Deterritorialized Bodies and the Multiplicity of False Origin

The work is built around one sculpture: Abyssinian (1913) by the Danish sculptor Johannes C. Bjerg, the only representation of a Black body in the permanent collection of Statens Museum for Kunst.

Bjerg never went to Abyssinia. His figure was put together in Paris from what was in the air at the time: the Ballets Russes and Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, which premiered the same year; reports and catalogues from the colonies, such as the Belgian Collection des Monographies Ethnographiques, which divided the Congo into neat “ethnic” blocks; and Greek and Roman sculpture.

The prints cut the sculpture into fragments and hang them on steel frames through the room. What is left is a hybrid: an identity with several false origins, copied over and over inside Western art history.