The Lost Faces | Ten Types of Torture

plaster casts, clay casts, bucket, chain

In the world there is nothing more submissive and weaker than water. Yet
for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it. This is
because there is nothing that can take its place.
That the weak overcomes the strong,
And the submissive overcomes the hard,
Everyone in the world knows yet no one can put this knowledge into
practice.

Laozi, Daodejing, chapter 78

The Lost Faces are a collection of material research and remainders of
Laura Stolls Faces series dealing with identity in connection to facial
features.

Some of the displayed pieces are relicts of an installation displayed it AIL
earlier this year, Ten Types of Torture. The process-based series of
artworks metaphorically displays two ontological regimes: The western,
object based one with its roots in ancient Greece with Plato and
Aristotle; and the eastern, process and relation based one coined by
Laozi and Confucius. By confronting these radically different concepts,
the Stoll wants to question implicit assumptions crucial to our way of
viewing the world.

Despite the presented works being live masks (taken from someone who
is still alive), the gain of popularity of death masks during the 19th
century marked a turn in commemorative culture and mourning from
ritual to personal. A temporal parallel can be drawn to an increased need
for proof of identity and origin in times of emerging mass production.
This shift is also interesting in regard of how we define ourselves as
humans: In research, the differentiation between the first women and
men and genetically very similar apes is often made by the investigating
how the remains are found. If it was buried, it was human.