“Big Brother” living container as a work of art at Museum Tinguely Basel
Published: Wednesday, Dec 6th 2023, 07:20
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Basel-based playwright Boris Nikitin has placed a replica of the living container from the 2000 TV show "Big Brother" in the Museum Tinguely. The acclaimed and demonized reality show from back then thus becomes a historical museum object of social media self-portrayal.
A group of "completely normal" people were locked in a container and recorded around the clock by cameras that broadcast the action to a rapidly growing audience in their living rooms. The reality show, which was invented in the Netherlands in 1999, was the first to be broadcast on TV and streamed live around the clock.
In a way, "Big Brother" was the birth of social media dominated by self-expression. Facebook and Instagram only followed after 2004. The first iPhone from 2007 could be exhibited in a display case next to the ten by ten meter container.
Celebrated worldwide as an entertainment sensation and demonized as a manifesto of stultification, "Big Brother" became a social event around the turn of the century and the talk of the day in both uneducated and intellectual circles. The word "foreign shame" was born.
From the stage to the museum
Nikitin originally recreated the living container in the coronavirus year 2020 as a stage installation for the production "Erste Staffel. 20 Years of Big Brother" at the Nuremberg State Theater. This has now been brought into the museum for the public to walk through and has become a conceptual art installation entitled "The Last Reality Show".
In the container, you encounter the invisible ghosts of long-forgotten former residents in the bright light. These are rooms that have the visual aura of times long past: It is a mixture of a nostalgic time capsule and the dystopian horror of a hideously furnished show prison for a group of people who mercilessly exposed themselves to ridicule.
At the opening on Tuesday evening, museum director Roland Wetzel described the installation as a harmonious counterpart to Tinguely's play with man and machine. Existential themes of unreflected individual expression, which are now part of everyday social media life, have remained in the container, said Nikitin.
The installation "The Last Reality Show" by Boris Nikitin can be seen at Museum Tinguely Basel until January 21, 2024.
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