A Sense of Reality
Friday, December 4, 2026
6:00 pm
This event has passed.
This installation takes as its point of departure the work of German-Jewish archaeologist Margarete Bieber (1879–1978) and her studies of ancient fragments, copies and their translation across time. Forced from her academic position in Germany under the Nazi regime in 1933, Bieber continued her work in exile, first in England and later in the United States. Her scholarship was praised for bringing to archaeology a vivid “sense of reality,” and particularly of human reality: an approach that resisted both the mystifying abstractions associated with European traditions of classical scholarship and the narrow factuality she encountered in American archaeology. Across her work on sculpture, theatre, dress and copies, antiquity emerged not as an idealised and distant world, but as something inhabited, embodied and continually transformed. Bringing Bieber’s research into dialogue with a series of sculptural fresco fragments, the installation explores how bodies, narratives and historical memory are reconstructed through acts of copying, interpretation and preservation. Referencing fragments recovered from ancient buildings, the works present incomplete bodily forms without resolving them into whole figures. Removed from its architectural setting, the fresco shifts from surface to object: its original location and narrative become uncertain, opening the fragment to interpretation, reconstruction and projection.
Bieber challenged the assumption that Roman replicas were merely diminished versions of Greek originals. Instead, she understood copies as historical objects in their own right: transformations through which images, forms and cultural memory travelled across time. While her scholarship approached the copy as material evidence through which an earlier artwork and its historical world might be understood, the fragments presented here begin with what the copy cannot restore: the absent body, architecture and narrative surrounding it. Read alongside Bieber’s own experience of displacement, questions of transmission, loss and survival acquire an additional historical resonance.
Bieber’s research on Pompeii, and particularly her 1928 study of the recently excavated Villa of the Mysteries, provides a further point of encounter. Her attention to dress, gesture and bodily expression, and her interpretation of the fresco cycle through questions of female ritual and marriage, foregrounded forms of human experience often marginal to conventional histories of classical art. Here, these readings are brought into dialogue with contemporary feminist and cyberfeminist perspectives. They enter the sculptural fragments as additional layers of translation, resisting their reconstruction into singular, idealised or stable bodies.
Situated throughout the German Historical Institute, the installation works through two conditions: the fragment in the niche and the book in the library. Traditionally reserved for a sculpture or portrait bust, the niche anticipates a coherent, named body. Here, it holds an incomplete figure — a hand, torso, fold of dress or facial feature. The fragment becomes a feminist strategy, resisting reconstruction into a singular body and keeping absence, ambiguity and multiplicity in view.
In the library, selected books by Margarete Bieber, with annotations and interventions, become similarly open and revisable objects. Between niche and library, fragment and text, the installation unsettles the authority of both the complete figure and the finished text.
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Prof Dr Ines Weizman
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme