The Bambi Project
3D carved wood, steel frame, bulletproof glass, polyurethane foam, acrylic resin, pigments
Group exhibition at Kogo Gallery, Tartu, Estonia
21/08 – 30/10/2021
Group show together with Eike Eplik, Žilvinas Landzbergas, Ingrīda Pičukāne, Laura Põld and Rūta Spelskytė
Curated by Šelda Puķīte
In 1923, Austrian writer and Vienna modernist and Zionist, Felix Salten, published his coming-of-age book Bambi: A Life In The Woods. Salten’s tale tells the story of forest life from the perspective of animals and plants, introducing in great detail their lives full of sight, sound and smell related learning experiences. Later, thanks to the Disney animated drama film Bambi (1942), this forest tale became a significant element of pop culture, inspiration for many environmental activists and a nightmare for hunting organizations. Walt Disney as somebody who profoundly disliked hunting recreated and simplified this story making the forest a place of paradise threatened only by one evil danger – mankind. Over the years, this culturally significant story has been the subject of considerable discussion about its true message from raising environmental awareness and ecocriticism to the representation of the Jewish nation in Europe. In an essay published in 2003, cultural historian Iris Bruce argued that Salten’s tale evokes the “experience of exclusion and discrimination.”
Almost a hundred years have passed since Salten’s book was introduced to its first readers but the story, albeit with few outdated elements, has not lost its relevance today. Now, when discussions of environmental issues, the anthropocentric world view and climate crises have gained new momentum and online book club culture, a curious side effect of the global pandemic, has become more popular, it seems the right moment to revisit the pages of this forest tale. Together with a selected group of artists from the Baltic region, an online book club was created to read Salten’s Bambi and contemplate how this story connects with their personal experiences, the environmental issues we are facing today and the reconnection with nature as part of the idea of a post-human world.
Eike Eplik, Žilvinas Landzbergas, Ingrīda Pičukāne, Laura Põld, Rūta Spelskytė and Līga Spunde are all in their own unique way known for their interest in nature and storytelling. As a result of this experimental book reading laboratory, each of them has chosen some triggering aspect of Salten’s story and created new works for the Bambi Project. Exhibited in the darkened, protective environment of Kogo gallery, the artists’ works have become a coherent ecosystem in an imagined forest.
The Bambi Project, exhibition view, Kogo Gallery, Tartu, Estonia, 2021
Gobo, front view, 3D carved wood, polyurethane foam, acrylic resin, pigments, 2021
Gobo, back view, 3D carved wood, polyurethane foam, acrylic resin, pigments, 2021
His whole youth suddenly flashed before his eyes. The meadow, the trails where he walked with his mother, the happy games with Gobo and Faline, the nice grasshoppers and butterflies, the fight with Karus and Ronno when he had won Faline for his own. He felt happy again, and yet, he trembled. (Salten, p. 214–215)
Līga Spunde has chosen to focus on ambiguous human attitudes towards living beings and their complicated relationships with nature, a motif present also in Salten’s book. Both exhibition works represent an image of a deer in a similar pose but the situations each of them are placed in are radically different. The harmonious and carefree landscape represented in Bulletproof Glass Protecting Serenity takes its inspiration from the idealized world usually seen in Disney animations. Although the animal world built up by Disney is fictional, it represents the ideals of Western society, the desire for a place of peace and happiness. Spunde has built bulletproof glass around this idealized vision to protect the dream of the Bambi world.
Although Gobo is represented in a similar way, instead of his forest friends we see a human figure next to the deer’s body. The image is borrowed from trophy photography, where a smiling man poses with the hunted prey, creating a misleading impression of friendship between these two species. At first it is hard to see death in these kinds of photographs but recognizing its presence causes us to experience haunting chills. Gobo, although not present in the Disney animation, has a prominent place in the book representing both pet and prey. It actualizes the issue of discrimination between humans and animals, underlining the different attitudes that man has towards pets, cattle and wild animals.
Bulletproof Glass Protecting Serenity, front view, 3D carved wood, steel frame, bulletproof glass, 2021
Bulletproof Glass Protecting Serenity, digital drawing, 2021
Spunde has chosen to focus on ambiguous human attitudes towards living beings and their complicated relationships with nature, a motif present also in Salten’s book. Both exhibition works represent an image of a deer in a similar pose but the situations each of them are placed in are radically different. The harmonious and carefree landscape represented in Bulletproof Glass Protecting Serenity takes its inspiration from the idealized world usually seen in Disney animations. Although the animal world built up by Disney is fictional, it represents the ideals of Western society, the desire for a place of peace and happiness. Spunde has built bulletproof glass around this idealized vision to protect the dream of the Bambi world.
Text by Šelda Puķīte