“Admired, collected, and put on display”

Many museum exhibitions—and re-hangings of permanent collections—have in recent years aimed to address legacies of colonialism, as well as outdated and oppressive gender and sexual “norms.” Sometimes these shows incorporate contemporary art in response to historical work now viewed as pejorative or oppressive. Too often forgotten in these re-visions of art/history is the stereotypically dehumanizing representation of disability and disabled persons. “Admired, collected, and put on display,” in the Baroque treasury of the Dresden Residenzschloss, attempts to rectify this glaring omission by employing the work of contemporary disabled artists to provide critical context to such royal collections, as well as to render more fully the history of disability representation.

This curatorial goal is crucial yet its enactment is problematic, often re-inscribing this dehumanizing history. Attempts are made to mobilize the contemporary art to demythologize disability, but the historical works and what they promulgate dominate contemporary pieces by Eric Beier Eva Jünger, Steven Solbrig, and Dirk Sorge, which are placed mostly outside the small exhibition room or, in the case of Beier’s work, used more as a structural crutch rather than integrated critique.

Floor guides provide access for visitors who are blind or have low vision. But in the spacious covered courtyard entrance, it takes time to realize that Beier’s floor guide—consisting of colorful interweavings of commonly used pictograms for woman, man, and wheelchair—surrounds Steven Solbrig’s plaster headless torso disabled women, anonymous (2022), signifying that the sculpture is a part of the exhibition. The floor guide leads from the courtyard to the elevators, and then on the first floor into the Sponsel Room comprising the exhibition’s small main space. It is part of the sequence of many and larger rooms of the Neues Grünes Gewölbe (New Green Vault), which displays Baroque treasures collected by Saxon rulers.

A section of the show titled “Depictions of people” contains sixteenth- and seventeenth-century portraits of Thomas Schweicker and Theodor Steib, “foot artists” who, having no arms, used their feet to write: both are shown writing. A seventeenth-century etching depicts Orazio Gonzales, patriarch of a family from Tenerife. A wall text notes: “The father and several of his children had abnormal hair growth on their faces and all over their bodies.”

The text, which includes pejorative language such as abnormal, also introduces us to “people with learning disabilities,” who were called “natural fools,” as well as conjoined twins, called “miracle births,” also represented in art displayed in the room. We are told that the “images were meant to show the diversity of human beings, but they also put people on display and emphasized otherness and oddity.” But no evidence is provided on the diversity angle. It seems the curators are, perhaps unconsciously, re-inscribing the otherness/oddity. If there is any further humanizing information of those depicted, it is not given, resulting in a display too akin to the “freak shows” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Some of the most famous collectibles in the vault are the colorful, pearl, gemstone, and porcelain miniature figurines of people with “restricted growth,” including “court dwarfs.” The audio station for Eva Jünger’s valuable audiotexts about the historical context of short-statured people, which create an evocative “link to the present day” by deftly including Jünger’s experiences, is unfortunately not placed in the main room with these figurines. The station is in the hallway next to the eye-catching sixteenth-century armor of the “court dwarf” Rupert. During my lengthy stay at the exhibit many visitors stopped to take selfies in front of Rupert’s armor but passed by Jünger’s audio station.

Literary Discourse (2024), one of Jünger’s seven short audiotexts, includes incisive analysis of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The artist talks of the “linguistic talent, ingenuity, and rhetorical skills” of “court dwarfs.” She points to how Gulliver is in one society considered a “giant” but in another a “dwarf,” depending on the statures of an island’s inhabitants.

Another valuable intervention can be found in two other rooms of the New Green Vault. Dirk Sorge has placed among the Baroque curiosities “preziosi e precari,” his own versions of “figurines from the first quarter of the twenty-first century,” including a gold papier-mâché unicorn and other “fantasy creatures.” Though Beier’s floor guide leads to some of Sorge’s collectibles, others, including a disabled Barbie-like doll, are only announced by labels differentiated in color from those of the museum collection.

Sorge entertainingly provides essential context in his six-and-a half-minute video, also titled preziosi e precari (2024). The video features a voiceover and playful images of his collectibles, their inspirations, materials, and what they tangibly and intangibly connote. The voiceover poses a series of questions: “If I were the Queen of Saxony, what would I collect? What should be preserved and exhibited?” “What actually is a curiosity?” “What actually is a minority?” “What does ‘deviating from the norm’ actually mean?”

The video posits that if a butterfly is collected, the choice—a particularly large, small, or colorful one—matters. “Or do I have to collect all the butterflies for the collection to be complete?” The video focuses on the power of the collector: “depending on what I exhibit, I also change what other people imagine a butterfly to be.” Here, Sorge brings together crucial critiques of collections: what might be missing from a collection and the result of aesthetic selection.

Musing on what a unicorn actually looks like, the video directly addresses disability: “People with disabilities are not unicorns. They are real. But they are not as shown in pictures. Disability is a complex phenomenon. If you try to show it in the form of a small ivory statue, the depiction inevitably becomes a caricature.”

Sorge’s video could have been used to frame the entire exhibit. Placing it and Jünger’s audio station outside the main exhibit room works against the demythologizing of disability. Thus “Admired, collected, and put on display” keeps the focus on disability as spectacle. Ultimately, it is a lost opportunity not only to center the disabled artist rather than the displayed disabled, but also to recontextualize the entire Neues Grünes Gewölbe and reframe the idea of a collection.