
by
Jan Nikolai Nelles
feat:
Olamiju Fajemisin
(voice)
deep listening experience (40 min)
recommended are headphones
and to use Chrome Browser
on display at
»Triennale Fellbach - The Vibration of Things«
15th Small Sculpture Triennial Fellbach
4th of June to 3rd of October 2022
The Beheaded Buddha, 2021, .gif (photogrammetry)
The Beheaded Buddha, 2021, .gif (photogrammetry)
"When looking at the severed head of a Buddha in a museum, I had never asked myself: “Where is the body of this head?” It doesn’t take a detective’s trained eye to notice the signs of fracture, the broken edges on the neck of the exposed and bodyless head. It was due to ignorance that I did not ask the question. I ignored the discontinuity of the figurative and its absence because of the exhibition itself. The museum seemed to confirm that no further explanation was needed, and the disembodied “head on a stick” did not produce any cognitive dissonance that would have led me to question the scene. I simply didn’t need to ask: “Where is the body of this head?” And yet, very curiously, the first question I asked myself upon seeing the Buddha statues without their heads in Angkor Wat was insistent: “Where is the head of this body?”"
The written essay was planned to be published in early 2021 as "The Beheaded Buddha," in Decapitated Economies, intercalations 5, eds. A.-S. Springer and E. Turpin
(Berlin: K. Verlag and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2021).
Due to pandemic circumstances, it has not been published and is available for pre-order.
The digital production received funding from the Deutscher Künstlerbund, and the 'Ministerium für Kultur und Medien' in the program 'Neustart Kultur'.