The Death of Melanie Bonajo:
How to unmodernize yourself and become an elf in 12 steps.
The Death of Melanie Bonajo is the first museum retrospective of video installations by the Dutch artist Melanie Bonajo (Heerlen, 1978). The exhibition gives the visitor an opportunity to reflect not just on eir work, but also on what the work means in our modern, capitalist society.
The apocalyptic title of the show may sound dramatic, but in the light of this opportunity of looking back, you need to die in order to be reborn. And in being reborn, you can rethink and recast yourself. Who do you want to be?
A bird? A rock? A feeling? A sound? An elf? Your elf? Yourself?
BonnefantenMuseum Maastricht, Nl.
The installation emphasize the idea of transitioning by working every portals that leads from a room to an other.
The visitor is asked to choose a path by himself, navigating within twelve really different rooms, having the piossibility sometime to look back to a room he.she.it has been earlyer
The Death of Melanie Bonajo is immersive in many ways, as the installations and the path through the exhibition is rich in sensual experiences. Everyone is invited to take the time, and fight the modern urge to progress and be efficient. Be elf-efficient.
The entire architecture of the museum is played with, the floors, the doors, the walls, the ceilings that compose the building are vividly colored and transformed, to create a dreamlike rythm of mental dive all along the visit. Twelve rooms, as twelve condensed steps to move towards an other innerstate of being, an elf perhaps.
Curation by Geir Haraldseth
retrospective of Mélanie Bonajo
some installations by Clemence Seilles, Thomas Ballouhey or Carolin Gieszner.
Graphic Philippe Karrer Studio
Pictures J.van Rooij and Peter Cox
2018