Provocative Mermaids Woo Visitors to Warsaw MoMA’s Inaugural Show. By Sarah Cascone
Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has a temporary new home, the Museum on the Vistula, and has inaugurated the venue with a group show, “The Beguiling Siren Is Thy Crest,” that features distinctly modern takes on the classic subject of the mermaid.
Works on view in the new show explore ideas of queer sexuality, as in Elmgreen & Dragset‘s recasting of Copenhagen’s famed The Little Mermaid as a man; the economic crisis; environmental concerns as the Earth enters the Anthropocene, a new epoch defined by man’s influence on the climate; and technological attempts to perfect the human condition, among other themes.
Image: Elmgreen & Dragset, He (Copper Green), 2013. Courtesy of Victoria Miro.