Domestication of Pyramids by Magdalena Jetelová are pyramid-sculptures installation, covered by volcanic ashes, and have been shown at the Museum of Applied Arts / Vienna, Martin-Gropius-Bau / Berlin, National Museum of Contemporary Art / Warsaw and other art spaces.
A space on a scale which greatly exceeds the size of the host building is inserted into the museum’s interior. Despite its dimensions, it is only a fragment of a whole known to us, which in an imaginary way continues beyond the borders of the Museum building and which we can mentally reconstruct as a pyramid.
The intersection of the eastern archetypal monument—the pyramid—and its absolute geometry with ‘humanized’ western architecture, its small details and scale, raises questions concerning the nature of our culture, whereby our stable coordinates which anchor us in the world become relative. Other pyramids have been constructed at various locations in Europe, but only in Vienna is the pyramid physically accessible both from the inside and outside; in Warsaw and Berlin the surface of the structure can be observed from the outside, which, because it is covered with volcanic ashes, evokes the feeling of a full compact mass, poured into the form of a heap. The confrontation of the eastern monument and European cultural history takes place differently each time, and yet on the same principle. The domestication of absolute architecture takes place in our minds.
