traveling exhibition

For 'Between Life & Death – Rites of Farewell', we define the first breath of air, the moment of birth, as the entry into the earthly human life.

But life on earth is fleeting, and with birth, the end, or death, is also already established.

But is there something after death? And if, what is after?

INEVITABLE

INCOMPREHENSIBLE

The knowledge of the inevitability of death is, according to Voltaire,
what makes human beings human.
Death concerns human beings both as individuals and as part of a
community, and birth and death are sometimes close to one another.
Archaeology has shown us both children’s graves and burial of women alongside newborn babies. The rites of farewell can often only be surmised.

For millennia, we, the human beings, have been trying to understand the
painful and incomprehensible experience of death.
Suppression or explanation are strategies we use to overcome it.
Belonging to, or connected to these strategies are tabooing, cultures of
remembrance, conceptions of a possible afterlife, rebirth, and myth formation.

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TRAVELING EXHIBITION 1

TRAVELING EXHIBITION 2

Graves are the visible and often only preserved remains from mourning and death rites. Mourning rites connect life and death, and helps the ones left behind realizing how to carry on living after the loss.
Death rites accompany the dead on their way to the beyond.
Offerings of food and drink are often part of such rituals.
A wide variety of religious, non-religious, and every-day artworks,
like Tödlein (‘Little Death’) and vanitas motives depict the transience of life. These, and other kinds of memento mori, are artistic symbolic
reminders of our mortality.

ETERNAL?

Our modern-day, oftentimes de-ritualized and professionalized ‘farewell’ makes lonely. Our modern culture also propagates a longing for eternal youth that opposes this type of ‘farewell’. These ideas of immortality can sometimes make us deny, and even banish, death. On the other side,
many people today even choose to have a memorial diamond made from the bones of their lost loved ones to carry on their finger.