Ban the old, dry methods – Travel Kit / Shaving Set by Sarasija Subramanian

Description

Ban the old, dry methods’ is an excerpt from a larger, ongoing project, that emerges from an engagement with the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden’s permanent collection. The work is centred around the ways in which science and the State have viewed the body of the individual, and how in turn such perspectives are co-opted by consequent political regimes, amongst other structures of power. Addressing the museum’s founding ideology which stressed on seeing and consequently knowing our bodies as the cornerstones of keeping assuredly healthy, without a shadow of doubt, each drawing draws from three key aspects of the collection: the objects on display, the written descriptions, and the English audioguide. Either instruction or proclamation, the certainty of the statements now displaced, build a belief system parallel to the one that the museum and its collection was founded on.