Markus Schinwald's Body Manipulations at Migros Museum

Markus Schinwald (born 1973, lives and works in Vienna) explores the body as an object to transform and a subject to manipulate, focusing on distorted perception, desire, and fantasy. His works feature mannequins and characters in strange clothing and accessories with jerky gestures. At the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich (February 16 to May 18, 2008), the exhibition uses a mise en abyme rhetoric to amplify the theme. The main hall entrance is blocked by a pivoting wall that reveals a grid of white pillars and beams, inspired by Friedrich Kiesler's 1924 theater exhibition system. This architectural device creates interdependence among paintings, sculptures, animated mannequins, and 35mm films, forcing visitors on a discontinuous path that mimics the mechanical movements of Schinwald's automata (Bepo, 2005; Eli, 2008) and film actors (1st Part Conditional, 2004; Ten in Love, 2006). A series of 19th-century bourgeois portraits are modified with incongruous prosthetics that muzzle, corset, and punish the subjects, continuing Schinwald's research on the restrained body with sadomasochistic and fetishistic aesthetics. Abstract curvilinear sculptures on plywood bases, whose veins resemble Rorschach inkblots, are dismembered and reassembled Chippendale furniture legs in suggestive poses, appearing both anthropomorphic and zoomorphic. The exhibition's dramaturgy and scenography push the viewer into voyeurism, leaving them never quite unscathed.