Franziska Megert
«Arachne-Vanitas»

Together with ‘Playing with Fire' (1989) and ‘Philemon and Baucis' (1993), the sculpture is part of a trilogy of identically structured works all consisting of two towers made up by three monitors stacked on top of each other. By juxtaposing human couples, they address the subject of physical changeability and the distance between bodies that can be overcome only by means of the immaterial video images that are superimposed over each other.
The interflowing images of an elderly and a young female figure in ‘Arachne-Vanitas' makes either body lose its tangible physicality; emphasized now is the transient nature of the flesh. Particularly in the Baroque period, the notion of ‘vanitas' referred to the illusionary nature of all being. At the same time, the work alludes to the classical myth of Arachne, the skilled weaver who chose to depict in one of her products a picadillo of the goddess Athena, who punished this arrogance by turning the weaver into a spider, an insect which is apparently ageless.