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Who are you?
     Apolline Morel-Lab

Where are you?
     I’m in the Academe der Bildenden Kunste Wien, but I also study in Strasbourg, France

What are you researching/interested in?
     I have recently been very interested in the concept of cannon in art. Apparently there were these unspoken laws of sculpture in antiquity, around the 5th century, which said how a sculpture was supposed to be, like the proportions, materials etc. This is interesting as it doesn’t exist anymore. I read more and became more careful with the sculptures from antiquity which were around me, especially those in public space because they are still here after all this time, even though they are not like our contemporary cannon. However the thing which really interests me is this idea of the copies. Back in the time when they were made plaster sculptures from Greece and Italy were sent and spread all over Europe in order for students to have a model of what sculpture should be like.

What is your work (specific or general) trying to say?
     My first idea was to steal these ‘perfect shapes’ by taking casts of sculptures in the public space. With these shapes I would make a collage. This was also done in the Renaissance periods; they would swap body parts from different sculptures, matching the head of one sculpture with the torso of another. I don’t have many because they are so difficult to obtain. It is considered vandalism to go out on the streets and cast these sculptures. Your not really allowed to do it (although the process is not damaging to the original sculpture itself). I found this interesting as the public space is not as available as it sounds. With these different parts though, the idea is to bring these shapes from the public space into an exhibition space to decontextualise them in order to give the viewer a different look at them as you may not notice them outside so much. I will present these pieces as relics, putting them on a pedi stool but in an unstable way, about to fall like a ruin. I was thinking of bringing together these different cultures of the antiquity and contemporary art, asking what it means to mix them. I wanted to question the phenomena of obsolescence, restoration and what we conserve and why. Why some are in the archive and the temporality of things, especially now in contemporarily art where people use living things in performance for example. Yes, the temporality of art in general.