600. Christoph & Sebastian Mügge. HARIGE AANGELEGENHEID. Locatie : Graffitistraat [Werregarenstraat] 9000 Gent. 28 november – 1 december 2019. Curated by Anyuta Wiazemsky Snauwaert & Samira El Khadraoui.
txt In their project “Harige aangelegenheid“, the German-Swedish brothers Christoph and Sebastian Mügge decided to create a thought-provoking installation made mainly out of human hair that was donated by a local hairdresser in Ghent. Hair is a new material to work with for the artists, and was of interest as it is, beyond doubt, an integral part of all humans that might be perceived as desirable and, to a certain extend, even challenging and subversive as it got the potential to corrupt high moral standards in the eyes of some religious groups who therefore decide to prevent the exposure of hair in public. At the same time hair can incorporate negative connotation as it might be considered repulsive, especially if the owners are unknown and the left-overs are re-arranged in a new context.
Furthermore, hair can represent both a very personal liberation and the search for identity and belonging like in the Hippie movement, or highlight the need for control and blatant aggression as part of punishment strategies and disciplinary force that have been examined by numerous authoritarian states throughout history.
Piles of hair from different humans can provoke strong feelings and reference the unwanted, cultural hygiene and normalisation- dark images of prisons and labour camps might pop up in our collective consciousness.
And indeed a substantial quantity of hair got strung to an iron fence halfway above-mentioned location downtown Ghent, half up the wall, securing a widowed window from other unvoluntary patchwork. And it remained there for a couple of days.