The Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, is one of humanity’s oldest attempts to summarize the world: a meeting place for order and chaos, nature and imagination. The collection of Ferdinand I of Tyrol in Ambras Castle in the 16th century reflected the peculiar worldview of the time: specimens, freaks, tiny monsters made of bones and corals, hairy people, bizarre souvenirs, imprints of unknown bodies. Ágnes Verebics’ own “Wunderkammer” is a contemporary reflection of this—an internal, psychological collection that includes the frightening and the fragile, the grotesque and the beautiful.
This exhibition is both an extended self-portrait and a collection room. Verebics has been a passionate flea market collector for more than twenty years: she collects oddities, small, forgotten objects, which are then transformed—given new life in the form of paintings, sculptures, braids, and hairy objects. Each piece is a fragment: a body part, a memory fragment, an abandoned detail in which personal and collective mythology are mixed.
The demonic, bestial side of humanity vibrates in the images and objects, but never directly, only beneath the surface. Horror is not shown here, but it becomes palpable: as a slow pulsation of melancholy, anxiety, and contemplation. Thus, the works do not evoke terror, but rather a kind of familiar unease—a feeling similar to when we encounter our own inner strangeness.
In the world of the Wunderkammer, order is born out of disorder. Every little thing, every hair, every fragment is a possible memory, a liberated energy connected to the body, desire, and passing away. Ágnes Verebics’s works thus hover on the border between collecting and self-knowledge: the soul’s own museum, where every object suggests a single question: what do we preserve of ourselves, and what do we let go?