As the setting for her WAR ROOMS series of photographs, Katharina Gruzei chose the odd halls and premises of a Moscow museum. Indeed, at the Museum of the Great Patriotic War she turned her gaze away from the large-scale war dioramas to focus on areas of the museum space, in which museum structures and staging strategies become apparent. There pathos-filled murals of wartime activities engage in a bizarre dialogue with the museum’s functional level. Painted soldiers appear entrenched behind a desk that belongs to the museum staff. Elsewhere it seems like a gathered group of military commanders is staring at a red phone placed in the room.

Real items become bizarre objects engaged with their surroundings in an absurdist way. In the middle of the painted battlefields for instance there are museum doors that suggest an escape route out of the war scenario and the option of being able to flee the war through the paintings.

In her photo series Katharina Gruzei combines fundamental questions about museum staging and the representation of war with a subtle criticism of the institutions themselves.

Katharina Gruzei, *1983 in Klagenfurt, Austria. Lives and works in Linz and Vienna, Austria.