Three-channel video installation,
steel, acrylic glass, clay

Zoos are places of longing and projection – and, at the same time, institutional structures in which hierarchies are produced, made visible and stabilised. In her three-channel video installation sensational view, tired screams, Sarah Reva Mohr examines the zoo as a space of ambivalence, straddling seeming care and the exertion of power. Taking Barcelona Zoo as an example, the installation reveals how architecture, the direction of the gaze and institutional narratives structure the relationship between humans and animals.

At the heart of the work is the albino gorilla Snowflake, who was captured in 1966 and kept at Barcelona Zoo until his death in 2003. Marked as a rare deviation, the animal became an object of projection for scientific curiosity, media attention and tourist marketing. His story is a rich blend of colonial entanglements as well as questions relating to the categorisation and economic exploitation of a living being.

The installation combines various different cinematic layers which allow the zoo to be experienced as a choreographed space of perception. Observations from the perspective of visitors follow the paths, lines of sight and architectural emphases of the complex and point to the structures that direct movements and allocate roles – those looking and those being looked at.

The perspective is set against the ghost walk sequence, in which the same infrastructure is transversed once again by the figure of Snowflake. As a “ghost” of himself, he passes through the zoo’s paths, enclosures and visual orders. Surfaces, materials and barriers that usually remain in the background come to the fore here and reference a life organised behind walls and glass.

A replica of one of the zoo’s many information boards supplements these two cinematic positions, showing the work’s entire video archive. Descriptions of the scenes shot pass across the board and are interrupted by fragmented thoughts and associations. These sober attributions recall the data base of a collection and make reference to the accumulation of data, knowledge and images inscribed into zoological institutions. The combination of these different elements form an open, deliberately incomplete arrangement of observations, archival material and speculative perspectives that bring together different levels of perception, recollection and infrastructure.

Sarah Reva Mohr sets her sights on the seemingly innocuous processes which organise spaces, distribute responsibilities and stabilise differences. The zoo thus appears as a structure that has emerged from history in which colonial domains of knowledge continue to apply and society’s ideas of order, empathy and control are made manifest in spatial form.

• Sektion Section: An Incomplete Assembly
• Programm Programme: An Incomplete Assembly