‘Domestication of Pyramids’ is a stunning piece of installation art by the Czech artist and architect Magdalena Jetelova. Installed in a number of locations between 1992 and 1994, the work deals strongly with dislocation. Here a large fragment of a pyramid stands inside a gallery. It appears to rip through the walls of the space and the viewer can easily imagine that the structure continues past these restraints and spans to the scale of an actual pyramid.
The images above show a pyramid that could have easily been lifted directly from Egypt and dropped rather haphazardly into the museum. Jetelova’s work comments on this dislocation; the Western mentality of taking important parts of our history and placing them inside museums. This is the ‘domestication’ that the works title refers to. It’s a powerful visual metaphor and one which I’d have loved to have seen in real life.
The piece ran in a number of art spaces during the 90′s including Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (top image), Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau (second image), Warsaw’s National Museum of Contemporary Art and Dublin’s Irish Museum of Modern Art. More art and information on Jetelova’s work can be found on her website here.