C-Prints
This series of photographs began with the video installation by the same title, filmed in the Natural History Museum of Berlin. In the film, a taxidermist working with corals, and a writer, working on an erotic novel, meet around a diorama and common interest: a GDR expedition in the late 1960s organized to uproot coral reefs from Cuba. The expedition brought back six tons of corals to the museum - a load consisting of 40 individual types, each thousands of years old, of which only a few would ever be put on view in the museum. In the photographs, Gruber positions these corals within a selection of the museum’s dioramas that are currently hidden from public view. These dioramas are nevertheless still preserved using toxic substances to prevent any living entity from occupying them. Both the film and photographs highlight the toxicity - both physical and metaphorical - inherent in individuals and institutions that attempt to possess and preserve. The corals, rearranged by Gruber, appear at times slightly hidden and at other moments in the center of different dioramas. There they become ambassadors of a seemingly natural, yet entirely artificially constructed still life.