Hello to you,

my response hopefully does not get you offended, since I offer you my view but that does not mean that my perspective cannot be questioned. Though I agree with you very much on the notion that what one perceives as "other" is at the same time also "familiar".

I'm afraid the art on show didn't inspire fear in me. In fact, I find it a bit contrived and a bit too ... avant garde. I rather get the impression of art for art's sake. More like a search for "how can I attract attention?" in a market that seems to be saturated. Even a little too aesthetic to trigger my fear or loathing.

I've experienced one major culture shock and that was actually my first trip to the US when we set foot on Las Vegas ground. This garish artificial world caused me great discomfort, I felt downright disgust (years later I got involved in the Vegas experience). That was about 25 years ago.

Breaking the taboo would be, for example, pictures of real dead people, taken at the undertaker's or in the chapel where the dead are laid out to say goodbye to them. But I don't know whether the artist was trying to break a taboo here. In my country, the strange thing is death itself. There are no real dead people to be seen anywhere, no one gathers around the dead (as we sometimes see in films, for example) lying in an open coffin. This kind of tradition seems to be dying out more and more (which I personally find unfortunate).

Perhaps the fact that we shield ourselves from such real things also explains the cinematic fascination with zombies, half-rotten dead bodies that still walk around.

I myself grew up with parents who still practised Christian traditions themselves. I remember that my mother had kept numerous black and white photographs showing dead people in open coffins with their relatives standing around them. At the time, I thought something like "morbid!" or "why does my mum keep photos like that?" Today I realise that it was simply part of her Christian upbringing and that it was quite normal for the living to gather around the dead one last time.

In the modern world, it is difficult to find something so alien and off the beaten track. And if we did, we would probably be shocked to the bone. The later colonisers would probably have felt the same way when they came across rituals and customs that seemed completely alien to them. Whatever one thinks about it, the fact is that the colonialists Christianised large parts of the indigenous population over time. However, whether the first conquerors were in fact freebooters and adventurers and were themselves little influenced by Christian principles - which I rather suspect - is uncertain. One could bear in mind that Christianity itself was still not free of presumably pagan and barbaric influences around 1400 and earlier.

As G. K. Chesterton once wrote, the Prussians, for example, had barely converted to Christianity when de-Christianisation already was in full swing. There has probably never really been such a thing as a simultaneous and universally linear world view, and by the time "the last man" has adopted what everyone else already seems to have adopted, the first and early adopters have already changed their own course again.

This picture is from my moms stock. My dad is standing in the front row.