A living installation
Inside transparent cases, larvae became insects that could be fed to carnivorous plants. A biological life cycle unfolded before museum visitors.
← Curator
Closed System
A project by Natasha Schulte combining paintings, photographs and a living installation of insects and carnivorous plants. The exhibition considers how bodies are observed, organised and subjected to systems of control.
Curated by Andrii Siguntsov.
Inside the system
Bodies under observation
Photographic bodies and paintings appeared alongside the installation, bringing biological processes into dialogue with how we observe and classify the human body.
Exhibition sources: Думська
About the project
Natasha Schulte’s Closed System places photographs and paintings alongside an installation inhabited by insects and carnivorous plants. The white museum room becomes a model of ordered space: bodies are arranged, observed and made available to the gaze of others.
In the photographs, corporeality is reorganised according to the desire to decorate and control. Individual features recede, and bodies begin to resemble objects. The living installation makes this relationship more explicit. Behind glass, creatures remain unaware of the observer, while the conditions of the display determine the life and death of flies and the nourishment of plants.
The exhibition asks how spatial organisation becomes a form of power. Drawing on the relationship between bodily control and social identity, the curatorial reading brings the photographed body and the enclosed ecosystem into a shared field of vulnerability, visibility and external force.