Looking for a photographic subject, Martien Van Beeck became fascinated by the many ways of preservation in a museum of zoology. Mounted skeletons, stuffed and dried animals and jars of specimens are the manifestations of a disruption of the natural process of living and dying.
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Looking for a photographic subject, Martien Van Beeck became fascinated by the many ways of preservation in a museum of zoology. Mounted skeletons, stuffed and dried animals and jars of specimens are the manifestations of a disruption of the natural process of living and dying. Van Beeck is interested in the decomposing and concomitant disruption of the symbolic dimensions of grief, mourning and rituals. His photographic work is not an attempt to give an opinion towards the scientific motives to preserve specimens, neither is it an attempt to systematically catalogue all the thousands of jars. The artist approaches every creature one by one and tries to capture a contorted posture, a dramatic gesture, a grotesque strangeness. Through these photographs van Beek also reflects upon his own death and the meaning of death in our society trough time.
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