materials used. And then starts the magic.
To look at faces, faces of ordinary people, well, we do that every day. On the bus, in the supermarket, in the gym… A huge difference, though, when you look at someone right in the eye. At Col Tempo, you meet people. You look them in the eye. And what do you see? Yourself, actually, in a mirror. You see belonging together through another ordinary human being.
When I ventured into the dark halls of the exhibition, to be honest with you, I didn’t know what to expect. Sure I’d read the intro about it; a huge success at the 53rd Venice Biennale; that it employed photos and videos of the substantial collection of Second World War Nazi anthropological research. It was way more complex than that. I got the gift of realizing how precious the human gaze is; precisely because, in there, you’ll find the best mirror.
Through March 14
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