Exhibition Death Masks

Millions of objects lie un-exhibited in Swedish museums, and each of them has a story of its own. In the attic of Gothenburg's Natural History Museum, nestling among taxidermied seals and glass-eyed birds, Marcel Pabst stumbled across some of these stories - in the form of a collection of death masks that came to the museum in 1920 and have, to date, only been shown to the public once.

"The likenesses of the dead, revealed by the beam of the torch as I shone it around, scared me. But at the same time, they fascinated me, and awakened my curiosity." This discovery was the beginning of a series of portraits of these casts, items that were once selected for the purpose of "racial biology" studies - now considered to be one of the most reviled aspects of Swedish history - as well as to commemorate the dead. With his photographs, Marcel Pabst depicts these people, who have already been depicted once before, again; in a similar way to the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto's celebrated portraits of historical figures in Madam Tussauds wax museum. By doing this Marcel lets them live on - while prompting us to consider our own equal worth as individuals. >