For several years, Natascha Niederstrass has been exploring the imaginary limits of both scholarly and popular culture. She has delved into, among others, fantasies connected with illness and death, as well our fascination with necropolises and ruins, which attest to the inevitable impermanence of bodies and systems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Ruinenlust<\/em> (2024), Niederstrass revisits Poveglia, a reputedly haunted island in the Venetian lagoon that over time once housed a refuge, a prison, a quarantine station, and a sanatorium. The artist\u2019s photographs of the latter invite us to retrace a journey as clandestine tourists and to project ourselves into these staged spaces. Testimonials about the presence of ghosts, gathered from comments published online, punctuate the installation. What is examined here is not the sanatorium itself, but rather the imagination it activates and its ability to take us somewhere else. The recurrent door and window motifs refer to the crossing of spaces and the transference of reality towards the supernatural. A reliquary and two recumbent figures bear witness to the historic nature of this account of survival and the afterlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Le point aveugle<\/em> (2017), an installation inspired by the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, Niederstrass reflects on the constructed nature of memory and patrimony. Using visual strategies similar to those employed in Ruinenlust<\/em>, she stimulates a process of identification in which viewers get caught up in their own imaginations and are invited to discover within themselves the driving forces behind their sensibility. With this reversal, these two bodies of work orchestrate an introspection of the gaze, exposing the illusion of free will and the fantasy of apprehending the visible world without the interference of personal thoughts or desires. From these troubled spaces on the border of life and death emerges an accumulation of the fantasies, illusions, and beliefs that we carry within us, notably our fascination with and fear of the decomposition of bodies and the breakdown of systems, as well as our almost irrepressible desire to counter them in narrative form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Natascha$
Natascha Niederstrass<\/strong>
Do Not Disturb: Those Who in Life Were Contagious Rest Here, 1793<\/em>, from the series Ruinenlust<\/em>, 2024.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Natascha$
Natascha Niederstrass<\/strong>
Restes et fragments<\/em>, from the series Le point aveugle<\/em>, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Natascha$
Natascha Niederstrass<\/strong>
Suaire, cercueil et cadavre<\/em>, from the series Le point aveugle<\/em>, 2017.
Photo: courtesy of the artist & Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Collection<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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