Christian Kosmas Mayer’s cross-media works and installations are based on detailed research into history and contemporary society. This is undertaken in order to critically reevaluate history and the present by placing evolutionary and natural phenomena into the framework of cultural history and science.

Mayer’s work focuses on critical exploration of questions of archiving and conserving as deliberate acts that create history.

For his solo exhibition at mumok, Mayer investigates the dynamic relations between living creatures and inanimate objects. The exhibited objects are witnesses of a frozen moment in time, in which mostly schematically distinct concepts of time such as the past, present, and future, or before and after, and life and death, meld into one. This exhibition explores the theme of conservation both as a natural and as an artificial process of archiving. Motifs from Romanticism are confronted with contemporary narratives that draw on today’s insights from the natural sciences.