‘Domestication of Pyramids’ is a stunning piece of installation
art by the Czech artist and architect Magdalena Jetelova.
Installed in a number of locations between 1992 and 1994, the
work deals strongly with dislocation. Here a large fragment of a
pyramid stands inside a gallery. It appears to rip through the
walls of the space and the viewer can easily imagine that the
structure continues past these restraints and spans to the scale
of an actual pyramid. The images above show a pyramid that could
have easily been lifted directly from Egypt and dropped rather
haphazardly into the museum. Jetelova’s work comments on this
dislocation; the Western mentality of taking important parts of
our history and placing them inside museums. This is the
‘domestication’ that the works title refers to. It’s a powerful
visual metaphor and one which I’d have loved to have seen in
real life. The piece ran in a number of art spaces during the
90′s including Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (top image),
Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau