"Exhibit B" Still On Display in Europe, and Still on a Hot Seat

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Doreen Carvajal

The South African artist and playwright Brett Baily, right, working with an actor this month during a rehearsal of "Exhibit B" at the Musée Saint-Croix in Pitiers, France. The show is a live performance of 12 scenes of silent actors.

FRANCE---Jelle Saminnadin plays a black odalisque, a seminude Congolese slave gazing in a gilded mirror. A leather bond encircles her neck and chains her to a bed of lace and pillows in a scene mimicking a colonial human zoo of the early 20th century. The image is one of a dozen living portraits in a traveling art installation, “Exhibit B,” by the South African playwright and installation artist Brett Bailey, who calls it a critique that exposes the roots of racism in the human menageries that flourished in the 19th and 20th centuries, mainly in major cities of Europe, starting in Germany.[link]