ARTIFICIAL HELLS

former west
brought back from their overseas missions (stuffed animals, plant specimens,
ethnographic objects, and so on). His contribution addressed the display
system of the museum but also a situation of conflict there: the retired veterans
disliked the museum’s curator, whose job it was to decide which of their
objects would enter the collection after they passed away. Dion’s project
proceeded from a lithograph showing the museum’s original nineteenthcentury
display cabinets (destroyed after the institution had been revamped
in the 1960s); he had two of these refabricated, filling one with the objects that
appeared in the lithograph, and the other with mementos belonging to the
veterans, specifically those objects which would not make it into the collection
upon their deaths, but which were of great personal significance: a
cookbook from a prisoner of war camp; a carved figurine from a man who
had to leave behind the love of his life in Indonesia; and a silver steam- engine,
built by one of the veterans as his wife was dying of cancer. 25 Secondly, Irene
and Christine Hohenbüchler’s residency in Arnhem prison, working with
inmates to produce a series of paintings, installed in little huts outside the
prison, plus an installation in the main hall of the panopticon, using the artists’
signature materials of wool and fabric. The residency built upon their
previous collaborations with adults with learning disabilities and led to
Mark Dion, Project for the Royal Home for the Retirees, 1993
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