Unheavenly Bodies

Project year: 2022
Educational Project
Critic: Cruz Gracia & Natali Franscowski

Since the 1900s The Metropolitan Museum of Art played a major role in the excavations of over 30 burial sites. In order to “observe”, “explore”, and “preserve” cultural artifacts from across the globe. Excavations and donations from “patrons” have contributed to
the Met “owning” the largest collections of Egyptian Artifacts and one of the biggest collections of Cypriot Artifacts in the world.

Through the Met’s excavations of tombs and burial sites, artifacts related to death cultures are uncovered and are now a part of the Met collection. A huge part of the collection is made up of objects that resemble human bodies, which were made from local materials ranging from ivory, ceramics, bronze and limestone. Human body sculptures are closely related to death culture in the ways that they are created as offerings to the dead, as companions to the dead in the afterlife, to ward off evil or to represent people who passed away.

Human bodies found in the Met excavation in burial sites were extracted from the sites and shipped back to the United States. Human remains ranging from Skulls of Asmat people, to Skulls of people from Central Africa, to human teeth, to instruments made from bones of indigenous people, to mummified organ of what is assumed to be a liver, are all listed as a part of an “exotic art” collection “owned” by the Met. None of the bodies in the collection are of western people or people who identified as white. These human remains are listed and labeled in the same way as other objects at the Met.

The video questions the treatment of “bodies” within the Met Museum and the Met Collection through the idea of objectification.

By objectifying the bodies, the Met has taken the “person” away from the “bodies” of the people whose remains lie in their collection.