Sebastian, 2007
Slide projection with sound
Slide projector, 80 slides, prism, motor, soundtrack
Installation view, Ulmer Museum, Ulm, 2008
Photo: Wilfried Petzi
Sebastian, 2007
Slide projection with sound
Slide projector, 80 slides, prism, motor, soundtrack
Installation view, Ulmer Museum, Ulm, 2008
Photo: Wilfried Petzi
Sebastian, 2007
Machine-sewn threads, paper
6 sheets, each 56 x 42 cm
Photo: Wilfried Petzi
The sculpture of St. Sebastian by Philipp Jakob Rämpl, pupil of the rococo sculptor Ignaz Günther, was created for the high altar of a small Upper Bavarian pilgrimage church around 1770.
Sebastian was sentenced to death for publicly avowing his Christianity around 300 AD. The Roman Emperor Diocletian ordered him to be shot to death by bowmen, but Sebastian miraculously survived. He was later bludgeoned to death in the Hippodrome. Countless pictorial representations of the saint evince his popularity. Since the middle ages he has generally been depicted as an attractive youth wearing a loin cloth, bound to a tree, and pierced by arrows. Even today he figures prominently in discourses on sexuality.
Images of the slides of the sculpture are projected via a rotating prism so that they circle the walls continuously. This breaks the depicted sculpture into the colors of the spectrum to produce a dematerialized light image.
The soundtrack accompanying Sebastian is based on an excerpt from Bach’s chorale Jesus bleibet meine Freude from the cantata Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben.
© Michaela Melián / VG Bildkunst