Robert Gabris
Insectology in My Body (2020)
Photo: Ela Bialkowska / Okno Studio, Florence 2020
Dates
20.9.2024–16.2.2025
Details
HD video, stereo sound, 5:35 min.
Location
Neue Galerie Graz, Graz
Part of
Horror Patriae: Exhibition
Production specifics
Courtesy of the artist
Robert Gabris’s “insectologies,” as he calls them, address the troubling legacy of European ethnography, which for a long time had a dehumanizing view of non-European communities and people. Their bodies were treated as scientific material to be analyzed and dissected if necessary. Working in drawings and performances, Gabris imagines his own metamorphosis into a wondrous bug, a little like Franz Kafka’s hero Gregor Samsa.
The artist sees his body as constantly on the verge of being rejected or displayed as an oddity for being queer and of Romani origin. Using ink, string, and other improvised materials, he transforms himself, tapping into a tradition dating to Viennese Actionism. Gabris thus distances himself from ethnological attributes and previous anthropological research. Instead, he reflects the very mechanism of displaying human beings as examples—be it as racialized stereotypes or as living experiments.
Camera: Christiane Peschek
Postproduction: David Pujdas Bosch
Retrospective
Retrospective