Martin Maeller
soft sorrow

Whatever happened to the mystery of Death? It seems I’m searching in all the wrong places. Diving deep into collective reminiscences and popular imagination. Walking through the great sand covered tombs with gilded sarcophaguses, digging through frozen soil and excavating skeletal remains of long evaporated souls. Casually strolling through old, oh so outdated natural history museums with artificially recreated pillars, architraves, friezes and cornices, I’m trying to grasp the mythical promises of life eternal. Tutankhamun’s glory, based solely on the riches of his elaborate burial site; Sha-Amun-em-su, the “Songstress of the Sanctuary of Amun”, engulfed in the fire of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro; Ötzi, the Tyrolean Iceman, found in the snowy mountaintops of the high Alps, with an arrow in his side, famed as an argument of one psychologist to prove that our ancestors lived in constant conflict.

How to deal with the elusive nature of Death? Does it belong to the soft embrace of the soil? Do you engage in a game of chess with the Grim Reaper? Do you hide under the veil of invisibility? Do you transfer your consciousness to a complex quantum processor, so it can be one day bestowed on to another corporeal form?

I find myself utterly lost in vague, yet premeditated attempts to localize such an eternal, ungraspable entity. Only symbols are left to toy with. A canopic jar, a gravestone, a tomb. All so simple, yet marvelous in its ingrained obviousness. Yet, all those are but tokens of the strayed search.

The only thing that remains tangible is sorrow aimed at those who passed away. Painful, piercing sensation which only Time, that fleeting slippery trickster can heal.

“Then Helen, daughter of Zeus, took other counsel.
Straightway she cast into the wine of which they were drinking a drug
to quiet all pain and strife, and bring forgetfulness of every ill.”

glass work: Lukáš Verner, Glass factory Karlov
3D modelling: Tomáš Zdvořáček
3D printing: Tomáš Medek, FaVU
screen printing: Beáta Spáčilová, Katarína Hládeková, FaVU
text: Jen Kratochvil
project coordinator, G99: Anita Topínková
production BAiR, installation of the exhibition: Šimon Kadlčák, Jan Langer
photo: Jan Kolský