Breaking The Cage

The Battery Channel - Expo

Exhibition facts

From Monday 18 May - Friday 22 may (except May 21)
11h - 16h

Parking LABIOMISTA
Marcel Habetslaan 50
3600 GENK

Please note, visiting is only possible with respect to the Covid-19 measures

Breaking The Cage, 2020
Koen Vanmechelen

 

This installation consists of the works Breaking the Cage and Uncomfortable. The latter work shows a naked, blindfolded child. It does not move. It is searching for clues about the environment it happens to be in. Its receptors try to sense the world around it. Its auditory system works, as well as its touch system, its balance, smell, and taste systems. But without vision, it feels vulnerable.  

The blindfold protects the child against surroundings corroded by factors unknown and forbidden. Who decided to shield it from the now and the future? Will the lowering of the blindfold help or impair its future? Will vision anchor it into one of many possible worlds? Or is it the possibility of future vision that makes it feel so uncomfortable?

The cage with eggs (Breaking the Cage) contains all its possible futures. If it is broken, the framework must be there. It is essential to safeguard the freedom and enable the child to choose its destiny.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights are emitted through the speakers, read out by Eleanor Roosevelt. They serve as beacon and guide, they are the very basis of the intercultural society of the future.

Above all, this installation claims that every newborn child has the right to a life worth living, in which there is lasting respect for human rights.

 

Breaking the Cage, iron, eggs, breeding lamp, 120 x 120 x 40 cm, 2014, Uncomfortable, marble, 51 x 60 x 60 cm, 2017 © Koen Vanmechelen
Eleanor Roosevelt reads the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 © UN Audiovisual Library

 

Uncomfortable refers to Koen Vanmechelen's sculpture; Collective Memory, an international symbol for human rights that is located on the Global Campus of Human Rights in Venice (IT). Breaking the Cage is part of Human Rights House Tulum in Mexico.