M HKA Ensembles

Installation

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK006940).

Mark Dion represents a strongly intellectualist strand within late eighties and early nineties art practice, and is equally associated with institutional critique’s unrelenting questioning of the institutions of art - the institution of the museum ranking foremost among these. In Dion’s seemingly scientific installations, which borrow freely and promiscuously from the adjoining realms and linguae francae of archeology, biology and botanism, the basic questions always concern the truth claims of the museum - whether this pertains to the art museum or the museum of natural history is only of secondary importance. Dion‘s Corridor of Extinction was acquired in 1997, four years after the artist’s remarkable debut at M HKA, in the seminal exhibition “On Taking a Normal Situation...” – then as now an occasion for Dion to trace a connection between the museum and the city of Antwerp’s fabled, historic zoo. The carpeted, walk-through Corridor, decorated with musty wallpaper, parodically combines bourgeois tastes for animals of both the domestic, living kind (a goldfish in a little bowl) and the long dead (the extinct species referred to in the title, occupying small wooden frames along the corridor).