For the photo series WAR ROOMS, Katharina Gruzei tracked down strange rooms in a Moscow museum. In the Central Museum of the Second World War, she turns her gaze to areas away from the large war dioramas and focuses on parts of the room in which museum structures and strategies of staging become visible.There, pathetic war paintings on the walls enter into a bizarre dialogue with the functional level of the museum: it seems as if painted soldiers are hiding behind a desk of the museum staff. Elsewhere, an assembled war staff seems to stare at a red telephone placed in the room.
Real objects become bizarre objects that enter into correspondence with their surroundings in an absurd way. Thus, in the midst of the painted battlefields, there are doors belonging to the museum that suggest an escape route from the war scenario and the option of escaping the war through the paintings.
In her photo series, Katharina Gruzei combines fundamental questions of museumisation and the representation of war with a subtle institutional critique.
Katharina Gruzei, *1983 in Klagenfurt, Austria. Lives and works in Linz and Vienna, Austria.