The Plague Doctor Dancing with a Rat in a Covid Ball: Liesl Bonger’s Best Photo | Art and design

WWhen Covid started, everyone was talking about masks. I thought about the face coverings we all had to wear, and I thought about masks more broadly. I researched masked balls and carnival masks and read a lot about plague outbreaks in Venice starting in the 14th century, and about epidemics in general.

This image, Danse Macabre, was inspired by Covid. If you take a closer look at the paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling, you’ll see some COVID-19 viruses smuggled among them. In the middle of the scene, a doctor wearing a plague mask – the kind still sold at Venice’s carnival – is shown dancing with the rat that caused the plague. The couple on the left point to the fact that the Brazilian government led by Bolsonaro at the time of the pandemic is accused of allowing many indigenous people to die unnecessarily. [he denied any wrongdoing]. So both of these things deal with colonialism – the woman with the yellow hat represents an indigenous person, and the man she’s dancing with wears a mask with the face of Pedro de Alvarado, the Spanish conquistador responsible for slaughtering indigenous people in Guatemala in the 16th century.

Different countries have measured social distancing in different terms. In Austria, for some unknown reason, we were told to stay as tall as a baby elephant from each other. I found a list of measurements suggested by different countries and discovered that in Florida, people were asked to imagine a baby alligator. By including a character in a crocodile mask, the social distancing gesture became a dance gesture. One of the dancers wears a face mask with the virus on it. I designed it myself using an online platform that can print your own mask – they really liked it and asked: “Can we use your design?”

I got into this type of theatrical photography by looking at paintings, and I’m very interested in colonialism and postcolonialism, which is the field that informs a lot of my work. Danse Macabre is one half of my double-panel costume. The other half is called the Hidden Transcript and includes characters from carnivals in different countries – there’s a lady with a rattle from a Peruvian carnival, a man wearing a New Orleans Mardi Gras headdress, a red mask from Andalusia and a Trinidadian Devil’s Diamond figure, like a blue dragon. They dance behind a seated woman wearing a dress made of green drape material, recalling the dress worn by Scarlett O’Hara in the party scene in Gone with the Wind. The two photos were taken on two consecutive days with the same models at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since it was about masked balls, I needed a nice floor.

I used to use friends in my photos, but I found it better to use actors or dancers because they have a different feeling about their bodies. They’re better at moving, but they’re also better at holding position when I need them to. The summer of 2021, when this photo was taken, was one of the hottest on record in Europe, and I was using lights which made it even hotter inside. It was very stressful, especially for the woman playing the mouse.

We had a truck parked outside with a generator to power the lights. He made a slight noise, and someone who lived nearby called the police to complain about his disturbance. They came over, took one look and said, “Yes, just park the car around the corner and forget about that guy.” I invited the man in and asked him if he wanted to see what we were doing, but he refused. I think he just wanted to be angry.

It is not possible to immediately decipher all the meaning and research that goes into my images. What I offer is a surface that sounds interesting and a title that might open some doors and make the viewer want to know more. To capture people, the work can’t just be clever – the trick is to make the images beautiful and Maher.

Biography of Liesel Bunger

child: 1947, Nuremberg
High point: A published study for a show at the Museum of Modern Art Vienna, and another with Sharim Gallery Vienna, all of which are now a high point.
Top tip: Be curious, read, and never give up.