Michelle Eistrup | Breathing Archives | 2021

In her artworks Michelle Eistrup (*1969) combines various forms of expression such as photography, drawing, video, sound and performance, thus discovering multitemporal and transnational colonial interweavings. Having been raised in Jamaica, Paris, an New York, she currently lives in Denmark with her family. In "Breathing Archives" she highlights the brutal consequences museal practices of collecting still have today. The artwork itself constitutes an exploration of ancestral remains as well as their backgrounds in the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony. At the same time she points to the international politics of the museums in the GDR, that can indeed hold some valuable impulses for contemporary museal debates and discourses. The accompanying sound collage is co-created with composer Anders Juhl (*1967).

The museum acquired the artwork from the artist in 2021.