Irene Anton ‘pandemic nightmare’, Spektrale 5, Luckau-Germany, 2012							            

Destructive elements always had been a fascination for mankind. If you regard for example atomic explosions, demolition of buildings, blasts, thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions, geysers, avalanches, icy rains, hale, tsunamis or tornados, the images created by this powerful violence always have their own aesthetic and beauty. 
But there are also some very small silent microcosmic and thus invisible elements, which are looking quite beautiful under a microscope, but are able to kill millions of human beings - the viruses. 
Due to the globalization and the increasing aerial traffic, epidemies can be spread out all over the world and become a pandemic quite quickly. The last waves of epidemies showed us that we almost can’t preview the development of the further movements and mutations of the viruses.
What I’d like to show is the beauty and variety of these tiny killers, shown by an installation of a simple metal bed with different designed viruses (from 15 until 20 cm in the average) hanging over it just like a firmament of stars.
Not only the diseases caused by the global movement are dangerous, there is still the worldwide problem of HIV, whose deadly process many people started to forget, because there are now effective medicaments on the market which in reality only prologue the life for some more years. 
In general medicaments against diseases are still unaffordable for most of the people in the poor countries any statistically, worldwide much more people die by diseases than by wars.
The pharma-industries mostly are not very interested in scientific investigation of some tropical diseases, because they won’t make enough profit in the so called “third world” and these non-investigated viruses just go on killing a hight rate of human beings.

My installation will also show the human threat in a metaphoric way, because loveliness always bears a certain potential of destruction in itself.


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