Fernando BryceAn Approach to the Museo Hawai25.04. - 21.05.2009
Museum Het Domein

The title of the exhibition refers to an itinerant museum of curiosities known as Museo Hawai that Bryce saw as a child, and which has remained in his memory ever since. This macabre Kunst- und Wunderkammer which toured the back streets of Peru until fifteen years ago, held what was left of a didactic collection of materials that were used to train police detectives. The rather grim collection was once described by author Gustavo Buntix as ‘a treasure-trove of aborted foetuses, ravages of venereal diseases, decomposed anatomies, and wax portraits of dictators and criminals where deathly likenesses of Hitler, Mussolini, Mao and Capone alternated’. In the Quechua language, the word ‘hawai’ means to gaze. Bryce considers the archive of imagery to which he is perpetually adding, a ‘museum of the gaze’: a place where different perspectives, views of history, ideologies and (stereotypical) images are deconstructed.

The most recent series of drawings by Bryce, Die Welt (2008), will be included this summer in an exhibition curated by Jota Castro during the Venice Biennial.

A comprehensive publication documenting the work of Fernando Bryce since 2005 will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. Containing many hundreds of images, an interview with the artist by Domein curator Roel Arkesteijn and an essay by writer Michaël Zeeman, the publication will be presented during a T-time on Sunday 14 June.