“An Exhibition of Badly-Lit Self-Adoration,” by conceptualist Marius Klein-Cho at the Colchester Museum for Experiential De-Obfuscation
It is no small thing to walk into an art show and feel—within seconds—that you have stepped into a crime scene in which the biggest casualty is good taste. Marius Klein-Cho’s Salted Wounds claims to explore “the tension between cure and decay, the ache of preservation, the erotics of crystallization.” What it actually delivers is three rooms’ worth of pretentious garbage sprinkled with enough sodium chloride to trigger a hypertension warning.
Before you even see the work, you’re required to “cleanse your palate” by licking a Himalayan salt block mounted to the wall next to the entry door. The gallery attendant, dressed as a Victorian dockworker, watches to make sure you do it. I considered asking for a fresh block, but given the state of the rest of the show, I suspect hygiene was not part of the conceptual framework.
Room One: The Pickle of Memory
You are greeted by a suspended chandelier made entirely of dill pickles, each one slowly dripping brine into a paddling pool filled with marshmallows. Signs say you can eat the marshmallows; nobody does. A faint audio track plays something I couldn’t hear – the sound may have been seeping in to the room from a different gallery. The nearby information panel claims this piece “dismantles the binary between fresh and preserved selfhood.” Hmmm, does it? And what does that even mean?
Room Two: Tears of the Brackish Moon
This is essentially a dimly lit corridor lined with large salt licks, each carved into crude busts of historical figures. Mine appeared to be a pitted and eroded version of Virginia Woolf. Visitors are encouraged to lick them “to taste the erosion of legacy.” I did not. A man ahead of me licked Napoleon and muttered, “Too much cumin.”
Room Three: Cure Me, Daddy
The “centrepiece” is a raw ham covered in glitter, rotating slowly on a mirrored turntable, surrounded by taxidermied pigeons wearing wedding veils. Every so often, a hidden misting system sprays a fine saltwater fog into the room. This, we are told, represents “the nuptial brine of desire.” I saw three people coughing uncontrollably and one woman collapse to the floor. She was soon moved on by gallery security.
The final “gesture” of the show is Vous êtes the Salt Mine, an “immersive identity excavation” in which you lie on a heated slab while an intern pours table salt onto your chest and whispers compliments sourced from Craigslist personal ads, in French. I lasted 15 seconds before I rolled off the slab and made for the exit.
The gift shop sells £45 jars of “artist-harvested salt”, salted liquorice shaped like crying babies, and a T-shirt that reads “I Am the Brine.” I left without purchasing anything.
One star—because, in fairness, the fog machine worked. Everything else? An over-seasoned monument to the dangers of letting a concept go unchecked. Salted Wounds is less an exhibition than a marathon of conceptual seasoning for an audience that did not consent to be marinated.
