EXHIBITION: A Sense of Reality
Thursday, November 5, 2026
6:00 pm
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A Sense of Reality
Margarete Bieber, Dressed Bodies, and Copies of Antiquity
5 November - 10 December 2026
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,” particularly of human reality, resisting both the mystifying abstractions of European classical scholarship and the narrow factuality she encountered in American archaeology. Rather than approaching antiquity as an idealised and distant world, she understood it as inhabited, embodied and continually transformed. Challenging the assumption that Roman replicas were merely diminished versions of Greek originals, Bieber regarded copies as historical objects in their own right, through which forms and cultural memory travelled across time. Her studies of sculpture, theatre and dress, including her 1928 interpretation of the frescoes in Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries, foregrounded gesture, bodily expression and female experience. The installation brings these readings into dialogue with contemporary feminist and cyberfeminist perspectives, raising questions of representation, reproduction and historical transmission.
The installation unfolds between the architectural niche, sculptural fragments and the library. Traditionally reserved for a sculpture or portrait bust, the niche anticipates a coherent, identifiable body. Here, incomplete forms, a hand, a torso, the fold of a dress or a facial feature, resist reconstruction into a singular figure. The fragment becomes a feminist strategy, keeping absence, ambiguity and multiplicity in view.
In the main wall niche, a latex cast taken from the surface of a concrete brutalist chapel at Stella Matutina in Switzerland presents architecture itself as a fragmented body. Made during a residency at the former home of the Sisters of Baldegg in Weggis, the pigmented membrane retains relief, dust and debris from the building. Like the displaced surfaces of Pompeii, this architectural skin carries traces of an inhabited space to a new setting, where preservation also becomes an act of translation. Peeled away through collective gestures the architectural skin records both the surface and the bodies involved in its removal. Detached from its original setting, it becomes an uncertain object suspended between documentation, reproduction and transformation.
In the library, two of Bieber’s publications, The Sculpture of the Hellenistic Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1955; revised edition, 1961) and Ancient Copies: Contributions to the History of Greek and Roman Art (New York: New York University Press, 1977), become sites of annotation and intervention. While Bieber approached copies as material evidence through which lost works and historical worlds might be reconstructed, the installation attends equally to what copying cannot restore: the absent body, architecture and narrative. Read alongside her experience of displacement and exile, these questions of transmission, loss and survival acquire further historical resonance. Between niche and library, fragment and text, the installation unsettles the authority of both the complete figure and the finished historical account.
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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
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Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme